Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and people have been celebrating pioneers in STEM (science, tech, engineering, and math). Which got me thinking: who is your favorite innovator?
My current favorites are Margaret Hamilton, who helped the navigational software for the Apollo mission, got Apollo 11 to land on the moon, and coined the term “software engineering,” and computer scientist and WWII codebreaker Alan Turing. I loved that the recent Steve Jobs movie features a set-piece with a prominent picture of Turing and gives Michael Fassbender’s Jobs an Aaron Sorkin monologue about how schoolchildren everywhere should know Turing’s name. I hope one day they will.
So who is your STEM hero, and are they widely known or forgotten by history?
Top image: Margaret Hamilton standing next to the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code via Wikimedia Commons