Superheroes

Birth: September 4, 1927
Death: October 24, 2011

John McCarthy

Major Academic Events

John McCarthy went to the California Institute of Technology. He had studied college mathematics in high school, so he was able to skip two years of the math course at the California Institute of Technology.
However, he was suspended from the school for not being able to attend the Physical Education courses. Later, he would join the military so that he would be readmitted into CIT.
Awards:
- Turing Award (1971)
- Computer Pioneer Award (1985)
- IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (1985)
- Kyoto Prize (1988)
- National Medal of Science (1990)
- Benjamin Franklin Medal (2003)

Contributions to Computer Science

In the summer of 1956, John McCarthy and a few others coined the term, “Artificial Intelligence,” more commonly known as AI. This conference started AI as a field.
In the late 1950s and the early 1960s, John McCarthy went ahead to discover that primitive recursive functions can also be used to compute symbolic expressions. A primitive recursive function is a function in which all its loops are for loops. A for loop means that there is a limited number of iterations that are allowed to repeat depending on the number declared in the first line of the loop. Using this discovery, he created the Lisp programming language.

Birth: August 26th, 1918
Death: Februrary 24th, 2020

Major Academic Events

From the start of her schooling, Katherine Johnson was a very bright student.
She was invited to West Virginia State University, one of three African Americans to be invited there, being the only female out of the three.
Katherine graduated from WVSU with honors and a B.S. in mathematics and French.
Her first job was as a teacher in an African American public school in Virginia.

Contributions to Computer Science

Katherine Johnson played a key role in launching the first man into orbit as she was in NASA's space task program.
During John Glenn's flight to space, she was specifically requested by John Glenn himself to recheck the calculations made by the computer for his launching.
Possibly her biggest accomplishment yet, in 1969, she did calculations for the Apollo 11 mission which sent three men to the moon.
For her contributions, she was awarded with numeroues awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Sources: Women In Stem (Katherine Johnson) : https://spacecenter.org/women-in-stem-katherine-johnson/
Britannica: Katherine Johnson: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Katherine-Johnson-mathematician
Who was Katherine Johnson? : https://www.nasa.gov/audience/forstudents/k-4/stories/nasa-knows/who-was-katherine-johnson-k4

Birth: November 9, 1914
Death: January 19, 2000

Major Academic Events

As a young girl, Hedy Lamarr had a brilliant mind, but her intelligence was ignored and she was introduced to the fine arts at a young age by her mother.
Hedy Lamarr would never go to college.
At the age of 16, Hedy Lamarr would study acting in Berlin and would have her first film debut by 1930. Her career, however, really started in the 1932s with the film, Ecstasy.
After a few twists and turns in her love life, between 1937 and 1940, Hedy Lamarr would create her first invention. She attempted to create a tablet that would dissolve in water to form a fizzy soft drink such as Coca-Cola. It was then that she started her interest in computer science.

Contributions to Computer Science

At the start of WW2, Hedy Lamarr and George Anthiel would go to create a frequency-hopping device, that would, "frequency-hop," between radio waves, interrupting any attempt to intercept the radio waves, allowing torpedos to finalize and locate their target.
This idea would revolutionize the world of computer science, even though it was not known at that time.
Frequency-hopping is utilized for many things, such as Bluetooth, wifi, and GPS so that it can hop frequencies and allow many others to utilize these systems without having it be interrupted by anyone using that system simultaneously.
Hedy Lamarr's ideas are still being utilized in today's innovations in 5G technology, and can also be found in the latest military radios, airplanes, and drones.