Vera Rubin (1928-Dec 25, 2016) was a groundbreaking astrophysicist who discovered evidence of dark matter.  In the 1970s, Rubin was studying the movement of distant spiral galaxies, when she discovered that the stars at the outside of these galaxies were moving as fast as the ones towards the center, which didn't fit existing gravitational theory. Her theory and explanation was a material she called "dark matter" (which had been loosely proposed in the 1930s and never mathematically observed until then). Starting her studies at Vassar, Rubin had proudly applied to historically all-male PhD programs like Princeton and was refused because of her gender, she went on to study at co-ed graduate programs at Cornell and Georgetown. She was later the first woman allowed to use the facilities at Caltech's famed Palomar Observatory and became a lifelong advocate of women in the sciences. Rubin frequently wrote about the "permission" and questions of "access" with technology, perhaps in her most quoted note where she wrote: "I live and work with three basic assumptions: 1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman. 2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women. 3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women." Thanks Vera for giving the world a little more permission

Roberta Heuer Williams (1953- ), the mother of the adventure game genre, is one of the most influential PC game designers of the 1980s and 1990s. Raised in southern California, outside LA,  she met her her husband, Ken Williams in High School.  They co-founded On-Line Systems (later, Sierra On-Line) when she was 26. The following year they wrote and designed Mystery House, the first graphic adventure game for the PC. Their second game, Wizard and the Princess (which launched the “Hi-Res Adventures” franchise), added color graphics. Their third game, King’s Quest, the first animated 3D (actually 2.5D) adventure game, featured an expansive world that could be explored by the player. In 1995, while working on King’s Quest VII, she also designed Phantasmagoria, a disturbing, horror-themed game which was the first in her career to be developed with full-motion video technology. Although she retired in 1999 from Sierra On-Line, Roberta worked on Odd Manor in 2011. In 2014, she was named as one of the top ten game designers of all time.

Maria Klawe (1951- ) is a mathematician, computer scientist and the fifth president of Harvey Mudd College. She was born in Toronto, Canada, spent her childhood in Scotland before returning to Canada. She attended the University of Alberta for undergrad, grad, and her Ph.D. in mathematics. She started her second Ph.D. at University of Toronto but was offered a faculty position there before she could complete it. She worked for IBM and Discrete Mathematics, and at as the Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, and has been on the board of directors for Microsoft. After UBC she moved to Princeton as the dean of engineering and professor of computer science, before landing at Harvey Mudd College, where she is the first woman president. She is a member of the board Broadcom Corporation and the nonprofit Math for America, as well as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She is a passionate scholar and educator, determined to close the computer science gender gap.

The Calutron Girls were Tennessee Eastman operators (mostly high school educated women) who were temporarily hired in 1945 by the Y-12 uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They operated calutrons (using electromagnets to separate uranium isotopes), invented by Ernest Lawrence, so that the Manhattan Project had enough enriched uranium to build the first atomic bombs. The girls were highly efficient but weren’t actually told what they were doing: it was pointed out that these “hillbilly girls” were achieving better rates of production than the scientists and engineers, arguably because the physicists fiddled too much with the controls, while the “girls” were trained “like soldiers” to be efficient and not question what they were doing.

On November 22, 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Margaret Hamilton the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the USA's highest civilian honor, at age 80 for her contribution that led to Apollo 11's successful landing. The very first contract NASA issued for the Apollo program (in August 1961) was with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop the guidance and navigation system for the Apollo spacecraft. Hamilton, a computer programmer, would wind up leading the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now Draper Labs). She headed the team that developed the building blocks of "software engineering" – a term that she coined. Her systems approach to the Apollo software development and insistence on rigorous testing was critical to the success of Apollo. As she noted, “There was no second chance. We all knew that.” (Pictured here with a pile of the Apollo Guidance Computer source code. Photo from the @mitmuseum) 

Mary Lou Jepsen (1965-) is an engineer and technology pioneer known for her contributions to mobile device screens, Oculus Virtual Reality, and the One Laptop per Child program.  Raised in Connecticut, she graduated with degrees in art and electrical engineering from Brown University, followed by a Master of Science in Holography from the MIT Media Lab.  In 1989, she co-created the world’s first holographic video system, before going back to Brown University for a Ph.D. in Optical Sciences. In 1995 she co-founded Microdisplay, the first company to solely develop tiny displays. She co-founded the One Laptop per Child program which prioritized creating and distributing affordable educational devices for the developing world; the XO laptop is the lowest-power and most environmentally friendly laptop ever made. At OLPC,  she invented the laptop’s sunlight-readable display technology and co-invented its ultra-low-power management system. In 2008, she founded Pixel Qi, a company that designs and refines sunlight-readable, power-saving screens for e-readers, outdoor displays and laptops. In 1995 she had a pituitary gland tumor removed, and continues to take hormone replacement pills twice a day: this experience prompted her to focus more on curing diseases with new display technology.  Her recent work has been leading display and hardware development at Facebook / Oculus and at Google: she announced her resignation in Spring of 2016 in favor of launching her new startup which aims to advance neuroscience and access to medical technology.

