The first woman PhD in computer science was a nun (2013) | Hacker News Reader

The first woman PhD in computer science was a nun (2013)

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161 pointsjaoued65 comments

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Kenneth_Keller and https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2019/03/18/2759/, she is also tied for being the first American to receive a PhD in computer science (one other person received his PhD on the same exact day). They are also potentially (it seems there's some debate) the first CS PhDs (https://studylib.net/doc/8193211/who-earned-first-computer-s...).

Great line from that last link: "Prior to 1965 ... there were none, and after 1965 there was a nun."

The first PhD in computing was David Wheeler in 1951 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wheeler_(computer_scient...

His PhD was in Mathematics AFAIR. Also note that the Wikipedia article is missing a citation on that point and further discussion on the talk page.

The title of his PhD dissertation was "Automatic computing with the EDSAC"

The claim is properly referenced now.

Interesting, wasn't aware!

I was pretty ignorant about this before today. What I've learned today is (1) that there are several competing claims for who has the first PhD in Computer Science (or the first PhD by an American, or Woman...), (2) all of those claims depend not on the quality of the work by the person but rather by whether something counts as "computer science" (does it have to be issued by a Computer Science department? Department with Computer Science in the name? Can the degree just say it's for Computer Science? Does it depend on the thesis topic?), and (3) for the most part none of the candidates really care too much about the distinctions about who was 1st.

But it is an interesting exercise in learning about computer scientists that I didn't know much about before.

Women got PhDs in computing earlier outside the USA, for instance Beatrice Worsley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Worsley

Erm, no.

The first woman to get a PhD in computer science was a Wren, not a nun: Beatrice Worsley. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatrice_Worsley of note

> When World War II ended, Worsley was the only Wren at the NRE to choose to remain in service.

She is tragically forgotten despite she wrote the first program to run on a Von Neumann architecture computer (that being the EDSAC) which you could simplify to say she wrote the first computer program as we today understand such.

Also, she got the first PhD in CS when CS wasn't even a thing yet.

To be more precise, she was a sister. A nun would be a woman consecrated to religious life who lives cloistered. While "nun" is used colloquially to refer to all women religious, the technical meaning is narrower.

As many other commenters have noted, there is a culture of many women religious receiving advanced degrees. One of my college friends who got his PhD in political science at MIT was surprised to discover that there were two women religious in his grad school cohort.

In parallel terms, "monk" and "brother" are often used interchangeably, but like with nun, a monk lives cloistered. A brother is a non-ordained man consecrated to religious life. While many brothers are monks, many monks are priests, and some brothers live non-cloistered lives, in the sciences, perhaps the best known would be Brother Guy Consolmagno who is a Jesuit brother and the Vatican astronomer.

When I was in college in engineering, I noticed a woman dressed in a sister's outfit always in the labs, I think she was studying EE? She was running PSpice. Very interesting.

I've known a large number of Catholic sisters over the years. They've been, without exception, some of the most interesting people I've ever known. When my mom was in the hospital last year, she had regular visits from an 89-year-old sister who came just to chat, even though my mom isn't Catholic (and there was no attempt to proselytize, I should add). It as more just a case of she enjoyed being able to provide socialization with the elderly women who were in the hospital.

I'd argue the best known monk in the sciences is Gregor Mendel , who was an Augustinian friar and genetics research pioneer.

As an aside, it always rubs me the wrong way when people insinuate the (Catholic) church is anti-science when the long list of contributions to science says otherwise.

True that. I was thinking the best-known living brother in the sciences.

Plus, I've met Brother Guy. He's really cool.

My great aunt who is a nun got a masters in Chemistry in the 1950s. She said that the only other women in her program were nuns.

It's not really surprising, is it? In a society that demands of women to get married and raise kids instead of work, it's mostly women who aren't allowed to marry and have kids who get to do things like follow a higher education.

Nobody is demanding that. It could just be that they want to.

It's was definitely demanded or at least heavily expected in the 60s and 50s (when these women grew up).

