Sister Mary Kenneth Keller: First US PhD in Computer Science
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
For example, grad students got priority on the mainframe. No big deal for most undergrads, they could just go in at night to get some computer time. However, the dorm for unmarried women had a curfew, and the young ladies could only leave under the supervision of a male chaperone. My colleague's solution was to ask her male classmates to pretend to take her out on dates. Once a gentleman caller convinced the dorm supervisor that his intentions were honorable, he could check my coworker out from the dorm like a library book, walk her out, and she'd be free to try out the programs she'd been working on during the day.
* I might be misremembering the details, but I think she said that women technically weren't allowed to be students of Carnegie Tech, but they could go to a separate CMU women's college (that didn't have CS or engineering majors, but did have math) and cross-register for individual Carnegie Tech classes.
I'm glad your coworker found ways to succeed despite offensive unfairness like that.
Other schools in Pittsburgh that began with offensive unfairness included Carlow University and Chatham University, but they began to admit men in 1945 and 2015, respectively.
You'd really need to examine society historically to understand why all womens' colleges, such as Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Barnard, and others, were necessary. Seeing universities as sexist ignores the larger picture. Women were only allowed to vote in 1920. That speaks volumes. In 1920, you would not want your daughter going to an all male or even coed school, no matter what opportunities were there. I wouldn't blame the colleges. It's really men that were the problem, and in large part, still remain so, and not for nothing, especially in STEM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Morrison_Carnegie_Col...
Mary Kenneth Keller - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25550364 - Dec 2020 (6 comments)
p.s. These links are just in case people are curious about past threads! Reposts are allowed on HN after a year or so (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html), and this isn't a repost in any case.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Celine_Fasenmyer
[1]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/SisterCelinesMethod.htmlShe wasn’t particularly interested in chemistry but after Sputnik the Catholic Church sent a lot of nuns to get grad degrees in STEM so they could give children a technical education.
https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/159591-who-earned-first...
I'm still going to keep a couple light anecdotes...
At Brown CS, beloved professor/statesman Andries van Dam once joked that, if he knew he was going to be the second, he would've worked faster.
When I was later at MIT, I was in a research group with Wexelblat's son. When I told him Andy's joke, he thought it was hilarious, said Andy was a family friend, and something about the only reason his dad was first was because his mom did the typing for his dissertation.
of interest:
> Sister Kenneth begins her dissertation, “Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns,” with the declaration, “The basic problem of this thesis is the exploration of an approach to the mechanization of inductive inference.” The idea is to automatically generate the nth mathematical expression in a series, given the first k expressions. As validation, Sister Kenneth implements a FORTRAN program to determine the nth derivative of a function, given the first k derivatives. She remarks that list processing languages such as LISP would have been more convenient but were not available to her.