Born: Aug. 26, 1918
Died: Feb. 24, 2020
Academic Events: Kathrine went to West Virginia State College and got a degree in mathematics and French. She was awarded the top of her class and went on to become a teacher, she then went back to school and was the first of three African American students in the West Virginia graduate math program before working for NASA. She went to high school when she was 10 and graduated when she was 15. She then graduated college when she was 18. She was also one of the first black students integrated into West Virginia's graduate schools.
Contributions to Computer Science: Kathrine Johnson provided a large chunk of the math done for the 1958 document "notes on space technology" which were used by engineers NACA that eventually created NASA. She then worked with NASA in 1962 and famously checked John Glen's computer math for the first orbital space flight by an American. she was a significant figure representing women in science and helped change the biased perspective of women in STEM fields. Kathrine also helped with math needed for the Apollo 11 mission to send the first man to the moon.
Sources:
Who was katherine Johnson?
Facts about katherine Johnson
Katherine's work with NASA
Born: January 31, 1956
Academic Events:Guido was a mathematics major at the university of Amsterdam. He was recruited to work for the Center for Mathematics & Informatics, where he worked on many utility programs
Contributions to Computer Science: Guido Van Rossum began working on a programming language that would be "simple and convenient for quick and dirty tasks, such as UNIX shell scripts, but with the expressivity of a high-level programming language." he named his language Python, this programming language completely changed the task of programming and it made it much easier to program with fewer errors. Rossum won the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Rossum eventually began working with google and created Google’s internal Mondrian code review tool, as well as an app Engine, which provides scalable cloud backends for web applications.
Sources:
Guido Van Rossum's Life
Python's Creation
About Guido Van rossum
Born: June 8, 1955
Academic Events:Timothy Berners-Lee graduated from Queen's College at Oxford University. He currently works at the computer science and AI laboratory at MIT and established the World Wide Web Consortium to monitor the progress of the web.
Contributions to Computer Science: Timothy Berners-Lee's primary contribution to Computer Science was inventing the World Wide Web while he worked at CERN. At the time of its invention, the World Wide Web was created to aid scientists around the globe in exchanging information. However, Berners-Lee also worked to ensure that all people had free access to the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee is also responsible for the original HTML that he wrote in 1993.
Sources:
Timothy Berners-Lee Biliography
Timothy Berners-Lee Knighted
Inventor of the World Wide Web
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