Nowadays it's demanded that both husband and wife work, and it gave us the two-income trap. It's not even progress.

If you have twice the labor, you can pay each person half as much (and double your profit) since consumption stays the same (to a rough approximation).

Financial capitalism at its best.

What you actually see is that with two full incomes housing prices went up. That's the supply side reacting to more money sloshing around. On the demand side, when both parents work there are now expenses for childcare, prepared food & so on.

You just have increased financial insecurity because now a family must rely on two incomes. In the past, when one spouse lost their job the other might find one or go to full time employment, now both parents have to be employed to be financially stable. That isn't even progress for those who have to work for a living. For the investor class it's of course different.

Nowadays both men and women have the option of finding occupations that give them the most satisfaction. You might be surprised at how many people consider this progress.

Steve Shirley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Shirley was able to found a computing consultancy business in the 1960s staffed entirely by women that had been fired when they got married, as was the usual practise at the time.

This is an amazing story I've never run across. Thank you for pointing it out. I think you got trolled, but I'm glad I got to learn about this as a result.

Ok, fair enough I never knew this was a common practice. I was thinking more about today when I made my comment

> Ok, fair enough I never knew this was a common practice.

What makes you think it was common practice? Exceptions are a thing…

For an example of it being not just common but in some cases required to dismiss women when they married, see "The Marriage Bar" at https://civilservant.org.uk/women-history.html

I'm talking about forming all-married women businesses. I'd be shocked if that was common, but if you have data showing otherwise, I'm happy to be corrected...

It was the norm for banks in New Zealand, through to the sixties and early seventies, to require women to have a letter of permission from their father or husband in order to get a job.

Source: have seen the ads specifying such.

   aren’t allowed to marry.

The term “nun” refers to a woman in a state of consecrated life, which has a variety of forms. The states of married life and consecrated life are mutually exclusive since the latter involves a vow of evangelical chastity. My point is it’s not a matter of “not allowed” – a man or woman who enters consecrated life does so of his or her own free will with the intention of living out the evangelical virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience.

Well, it's more than that: even by the standards of the general under-representation in college at the time, women in STEM were (and still are) pretty uncommon.

My mom got an engineering degree, '64-'68, and was also pretty much the only woman there. Women were going to college then, it's just that any woman (like my mom) showing engineering aptitude was encouraged to be a teacher since, as she was counseled, "women don't become engineers".

People tend to forget that in 1950, freedom to choose your own future as a young adult was a privilege for the very rich and political connected people. Everyone was handed role. For women that meant getting a job early until they got married. For men it was to be drafted into the military and shipped off to fight in wars. Women who refused got social pressured to conform, and men who refused got jailed.

If you were really lucky you were born into a rich family that could exempt you from the role given to you. The church may had been a alternative escape route available for women, but I don't know if that was the case here.

Karen Armstrong ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Armstrong ) said in her memoirs that when she turned 18 in 1962 she knew she didn't want to be a wife and mother, so she figured that she must have been "called" to become a nun.

It is hard to overstate the social pressure women were under to discard any life goals besides "motherhood" for a long time. My MIL has a math degree but knew full well that she might as well put in in the shredder once she got married. It's still kind of a painful subject for her honestly.

> My MIL has a math degree but knew full well that she might as well put in in the shredder once she got married. It's still kind of a painful subject for her honestly.

Goodness, I can imagine. If I was not given the chance to apply anything that I learned over the last two decades and was only allowed to do household chores and look after kids - as much as I'm looking forward to raising children - I would be extremely sad

Okay. Now, where are the details about her religious life? What did she believe in and care about? It was obviously very important to her, to the extent that she made serious monastic vows. When a movie actor is a life-long alcoholic, we happily include that in the biography; but when we are speaking about Catholic sisters, we whitewash it away from their lives? Pretty disappointing considering that the headline is "[she] was a nun".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisters_of_Charity_of_the_Bles...

"Dartmouth relaxed the rule barring women from its computer center..."

Just wow.

I've been working at a joke about men creating languages and parallel processing but that's a story for a different thread.

