Biography
Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932 – August 4, 2020) [ 2 ] [ 3 ] was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers . [ 4 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ] Allen was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow , and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award . [ 7 ] Her achievements include seminal work in compilers , program optimization , and parallelization . [ 8 ] [ 9 ] She worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita. [ 10 ] 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 school teacher. [ 10 ] 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. [ 11 ] 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. [ 11 ] Allen taught math from algebra to trigonometry. [ 12 ] She needed a Master's degree to earn a teaching certification, so after two years, she enrolled at the University of Michigan . She earned a Master of Science degree in mathematics in 1957. [ 13 ] Fields: Computer science, High-performance computing, Parallel computing, Compilers, Optimizing compilers Education: University at Albany BS University of Michigan MS Award Citation: .mw-parser-output .plainlist ol,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul{line-height:inherit;list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0}.mw-parser-output .plainlist ol li,.mw-parser-output .plainlist ul li{margin-bottom:0} ACM Fellow (1994) IBM Fellow (1989) Ada Lovelace Award (2002) Computer Pioneer Award (2004) Turing Award (2006) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2010) [ 1 ]
About the Turing Award
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science and is colloquially known as the "Nobel Prize of Computing."
Quick Facts
- Award: ACM A.M. Turing Award
- Added: 2026-02-07
- Source: Wikipedia
- Prize: $1,000,000 (USD)
- Presented by: ACM
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Notable Winners
- Donald Knuth (1974)
- Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
- Geoffrey Hinton (2018)
- Yoshua Bengio (2018)
- Yann LeCun (2018)