The Engineer Nobody Named

Frances E. Allen spent decades at IBM doing the work that makes modern computing fast—compiler optimization, parallel processing, the structural foundations that determine whether your software runs efficiently or wastes cycles. In 2006 she became the first woman to win the ACM Turing Award, the highest distinction in computer science. Almost nobody outside the field knows her name. The machines running everything around you were made faster and more capable by her contributions, and she remains exactly as famous as that implies.