Ellen Ochoa (1958- ) was the world’s first Hispanic female astronaut. Born in Los Angeles, California, Ellen Ochoa graduated from San Diego State University in 1980 with a BS in physics and went on to receive a MS and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University. She joined NASA in 1988 as a research engineer at the Ames Research Center where she investigated optical systems for performing information processing, before moving to the Johnson Space Center in 1990 to become the first female Hispanic astronaut. She had applied three times for the position, which was highly competitive, and even more so for women. She served on the nine-day STS-56 mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1993 (where she played the flute, in space, for science!). She has flown in space four times, logging nearly 1,000 hours in orbit. She holds three patents on optical systems that can be applied in multiple uses, including space (her work helped computers to “see”). She worked as the Deputy Center Director and Director of Flight Crew Operations. She is currently the 11th director of the Johnson Space Center: the second woman, and the first Latina to hold this position.. She has been recognized with NASA’s highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, and the Presidential Distinguished Rank Award, among many others. *kelsey edited this one. This current version is the old one.

Mary Engle Pennington (1872-1952) the “Ice Woman” was a chemist and bacteriologist who worked for the USDA and the FDA to revolutionize the storage and transportation of perishable food items. She attended the University of Pennsylvania but when she completed the requirements for a B.S., she was denied a degree because she was a woman, and given a certificate of proficiency in biology instead. Three years later, however, UPenn did grant her a Ph.D. She founded the Philadelphia Clinical Laboratory which focused on providing bacteriological analyses for physicians. She then became the director of the bacteriological laboratory of the Philadelphia Department of Health and Charities, where she developed the standards and techniques for dairy inspection and cold storage that have been popularized throughout the country. She taught physiological chemistry at the Women’s Medical College from 1989-1906. She joined the Bureau of Chemistry at the newly-instated USDA in 1907 (a family friend and mentor, Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, submitted her entrance exam with the name M.E.Pennington to disguise her gender) and within a year was promoted to Director of the Food Research Laboratory.  She established national standards for hygiene and storage in every step of food production (including changing the basic strategy for slaughtering chickens, and inventing the modern egg crate) from standardizing ice-cooled refrigerator cars to humidity-controlled cold storage. She continued working in her own lab in Philadelphia, where she explored and invented methods of storing and shipping dairy and other perishable food items safely.She left Philadelphia for NYC in 1919 where she ran the research department at American Balsa Company, an insulation manufacturer. She opened a consulting business, which she ran until her death, marketed to food storage and shipping companies.

Ruth Rogan Benerito (1916 -2013 ) was a physical chemist who invented wrinkle-resistant cotton. She graduated high school in New Orleans at the age of 14, and then attended Tulane University. She graduated during the Great Depression and taught high school while attending Tulane’s masters program via night classes, and then received her Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1948. In 1950 she married Frank Benerito and began working at the USDA in New Orleans, where she remained for most of her career. She developed a method to deliver fat intravenously to patients too sick to eat, which was put to use immediately during the Korean War. Synthetic fibers such as nylon and polyester had been invented in the 1930s and 40s, which resulted in a significant drop in consumer-purchased cotton items (depending on the size of a household, weekly ironing chores would often take up an entire day). Ruth Rogan Benerito attached organic chemicals to cotton fibers (known as “cross-linking”) to invent a cotton that was not only wrinkle resistant, but stain and flame resistant as well. She continued researching cotton, teaching at Tulane, and working for the USDA for many years. She received the Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for contribution to textiles and commitment to education when she was 86 years old. She received 55 patents during her lifetime.

Hedy Lamarr (Hedwig Eva Maria Keisler) (1914-2000) was an Austrian-American international movie star, and co-inventor of “frequency-hopping”. In 1932 the German film Exstase received a lot of attention; she left her husband (who sold arms to the Nazis) and moved to Hollywood to sign with MGM, quickly becoming a box-office sensation. In 1940 she met George Antheil, an American avant-garde composer who used synchronizers in his music. Together, they collaborated and co-invented a system that changed radio frequencies so that enemies could not detect missile signals during WWII. Hedy recalled her first marriage and having learned a lot about weapons, specifically torpedoes. Hedy and George received a patent for this “Secret Communication System” in 1941, and passed it along to the Navy, who put it to use decades later in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The “spread spectrum” technology that Lamarr helped to invent paved the way for subsequent wireless devices.

Evelyn Boyd Granville (1924- ) was the second black woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics. Graduating valedictorian at Dunbar High School and summa cum laude at Smith College in 1945, she went on to Yale University for her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1949. She was heavily affected by the positive role models she found in her teachers throughout her education who never doubted her intelligence as a black student, or a woman, even in segregated schools. She taught briefly at NYU’s Institute for Mathematics until she was offered a position at Fisk University in Nashville. She left Fisk for a job at the National Bureau of Standards (later renamed the Diamond Ordnance Fuze Laboratories) in Washington, D.C., where she worked on the development of missile fuzes, and became acquainted with the exciting new field of computer programming. She joined the IBM team in 1956, learning the computer language SOAP. After a short transfer to IBM’s NYC office, she returned to D.C. to work for NASA where she created computer software for NASA’s space programs Project Vanguard and Project Mercury. She married in 1960 and moved to her husband’s home in California where she worked in the Computation and Data Reduction Center of Space Technology Laboratories. In 1962 she worked on celestial mechanics, trajectory and orbit computations, numerical analysis, and digital computer techniques at the North American Aviation Company. She was a specialist for the Apollo project. She later divorced her husband and returned to teaching computer programming, numerical analysis, and mathematics. She retired from teaching in 1997, but continued to share her enthusiasm for education and mathematics as a public speaker for many years. She is 92 years old this year.

