
Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory - pseudolus
https://www.quantamagazine.org/hidden-heroines-of-chaos-ellen-fetter-and-margaret-hamilton-20190520/
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sampo
> Still, for coder-scientists in academic systems that measure success by
> paper citations, things haven’t changed all that much.

This is true. Someone still needs to write code for all the systems and
simulations needed to do science. But you don't get much academic credits for
building these things. Academic career-wise, much better to run simulations
using software others have written, and write papers about that.

Then again, being a programmer gives one a good position to leave academia and
get a software engineering job.

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ncmncm
I like that this article gives me more reasons than I already had to admire
everybody involved, even the writer.

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SpaceManNabs
Sorry if slightly off topic: This reminds of me a great play about a young,
fictional mathematician woman that comes to great insights about chaos and
entropy in the universe.

The ending is beautiful.

"Arcadia" by Tom Stoppard

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pseudolus
In a similar vein there was also David Auburn's "Proof" which featured a
female mathematician following in the footsteps of her mentally ill
mathematician father.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(play)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_\(play\))

~~~
dkural
Arcadia was infinitely better imho. Proof is formulaic (didactic and on the
nose on its moralizing theme) and propagates a number of stereotypes about
mathematicians around mental health and the lone genius etc.

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sneakernets
When I was a child, I was told by my 1st grade teacher that math was important
because when I'm a mother with a wonderful husband, I would know how to do
fractions and measurements to prepare cakes easier.

I would have loved to hear stories like this instead.

~~~
Verdex
Ultimately, the people teaching young people math do not understand what it is
or how to actually use it. If you took away their ability to do math, it is
unlikely that anything would actually change in their life.

Mathematics is the closest thing that humans have to doing magic. It's about
consistent axioms and finding true statements that are unintuitive. And it
allows you to problem solve at a level that exceeds what experience can teach
you.

No 'this is how you can use math' statement that I've ever heard in school has
ever done it justice.

Here's another history of math and women story that you might be interested
in:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MpQG2xXVo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_MpQG2xXVo)

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selimthegrim
What, no Mary Cartwright?

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faissaloo
Good for them I guess? What a weird title, either say 'women' or
'programmers', the use of the phrase 'women programmers' makes it seem like
some sort of alien concept.

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asark
It's become a common construction, but it bugs me too. You'd never say "men
nurses", for instance. Makes it sound like nurses who specialize in working
with men, not necessarily nurses who _are_ men. It's awkward but it's sticking
around, unfortunately.

[EDIT] more relevantly, "women doctors" definitely reads like an old-timey
euphemism for gynecologists.

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newswriter99
The headline "Two programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos
theory" would have done a lot more to further the right of women to be in the
STEM fields.

Pointing out they're female only further makes it look like most women are too
incompetent to do math or science.

~~~
inflatableDodo
As a counterpoint, I find that when introducing people to coding, mentioning
Grace Hopper's role in the development of compiled languages does a lot to
break down the perception of it being a job for boys.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
I've been trying to pinpoint when programming transitioned from being
considered "pink collar" work to "white collar" work in the general
population. My parents were born in the 40s and I was born in the 80s, and
when I went to college in the early 2000s they were still under the impression
that programming was akin to secretarial work. (I didn't pursue computer
science for other reasons as out-sourcing anxiety was at its head then, not
because of their weirdly mistaken impression).

~~~
oh_sigh
Programming was never pink collar. When women were 'programming' mainframes
and big analog computers back in the day, they were just punching in programs
that were written by mostly men.

Basically they were doing a rote process like women commonly did with
telephone switch boards, but operating on computer signals instead of voice
signals.

If a modern day programmer gets carpal tunnel, and they buy a typist so they
can just dictate code to the person - no one would consider the typist a
programmer unless he or she also happened to have those skills - not simply
becaues they type in code.

~~~
perl4ever
When my parents were working for GE, the engineers/scientists were men (like
my dad), and their assistants who programmed for them were commonly women
(like my mom), but they were no more "just typists" than programmers are
today. Pay for someone experienced was around $50-60K adjusted for inflation,
which I think tells you they weren't the equivalent of Google or Amazon
"software engineers", but they were the equivalent of someone making that
salary for some random business in flyover country today. Lots of people make
that kind of money today doing the work that businesses like Google outsource
because it's not exciting enough for their in-house talent that makes six
figures.

~~~
googlryas
Ok, but that doesn't mean that programming was pink collar, or generally
associated with women at that point.

~~~
perl4ever
Well, anecdotally, the reason my mom ended up as a programmer is because she
had an admission/scholarship to study engineering in college revoked because
she was a woman - they didn't technically _exclude_ women, but they told her
they already had _one_ in the department and didn't need any more. So she got
a degree in math (this was before computer science was a thing) and ended up
working for engineers, taking their problems and turning them into code.

Now I can't say how common this was without statistics, but you can see it
paints a picture of how discrimination in one area could potentially affect
another in a systematic way.

It could well be (and I'm sure I'm not the first to suggest it) that reduced
discrimination in areas that require both technical and soft skills have
caused an exodus of women from mere coding, because it's both more lucrative
and enjoyable for many of them.

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OJFord
Why is 'women programmers' or equivalent the 'in' or PC thing to say? It
doesn't make sense, 'women' is a plural noun; here it's used adjectivally.
I've never read 'men <noun>' by anyone literate.

Two _female_ programmers.

Or hey, as another commenter points out, who gives a shit that they're women?
You don't achieve the (presumed) goal of it being unremarkable whether a
programmer is male or female by remarking on it every time one is female.

~~~
SilasX
Because someone decided that "female" is offensive, regardless of the lack of
a better alternative, and everyone joined the train.

My earlier comment about the inanity:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539361](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14539361)

~~~
tom_
Lack of a better alternative? We have a perfectly good term for an adult
female human: "woman". (Plural: "women".) See, e.g., the headline. If we need
to stretch the grammar a bit to make this work, well, why not do that.

~~~
OJFord
What makes it better? (Or either of them anything other than neutral, mundane
words?)

~~~
untog
"female" and "male" are very clinical, scientific terms. They also lack
humanity - there are male and female dogs, cats and birds, but that's not the
case for "men" or "women".

No, none of this is backed up by a dispassionate reading of a dictionary but
that's language for you. It's emotive, for better or worse.

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tus87
Chaos theory was the 90s machine learning.

~~~
criddell
For me it really was. I think it was Mondo 2000 that first pointed me to James
Gleick's excellent Chaos book. After reading that I was looking for anything
else like it. Eventually I found books on artificial life and genetic
programming and these talked about neural nets and other machine learning
systems.

Those were exciting times. I was just thinking about Mondo 2000 and recurring
stories about smart drugs (nootropics?). I always wanted to try some of it but
never had the guts. I'd be curious to know if there were any long term
consequences for those who used them.

Edit: I just did some searching and found that R.U. Sirius did a followup
article:

[https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/03/09/smart-drugs-
nutrients-1...](https://www.mondo2000.com/2018/03/09/smart-drugs-
nutrients-1991-mondo-2000-flashback-friday/)

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booleandilemma
_Monocle drops_

 _Women_ programmers? You don’t you say!

