Linkspam: Farage cowers and the Women of Chaos

[davidgillon]

Farage refused to get off his bus in Rochester because of two people prominently standing with milkshakes. Well done Rochester, begins to redeem you for electing Mark Reckless as UKIP MP after he had responded to my experience of disability hate crime with "people are entitled to be angry".

The co-director of MIT's Lorenz Center was preparing for a symposium on Lorenz's discovery of the butterfly effect at MIT in the '60s and noticed something he'd skipped over previously, two women thanked for "numerical calculation" in his seminal papers. Some research turned up that Margaret Hamilton (who went on to be belatedly famous for her work on Apollo and Skylab, and popularised Software Engineering as a term) and Ellen Gille nee Fetter, who ran into the male-imposed computer science glass-ceiling post raising kids, had done basically all of the computational/programming work for Lorentz's work  and would be listed as co-authors if the paper was published today.

The Hidden Heroes of Chaos

When Gille's daughter was later interviewed for a place at MIT in the 80s, one of the questions she didn't get, but others did, was "How would you explain chaos to your mother?" {Sigh}

Comments

[hilarita]

The same is true for the computer programmers that worked at Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s - the women did a lot of the complex computation programming, and at best got an acknowledgement like that. I'm trying to think of something to do about fixing that in my copious free time.

[rmc28]

I would be interested in this work & fanf might well be too.

[davidgillon]

Certainly it's something someone should do. There's so many women made major contributions to computer science (and other science), yet have gone unrecognised.

[rmc28]

We work or have worked with some people who may remember these women (fanf more than me).

Let's hear it for Rochester!

[jesse_the_k]

Speaking of chaos,

https://paveldogreat.github.io/WebGL-Fluid-Simulation/

Chaos simulation in a browser window. What would Hamilton & Fetter have thought of that?

Re: Let's hear it for Rochester!

[davidgillon]

Nice, and they'd probably have thought programming a browser is substantially easier than laying your paper tape out down the corridor and debugging it with a pencil and scotch tape!

[sovay]

Farage refused to get off his bus in Rochester because of two people prominently standing with milkshakes.

Hooray.