Born on a farm in Peru, New York, Frances E. Allen earned two degrees, a Bachelor’s and a Masters, in mathematics, with the intent to teach. She wanted to teach, and joined IBM research in 1957 primarily to pay off her student loans.
She ended up staying with “Big Blue” for 45 years, during which time she worked alongside the NSA to develop their codebreaking project and a programming language called Alpha. During her tenure, she contributed to the ACS-1 project, which yielded no finished models but several techniques and innovations that almost all modern computers use. In 1989, she became the first female IBM Fellow. She retired in 2002, but remains affiliated with IBM, which created an award in her honor.
In 2006, she was awarded the Turing Award (named, of course, for Alan Turing), becoming the first woman earn one.