24 Facts About Frances Allen

Frances Elizabeth Allen was an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers.

Frances Allen's achievements include seminal work in compilers, program optimization, and parallelization.

Frances Allen worked for IBM from 1957 to 2002 and subsequently was a Fellow Emerita.

Frances Allen grew up on a farm in Peru, New York, near Lake Champlain, as the oldest of six children.

Frances Allen's father was a farmer, and her mother an elementary schoolteacher.

Frances Allen graduated from The New York State College for Teachers with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics in 1954 and began teaching school in Peru, New York.

Frances Allen planned to return to teaching once her student loans had been paid, but ended up staying with IBM for her entire 45-year career.

In 1959, Frances Allen was assigned to the Harvest project for code breaking with the National Security Agency, and worked on a programming language called Alpha.

Frances Allen managed the compiler-optimization team for both Harvest and the Stretch project.

From 1980 to 1995, Frances Allen led IBM's work in the developing parallel computing area, and helped to develop software for the IBM Blue Gene project.

Frances Allen retired from IBM in 2002, but remained affiliated with the corporation as a Fellow Emerita.

Fran Frances Allen's work has had an enormous impact on compiler research and practice.

Frances Allen developed and implemented her methods as part of compilers for the IBM STRETCH-HARVEST and the experimental Advanced Computing System.

Frances Allen went on to establish and lead the PTRAN project on the automatic parallel execution of FORTRAN programs.

Frances Allen was a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Frances Allen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1987, to the American Philosophical Society in 2001, and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010.

Frances Allen was nominated a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994.

In 1997, Frances Allen was inducted into the Witi Hall of Fame.

Frances Allen won the 2002 Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing.

In 2004, Frances Allen was the winner of the ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute.

Frances Allen was recognized for her work in high-performance computing with the 2006 Turing Award.

Frances Allen became the first woman recipient in the forty-year history of the award, which is considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing and is given by the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 1972, Allen married New York University computer science professor and collaborator Jacob T Schwartz.

Frances Allen died on August 4,2020, her 88th birthday, from complications with Alzheimer's disease.