The first woman to win the Nobel Prize

Turing Award, one of the most prestigious IT industry awards, was awarded to Frances E. Allen for her contributions to programming language when she was at IBM.

Frances E. Allen.Photo: IBM

Allen, 75, made a major contribution to optimizing compiler performance (the program converts this computer language to another computer language, translating programming code into binary strings 0 and 1) .

Allen started working for IBM in 1957 after graduating from the University of Michigan mathematics department (USA). At the same time, the development team of "Big Blue" led by expert John Backus has just completed Fortran - one of the first high-level programming languages.

Allen's mission is to replicate this result on different computers. "I am fortunate to work on a large project with large systems," Allen said when he received the award on February 21.

She also participated in various jobs, such as writing an intelligence analysis program for US security agencies. Recently, she helped design software for IBM Blue Gene supercomputers. Although retired since 2002, Allen is still actively involved in the campaign for women to study and research computer science.

The first Turing Award was held in 1966, founded by the Association for Computing Machinery, to select a person with great success in developing the computer community.The prize is named after Alan Mathison Turing, an English mathematician and one of the births of modern computer science.

Turing is regarded as the Nobel Prize for computing, each award worth $ 100,000 and all the honorees in the past 40 years are male.