Born on August 4, 1932, in New York State, near the Canadian border, Frances Allen was the eldest of six children. Deeply influenced by a mathematics teacher she met as a teenager, she began teaching at the same school. To earn her certification, she enrolled in a master's program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Curiosity led her to take an optional computer science course, a rarity at the time. IBM was then scouring the campus to hire a few students and offered her what she thought was merely a "job" that would allow her to pay off her student debt before returning to teaching.
An exceptional career at "Big Blue" followed, during which Frances Allen contributed to compiler optimization, the crucial stage in computing when algorithms expressed in (high-level) programming languages are converted into (low-level) machine language for execution. Her talents were also put to work for the NSA, helping to develop a compiler capable of handling three programming languages simultaneously: Fortran, Autocodor and Alpha.
Named an IBM Fellow in 1989—the company's highest career distinction—she became the first woman to receive the Turing Award in 2006, widely regarded as the "Nobel Prize in computing." She also championed women in computing. She died on her 88th birthday.
