Guido van Rossum was a computer programmer born in 31 January 1956.
Born and raised in the Netherlands, Rossum earned his degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Amsterdam in 1982. He was exceptionally smart, as he also won a Bronze medal in the International Math Olympiad held in 1974. In 2005, Rossum started working in Google, where he would also start developing the Python programming language. Though he had released Python many year prior in February 1991, the programming language took many years before it became more popular. However, in a matter of a few years, Python blew up as a programming language due to its simplicity and ease of creating complex scripts. Rossum declared himself as the sole "dictator" of Python and got many awards for his actions. For example, in 2018, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum.
Thanks to Rossum's work, millions more people were able to get into coding and realize how powerful computers really were.
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Grace Hopper Was born on December 9, 1906 in New York City. She went to Vasaar College and earned her degree in mathematics and physics from Yale University in 1930. In 1949, Hopper joined the UNIVAC and started working as a senior mathematician. When she wanted to create a programming language that could be programmed with normal English, she was turned down. However, Hopper insisted that it could be done. In Spring of 1959, Hopper started working on COBOL, one of the things she is the most famous for creating. Hopper belief that computers can be programmed using English rather than machine code was displayed in the language as it was much easier and efficient than its predecessors. One of her most famous stories is the one involving a moth getting stuck inside of the computer Hopper was working with. When asked why her code did not work, Hopper insisted that her code was correct, and a moth was found inside the computer. This is why to this day, computer engineers call errors in code "bugs". On New Year's Day in 1992, Hopper died in her sleep of natural causes.
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Margaret Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936, in Indiana. She is currently 86 years old.
Margaret studied mathematics at Earlham College. After her graduation she decided to be a high school teacher for a short amount of time. She then moved to Boston with her husband James Hamiliton to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University. Some of her awards include NASA’s Exceptional Space Act Award and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Margaret helped write the code that was used on the Apollo Mission to the Moon. She worked at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory where she led a team of scientists tasked to develop control and guidance modules for the Apollo space missions. Hamilton then created software to detect system errors if there ever was a crash. Both of these components were crucial for the success of the Apollo 11 mission which landed the first person to the Moon. Some of her smaller contributions are co-founding the company Higher Order Software in 1976 and establishing Hamilton Technologies in 1986.
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