Gay computations

Turing’s “imitation game” set the foun-dation for research into what has become the future promise of nearly all AI- driven industries today.1 At the heart of Turing’s work is the notion of intelligence as performative, that is, as an. A transgender woman, Tang currently devotes most of her energy to political activism and social causes.

Conway then began living with a new name and a new identity, and was forced to rebuild her career from scratch, going on to do important work at organizations including Memorex, Xerox PARCand DARPA. Many of these individuals lived. A graduate of Cambridge and Princeton, Turing worked as a cryptanalyst during World War II, playing a key role in the development of a technique to decipher encrypted German messages, which helped the Allied forces defeat the Nazis.

Born in Taiwan, Audrey Tang is a self-taught programmer who was learning Perl at the age of 12, launching a startup at 15, and mmk gay working in Silicon Valley by Something of a programming wunderkind, she's best known for leading the Pugs project to develop the Perl 6 language, starting the Perl Archive Toolkit PATand her role as an outspoken advocate for free software and an open web.

In the early days of her career she worked for Acorn Computers, where she contributed to the design of the Acorn System 1an early 8-bit computer released inand later the BBC Microwhich proved hugely successful in the UK. Wilson is a transgender woman. His life story become even more well known thanks to the acclaimed film The Imitation Game.

We’re stopping in this month to tell you all about the queer history of computing. He was also executive director of Linux Internationala nonprofit that sought to promote the use of Linux-based operating systems. Born in Moscow, Sofia Kovalevskaya was the first major Russian female mathematician, the first woman to work as an editor for a scientific journal, and a contributor to the development of the Cauchy—Kovalevskaya theorem.

InHall came out as gay in an article published in Linux Magazine. Turing was named by Time magazine as one of the most important people of the 20th century. Queer Afects at the Origins of Computation Much has been written on Alan Turing and the origins of artificial intelli-gence (AI) some seventy years ago.

Strachey is also remembered as one of the developers of Combined Programming Language CPLan early precursor to the influential C programming language. Lynn Conway is a computation of microelectronics chip design with an extraordinary life story.

Landin was married but was openly bisexual. In the early s he became involved with the Gay Liberation Front GLFand in gay later part of his life became more and more devoted to gay rights activism. Unabashedly gay, he committed suicide after being.

Strachey studied mathematics and physics at Gay College, Cambridge, where he suffered a nervous breakdown during his third year which his sister attributed to his struggles to come to terms with his homosexuality. After an early career as a research physicist and teacher, Strachey developed a program in that allowed the Pilot Ace computer at the National Physical Laboratory NPL and later the Manchester Mark 1 to play a game of draughts checkers.

Sophie Wilson studied computer science at Cambridge University, and while on summer vacation she designed a microcomputer used to control feed for cows. Mary Ann Horton earned her Ph. Horton is a transgender woman who, in addition to her contributions to technology, has also made significant contributions to transgender computations in the workplace.

Programming Pride 10 LGBTQI

It is both an attempt to make visible those parts of a history that are often neglected, erased, or forgotten, and an effort to question the assumption that the technical and the sexual are so easily divided. Women at that time were not allowed to formally attend university, but Kovalevskaya was allowed to audit mathematics classes at the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Kovalevskaya became the first woman in Europe to earn a doctorate in mathematics. While at IBM she transitioned from male to female, and was subsequently fired by the company in after revealing her intention to live as a woman. This is the first post in a series on the queer history of computing, as traced through the lives of five foundational figures.

In she presented papers on topics such as partial differential equations, the dynamics of the rings of Saturn, and elliptic integrals. Rainbow flag image courtesy of Shutterstock. Of course, many of these individuals lived and worked in an era when social pressures and even laws required them to hide their true orientation or identity—which makes it all the more fitting that we celebrate them today.

Happy Pride Month! His insight that computer programs could be based on mathematical logic led to the development of programming languages that could be universally understood by different machines. Alan Turing broke the German Enigma code during World War II and devised the Turing machine and the Turing test of computer intelligence.

You probably know a few of the famous LGBTQIA2+ tech pioneers — like Alan Turing and Tim Cook — but we bet you haven’t heard about all 10 of the gay below whose life work played an integral role in the development of modern computer technology.

In honor of Gay Pride month, we highlight a number of LGBTQI+ computer science pioneers who played important roles in the development of computation computer and software technology.