According to Wikipedia Dartmouth College was a male only college until 1972.

Woman did work as employees at the computer center, and bringing dates from nearby schools and colleges to the computing center was apparently a thing as students liked to show off their computer skills.

Also of note: unlike other colleges, students at Dartmouth didn't need to pay for computer time, creating both opportunity but potentially also the need to 'guard' against outsiders.

Haha, I love the idea of impressing women by showing them your computer skills.

Dunno what to say, green-on-black terminals, clean code and fast typing do always manage to turn me on ;)

Given the era I think we are talking key punches, card readers and line printers here.

There’s also Sister Catherine Wybourne, AKA The Digital Nun.

She’s a web and app developer and new media pioneer - and her monastery’s primary income comes through development and consulting services.

I went to a talk of hers on social media years ago and it was excellent.

“Being cloistered doesn't mean that you have to have an enclosed mind, or an enclosed approach to things.”

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11511596/Meet-...

Not just first "woman" PhD, but tied for first Computer Science PhD (in the U.S.).

Better article explaining she is actually first PhD in the U.S. for Computer Science. Not just first woman. https://www.cs.wisc.edu/2019/03/18/2759/

I hereby rename NaN to Nun in her honour

The first woman PhD in Computer Science was Sister Mary Kenneth Keller

Just going to leave this here: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

Making a lifetime vow does not mean you turn your brain off. The Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, first proposed the theory that is now known as the Big Bang and made other discoveries in astronomy and physics, and still served as a priest as well.

Blaise Pascal is another example. Heard he did something with all kinds of triangles.

He was quite invasive with his faith though.

And Reverend Bayes, too.

Yes, REVEREND Bayes was clergy, too, and what would we do in machine learning without Bayes' theorem? (His grave is in London.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes%27_theorem

It seems Bayes never actually wrote down what is now called Bayes Theorem. (Perhaps he knew of it). I think it was Laplace that recognized the full generality of the relationship.

Gregor Mendel was a monk who established many of the rules of heredity (Mendelian inheritance).

A service program I was associated with in the 90's had a government requirement that all social workers had their actions signed off my someone with a Masters in Social Work. That person was a Nun. It was amazing how many of the people we needed to provide the expertise to run those programs were Nuns.

Sister Celine[0] is another sister who, with a PhD in math, had an important influence on algorithms to calculate explicit formulas for many recurrence relations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celine_Fasenmyer

In fact I'd say it is quite the opposite.

Let's not forget that clergy was originally a ruling class, and as such, had access to higher education and enough time to think and do research. And even today, with a few exceptions, they are far from being brainwashed cultists.

Not only they have a better than average level of scientific education, they also have a surprisingly open mind. Fitting for people who spend a good part of their life studying, even if most of it is about the Bible.

i figure taking vows gives you the mental space to devote your time to academic (read contemplative) pursuits. I assume most spend their time thinking through the philosophies of divinity but science is certainly an area of philosophy that is worth their time...

Let's not forget the Jesuit missionaries who instrumental in the cultural exchange between the West and the peoples they sought to preach the Gospel to. Matteo Ricci is one celebrated figure, the missionaries that went to the First Nations in North America were others.

I've reading this news at least for the third time here on HW in this week.

Nice achievement but keep it DRY

If we keep reposting the article, it won't feel so exceptional…

What were those other posts? I only found one from 7 years ago: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

No wonder we start counting at zero, it all started with a nun.

Nikola Tesla and Isaac Newton were virgins as well. It might be argued that a certain level of unresolved frustration can be a driving force in technical pursuits...

I would argue that if you are not hampered by sexual pursuits, it frees your brain up for technical ones. https://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheAbstinence.htm

I think my mind did better with abstract thought before puberty.

I would argue it's probably a bit of both. Fulfilling sexual relationships are one way to feel a sense of satisfaction in life, and having kids is one way to achieve a kind of legacy. Solving hard technical problems and moving science forward is another way to achieve the same goals. One could pursue both, but if you already have one you might be less likely to feel a strong visceral need for the other.

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