Frances Allen

Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932August 4, 2020) was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization. She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita. Early life and education Allen grew up on a farm in Peru, New York, near Lake Champlain, as the oldest of six children. Her father was a farmer, and her mother an elementary schoolteacher. Her early elementary education took place in a one-room school house a mile away from her home, and she later attended a local high school. She graduated from The New York State College for Teachers (now part of the University at Albany, SUNY) with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1954 and began teaching school in Peru, New York. After two years, she enrolled at the University of Michigan and earned a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1957. Career and research Deeply in debt with student loans, she joined IBM Research in Poughkeepsie, New York, as a programmer in 1957, where she taught incoming employees the basics of Fortran. She planned to return to teaching once her student loans had been paid, but ended up staying with IBM for her entire 45-year career. In 1959, Allen was assigned to the Harvest project for code breaking with the National Security Agency, and worked on a programming language called Alpha. She managed the compiler-optimization team for both Harvest and the Stretch project.