a post for ada lovelace day
I’ve read some lovely posts for Ada Lovelace Day on my friends’ blogs today and I have been inspired me to write my own. Unable to settle on one subject, I’ve decided to write about three women in technology who have affected me personally.
Anne Thompson
Anne, or Mrs. Thompson as I referred to her, taught my 10th Grade Accelerated Geometry and 12th Grade Calculus classes at Washington High School in Sioux Falls, SD. She has an infectious enthusiasm for math and she was a very strong proponent of integrating graphing calculators into the math curriculum, something that had a huge impact on my own math education.
My family moved from Indiana to South Dakota in December of my eighth grade year, right in the middle of Algebra II. The school districts used different textbooks, which addressed topics in a different order, so I wasn’t quite prepared for where the class at my new school was at in their textbook, and I fell behind, which messed me up in math classes for years. A graphing calculator exercise in the first chapter of my graphing-calculator-based Calculus textbook allowed me to break through many of the barriers I’d had with Algebra in a single stroke of insight. It was also the first platform that I enthusiastically programmed on. The instant visual feedback of being able to graph a function immediately is an extremely powerful teaching tool and I thank Anne Thompson for working so hard to bring this technology into her classroom and into the classrooms of her fellow teachers. I believe the school owned well over 100 TI-81 calculators by the time I graduated in 1994. I still have my TI-85 around here somewhere.
It appears Anne is teaching classes at South Dakota State University these days.
Toni Logar
Dr. Logar is a Professor in the Math and Computer Science department at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I’ve always admired her for the fact that she has a mess of degrees, and for being one of the clearest programming teachers I’ve ever had. She was always willing to help when needed and was always looking out for students’ best interests. I was delighted when she agreed to write me a recommendation for my application to library school.
- Dr. Logar’s author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
- Google Scholar author search for AM Logar
Janie
I haven’t spoken to Janie in years, but I suspect she values her online privacy, so I won’t be referring to her last name here.
Janie was the systems integration lead on the team at Rockwell-Collins where I did a co-op for eight months in 1997. She was also one of my officemates. Janie is one of the smartest people I have ever met, and I don’t feel that she ever got enough credit for it. I remember her as both an excellent natural engineer and an excellent natural tester.
My favorite example of her raw engineering prowess is that she had designed a cruise control for her car that worked on mechanical principles — it would simply hold the accelerator pedal in the spot needed to maintain speed on the freeway, and she could easily engage and disengage it with her foot. Once, she got a speeding ticket driving through Nebraska, which puzzled her until she realized that she’d last filled her gas tank with a 10% ethanol mix. She concluded that it made her car go faster at the position the pedal was being held in by her cruise control mechanism.
Janie also gave me my first exposure to good edge test cases. Our team worked on Flight Management Systems (FMS), which are the avionics systems that fly planes when they are up in the air, keeping track of the flight plan and instruments and such. The project I worked on was a software simulation of the computer hardware the FMS ran on, and Janie would use the simulator to program the FMS to follow crazy flight plans, like a series of waypoints along a spiral, or going endlessly back and forth between two waypoints. She’d find good bugs, too. I thought of her often during my career as a software tester. She would have been a great Microsoft hire.
I often think about getting in touch with her again. I hope she is well. I know she still lives in the same house in Cedar Rapids, which I believe managed to avoid the bad flooding there last summer.
The Ada Programming Language
Not exaclty a “woman in technology”, I know, but I had to learn how to program in Ada when I worked at Rockwell-Collins on a co-op, and I have to say that it is one of my favorite programming languages. I came to love it for it’s refusal to compile until the code is mostly correct (as opposed to C/C++ compilers, which will try to compile whatever you throw at it) and the fact that it flows in such a way as to need very little commenting to document it. I would like to program in it again someday.