Frances Allen
A farm girl who joined IBM to pay off her student loan and stayed 45 years to become its first woman Fellow
Frances Allen grew up on a dairy farm in Peru, New York, the eldest of six children, in a house without central heating or running water for much of her childhood. She trained as a teacher and taught mathematics at her old school, then went to the University of Michigan for a master\'s degree. That left her in debt, and in 1957 she took a job at IBM Research intending to leave as soon as the loan was repaid.
Her first task was teaching Fortran, a brand new language, to IBM scientists who resented the idea of a language that hid the machine from them. She found she loved the compiler, the program that translated their code. She spent the next decades working out how a compiler could analyse a program and rearrange it to run faster without changing what it did. The techniques she described in a series of papers in the 1960s and 1970s are still the basis of the field.
She worked on the Stretch and Harvest machines for the National Security Agency and on a parallel computing project that was ahead of its time and cancelled. She said the work she was proudest of was the work nobody had seen.
In 1989 she became the first woman named an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 the first woman to receive the Turing Award. She was a keen mountaineer and a mentor to many. She died in 2020 on her 88th birthday.