Stephanie Shirley

Vera Buchthal was born in Dortmund to a Jewish father and a Christian mother. In 1939, aged five, she and her sister were put on a Kindertransport train to Britain and taken in by foster parents in the Midlands. She later said she decided to make her life one that was worth saving.

Her girls' school did not teach mathematics to the level she wanted, so she was allowed to attend lessons at the boys' school. She left at 18 and joined the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill, working on early computers and taking a maths degree in the evenings. She married a physicist, took the name Shirley, and found that as a woman she was never going to be promoted.

In 1962 she started a company from her dining room with six pounds of capital. Freelance Programmers wrote software, and its staff were almost all women, mostly mothers who had left work to have children, programming from home and posting code back to her. Letters signed Stephanie went unanswered, so she signed them Steve. Her team wrote the black box flight recorder software for Concorde. When the company was floated in 1996 it made 70 of her staff millionaires.

Her only child, Giles, was profoundly autistic and died at 35. She has given away most of her wealth, much of it to autism research and care, and was made a Dame in 2000.