Sister Mary Kenneth Keller was the first person to receive her Ph.D. in computer science. She entered the Sisters of Charity in 1932 and took her vows in 1940. She attended DePaul University and received her bachelor’s in mathematics and an M.S. in mathematics and physics. In 1958 she was the first woman to study mathematics and computers at Dartmouth College. There, she helped to develop the computer programming language BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) which, much like Grace Hopper’s COBOL translated binary into a programming language. She then attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison to attain her Ph.D., in May of 1965. That same year, she founded and became the chair of Clarke College’s Computer Science Department. She was there until her death at the age of 71.

Edith Clarke (1883-1959), the first female electrical engineer, is known for her contributions to the manipulations of hyperbolic functions, equivalent circuits, and graphical and electrical power system analysis. Orphaned at 18, Edith attended Vassar College and graduated with her bachelor’s in mathematics and astronomy in 1908. She studied radio at Hunter College and electrical engineering at Columbia University.  In 1911, she enrolled in the civil engineering program at University of Wisconsin, but quickly began working part time for AT&T, and soon full full time, as a mathematical computing assistant, going on to manage a group of women “human computers” during WWI, making calculations for the Transmission and Protection Engineering Department. She left AT&T in 1918 to become the first woman ever to receive her master’s degree in electrical engineering at MIT in Boston. She went on to work at General Electric for 26 years, where she filed a patent for the “graphical calculator” which was used to solve electric power transmission line problems. She left GE to take a professorship at the University of Texas, where she became the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country. She wrote many acclaimed papers, as well as the book “Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems” published in 1943. In 1948 she became the first woman Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. In 1954 she received the Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award “in recognition of her many original contributions to stability theory and circuit analysis”.

Ana Roqué de Duprey, born in Aguadilla Puerto Rico in 1853, was known as the Flower of the Valley. She became the youngest teacher’s assistant in Puerto Rico at the age of 11 and founded her own school just two years later, in her house. The geography textbook she wrote was later adopted by the Department of Education of Puerto Rico. She married Luis Enrique Duprey in 1872, and their home became a meeting place for discussions on astronomy, botany and music. She was made an honorary member of the Paris Society of Astronomers. In 1885, she earned a bachelor’s degree in science and philosophy. In 1894 she founded La Mujer, Puerto Rico’s first women-only magazine, the first of many revolutionary publications she would launch during her lifetime, in addition to writing many books, articles, and essays. In 1899, she began teaching English and then founded a college in Mayagüez. In 1903 she became one of the principal founders of the University of Puerto Rico (of which Mayagüez was a campus). In 1917, she helped to found the Feminine League of Puerto Rico in which would become the Suffragist Social League in 1921 when it began focusing on securing women the right to vote. Roque died two years before all Puerto Rican women were granted the right to vote, in 1935.

Grace Hopper 1906-1992 Graduated with a BA in mathematics and physics from Vasser in 1928, and then received her master’s in mathematics from Yale in 1930. She proceeded to teach at Vasser while earning her Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale in 1934. She taught until enlisting in the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1943, where she was commissioned as a lieutenant a year later. She was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard’s Cruft Laboratories, where she worked on the Mark computers. She oversaw programming for the UNIVAC computer at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, creating the first compiler for computer languages, which was a precursor for COBOL. She was recalled to active duty at the age of 60 to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages. She retired from the Navy at 79, a Rear Admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service, to become a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation. In 1991, she was the first woman awarded the National Medal of Technology

Carol Shaw (1955- ) is a retired video game developer,, and was one of the first female video game designers. She was born and raised in Palo Alto, California. Her father was a mechanical engineer, and she preferred playing with her brother’s model railroad set over her own dolls. When her father got laid off, her mother went back to work at the Stanford Library, working in serial records and periodicals. She played arcade games at the miniature golf course, specifically the first commercial arcade game, Computer Space, where she would partner with her brother or a friend to control all the buttons. She first used a computer in high school, and discovered that she could play text-based games on it. She became interested in computers, and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977 with a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a year later received a master’s degree as well, in Computer Science. She was hired by Atari to program games for the new VCS console. While working for Atari in 1978, although her official job title was Microprocessor Software Engineer, she designed Polo (unreleased), 3-D Tic-Tac-Toe, and Video Checkers. She left Atari in 1980 to work for Tandem Computers, but was contacted by Activision just over a year later to join their team: at Activision, she designed Happy Trails, and River Raid, which is universally regarded as a masterpiece of game design for the Atari 2600. She returned to Tandem from 1984-1990 before retiring early, which she credits to the success of River Raid.