FRANCES E. ALLEN

:''For the early American nun, see Frances Allen (nun).''
'Frances Elizabeth "Fran" Allen' (born 1932) is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. She was the first female IBM Fellow. In 2006, she became the first female to win the Turing Award.

Contents

Career

Awards and honors

References

External links

Career

Allen grew up on a farm in upstate New York and graduated from Albany State Teachers College with a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1954.^[1] She earned a master's degree in Math at the University of Michigan in 1957 and began teaching school in Peru, New York.^[2] Deeply in debt, she joined IBM on July 15 1957 and planned to stay only until her school loans were paid, but ended up staying for her entire 45-year career.
In the early 1980s, she formed the Parallel TRANslation (PTRAN) group to study the issues involved in compiling for parallel machines. The group was considered one of the top research groups in the world working with parallelization issues. Her work on these projects culminated in algorithms and technologies that form the basis for the theory of program optimization and are widely used in today's commercial compilers throughout the industry.
Allen's influence on the IBM community was recognized by her appointment as an IBM Fellow in 1989, the first woman to receive this recognition. She was also president of the IBM Academy of Technology. The Academy plays an important role in the corporation by providing technical leadership, advancing the understanding of key technical areas and fostering communications among technical professionals.

Awards and honors

Allen is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently on the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, the Computer Research Associates (CRA) board and National Science Foundation's CISE Advisory Board.
In 1997, Allen was inducted into the WITI Hall of Fame.^[3] She retired from IBM in 2002 and won the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award that year from the Association for Women in Computing. In 2007, she became the first woman to win the A.M. Turing Award.^[4]

References

1. Lohr, Steve (August 6 2002). Scientist at Work: Frances Allen; Would-Be Math Teacher Ended Up Educating a Computer Revolution. ''New York Times''
2. Lasewicz, Paul (April 5 2003). Frances Allen interview transcript.
3. WITI Hall of Fame
4. Associated Press (February 21 2007). First Woman Honored With Turing Award.

External links

★ Frances Allen via IBM Women in WITI Hall of Fame.

★ Interview with Frances Allen via annonline.com

★ Frances Allen: 2000 Fellow Awards Recipient via Computer History Museum

★ Top computer award breaks gender barrier after 40 years