Frances Elizabeth "Fran" Allen (born 1932) is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. She also had a role in intelligence work on programming languages and security codes for the National Security Agency.
Allen was the first female IBM Fellow and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award.
Allen grew up ...
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Frances Elizabeth "Fran" Allen (born 1932) is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers. Her achievements include seminal work in compilers, code optimization, and parallelization. She also had a role in intelligence work on programming languages and security codes for the National Security Agency.
Allen was the first female IBM Fellow and in 2006 became the first woman to win the Turing Award.
Allen grew up on a farm in upstate New York and graduated from The New York State College for Teachers (now State University of New York at Albany) with a B.Sc. degree in mathematics in 1954. She earned an M.Sc. degree in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1957 and began teaching school in Peru, New York. Deeply in debt, she joined IBM on July 15, 1957 and planned to stay only until her school loans were paid, but ended up staying for her entire 45-year career.
Allen became the first female IBM Fellow in 1989. In 2007 the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship...
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