This content was originally created on my personal social media with the purpose of making my biggest inspirations known to those who are not in the IT area and probably never heard of important scientists and programmers that impacted their lives through their contributions. In this article I'd like to talk about one of my biggest inspirations as a christian and woman in STEM field: Mary Kenneth Keller.
Mary was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 17, 1913. When she was around 18, she entered the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
In 1943 Mary completed her B.S. in Mathematics from DePaul University in Chicago, where later she would conquer her Master's degree in Mathematics and Physics.
In 1958 she started working on a workshop at Darmouth University, which at the time was exclusively for men, but an exception was made so that the sister could be part of the project.
At this university, he was part of the creation of the BASIC programming language, together with John George Kemeny, Thomas Eugene Kurtz, in 1964.
Mary earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1965 from Washington University in St. Louis, along with her colleague Irving Tang, who were the first PhD graduates in the field in the country.
After finishing her PhD, she founded the computer science department at Clarke University, Iowa.
Clarke University was a Catholic women-only institution, becoming mixed only in 1979.
Mary believed that computer science was a way to improve the quality of education, helping people learn, and believed that computers should be accessible for all.
“We’re having an information explosion, among others and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available.”
She died in 1985, at the age of 71, in the city of Dubuque, lowa, leaving behind a great legacy of her great deeds.
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