From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Lois Haibt
Lois Haibt
Lois Haibt was an American Computer Scientist, is per- a daughter Carolyn Mitchell. She worked for years as
haps most famous for being a member of the ten person a systems analyst and researcher for Yorktown Heights
team that invented FORTRAN, the first successful high IBM Research Laboratory, where her work included
level programming language. She joined the FORTRAN working on visualization of program structure using a
team, which was led by John Backus, upon graduation program she developed to draw multilevel flow charts
from Vassar College. She was the only female member of and in later years, she worked in the analysis of Petri Nets
the team.[1] and generating programs from them.
"They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude
for problem-solving skills-bridge players, chess players,
even women."-Lois Haibt,
See also
After graduating from Vassar, where she did well in • Fortran
math and science, Lois Haibt was lured to I.B.M. by a • John Backus
starting salary of $5,100, nearly twice the offer from Bell • List of prominent pioneers in computer science
Laboratories. "They told me it was a job programming
computers," she said. "I only had a vague idea what that
was. But I figured it must be something interesting and
References
challenging, if they were going to pay me all that mon- [1] Steve Lohr. "John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer,
ey." Dies". New York Times. March 20th, 2007.
“It was the kind of atmosphere where if you couldn’t Original Paper on FORTRAN from 1957
see what was wrong with your program, you would just Persondata
turn to the next person,” she recalled. “No one was wor- Name Haibt, Lois
ried about seeming stupid or possessive of his or her
Alternative names
code. We were all just learning together.”
Lois Haibt was tasked with writing the computer Short description
module that analyzed the flow control from the part of Date of birth
the compiler that collected information about the pro- Place of birth
gram to be compiled and calculated (using Monte Carlo
simulations) the frequency with which the basic blocks Date of death
of the program would be executed. She was married to Place of death
Luther H. Haibt and lived in Katonah, N.Y where she had
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lois_Haibt&oldid=450680264"
Categories:
• American computer programmers
• Computer pioneers
• Fortran
• Living people
• Vassar College alumni
• Women in applied computer science
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