Constance Markievicz
POLITICS / ACTIVIST (1868 - 1927)
Constance Markievice was an Irish activist
and politician. In 1913 she joined the Irish
Citizen Army, which was a small volunteer
force. In the 1916 Easter Rising she fought in
St Stephen's Green as second in command
for six days straight. When the fighting ended,
she was imprisoned and sentenced to death,
but the judge reduced it to life "on account of
her sex". Once released she turned her hand
to politics and was elected to the British
House of Commons in 1918, the first woman
to be elected to Westminster. however, she
refused to take her seat instead joined the
newly established Dail Eireann, the
Parliament of the revolutionary Irish Republic.
She served as Minister of Labour between
1919-1922 making her the first female cabinet
minister in Europe.
Grace Hopper
COMPUTER SCIENCE (1906 - 1992)
Having begun her career in the Navy, by the
late 1940s Grace Hopper worked at the
Harvard Computation Lab as part of the Navy
Reserve, programming the Mark 1 computer
that brought speed and accuracy to military
initiatives. Later, she transferred to the EckertMauchly
Computer Corp, where she worked
as a senior mathematician. She helped
develop the UNIVAC I computer, the first
business-oriented machine. Her accolades
include creating the first compiler, software
that translated arithmetic into language and
unifies programming instruction. She was one
of the architects of a computer language
called COBOL, which is still a standard of
data processing today. Most notably, she is
credited with the idea that computer code
could be written and read like language.
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