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Lynn Conway (Ada Lovelace Day 2009)

For those who are not aware, today, 24 March 2009, is the first Ada Lovelace
Day. It is a day to celebrate women in technology and to inspire young girls who
are interested in technology.

So who was Ada Lovelace? Ada Lovelace,
né Ada Byron, was the result of Lord and Lady Byron’s short
lived marriage. In order to prevent her daughter taking on her father’s
dangerously poetic traits Lady Byron had her daughter taught mathematics and
music. The young Ada was fascinated by mathematics and when she was 17 she met
Charles Babbage, then
Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (a position currently held by Stephen Hawking). Their
copious correspondence made them life long friends. Ada eventually married and
by way of inheritance became Lady Ada of Lovelace but she continued her
friendship with Babbage.

Even though the Difference Engine was not complete Charles Babbage wanted to
move on to his next contraption, the Analytical Engine. In
order to be easily configurable, i.e. programmable, the engine was to utilised
the punched card idea from the Jacquard Loom. In 1842,
while Babbage was trying to get sponsorship from abroad to be able to build his
device, Italian Mathematician Louis Menebrea published a memo on the Analytical
Engine in French. Babbage employed Lady Lovelace to translate it for him.

But Ada Lovelace did more than just translate the document but furthered the
research and the notes she wrote to accompany the paper are larger than the
paper itself. In the notes Ada Lovelace described how you could configure the
Analytical Engine to produce a sequence of Bernoulli Numbers.
This was the first ever computer program and she was the world’s first
programmer so it seems fitting the day is named after her. She also has the ADA
programming language named after her too. But Lady Lovelace was not completely
unaffected by her father’s legacy and when her peers were seeing such devices as
merely scientific and mathematical machines she saw how computers could be
artistic, used to make music or be used in graphics.

But this post isn’t about Ada Lovelace. It is about Lynn Conway who is a
heroine of mine and an inspiration. It think she quite rightly deserves to be
blogged about on Ada Lovelace Day.

Lynn Conway is Professor Emerita of Electronic Engineering
and Computer Science at the University of Michigan. She retired from teaching
and research in 1998. Professor Conway is responsible for many advances that are
required for modern computing and much of her work was carried out during a time
when women were virtual non-existent in computer sciences and misogyny was
rife.

I was not sure whether I should talk about Lynn Conway’s earliest work as she
is a trans-woman and her
earliest work was prior to transition. I was reluctant because I wanted to write
about Lynn Conway the woman technologist and not her biological
past however Ms Conway is open about her past and it does not detract from her
achievements. In fact it makes them even more inspiring. Lynn Conway entered MIT
in 1955 where she excelled. She tried to transition whilst there but the medical
and social climate was against her so she left despondent and worked as a
technician for several years. She resumed her education at Columbia University
obtaining her batchelor’s degree in 1962 and her master’s a year later. She was
subsequently head hunted by IBM to work as a researcher on the Advance Computing
Systems project. Whilst at IBM Lynn Conway invented dynamic
instruction scheduling.

Micro-processors have many functional units which can operate in parallel. I
do not mean multiple core processors but units that are part of a single core.
As a simplist example we can consider a processor that has separate addition and
multiplication units. I.e. the processor can add a pair of numbers and multiply
a pair of numbers simultaneously. Conway’s idea was to utilise this
parallelization by re-ordering instructions in a program dynamically to suit the
processor’s architecture. For example supposing a set of instructions comprising
two additions followed by two multiplications performs a mathematical
calculation. And suppose you could do the same calculation as addition,
multiplication, addition, multiplication. I.e. you swap the second and third
operations. Then this would be more efficient since the processor can do those
additions and multiplications simultaneously. The rearrangement would be
dynamic, i.e. the tools or processor would do it and not the programmer. This is
dynamic instruction scheduling and is core to modern computer science.

Whilst at IBM the depression caused Professor Conway to attempt transition
again and it was during this transition she was fired by IBM for being a
transsexual person. She completed her transition, changed her name, hid her
past, and started her career again from scratch.

Lynn Conway worked firstly as a contract programmer and then for Memorex as a
system designer and computer architect. Then in 1973 she moved to, the famous Xerox PARC, where she led the
Large Scale Integration Systems team. Whilst there she collaborated with
Professor Carver Mead of Caltech. Between them they wrote the classic text Introduction
to VLSI Systems. This text spearheaded the Mead and Conway
Revolution whereby the number of engineers capable of developing new chips
significantly increased. The book filled a major gap in the literature and
formed the basis of an educational revolution in computer science. Many
universities started teaching VLSI courses based upon the book and some even
used Conway’s notes from her own, now famous, course held at MIT in 1978.

The course on its own would not have been that useful if students were not
able to realise their designs so, in addition to inventing design rules which
simplified chip design and design tools, Professor Conway also worked on an internet
based infrastructure that allowed for rapid prototyping and short run
fabrication of a large number of VLSI designs. The Multi Project Chip
was demonstrated at the MIT course and within weeks students had their
fabricated prototypes for testing. The system evolved and is still used as a
national infrastructure by universities and researchers. Lynn Conway’s work has
had significant
impact on chip design. In the early 80s Ms Conway moved to DARPA and in 1985
she became Professor of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at the
University of Michigan and associate dean of engineering there. She stayed there
as a researcher and teacher until she retired in 1998.

Most people don’t invent anything during their lives. Lynn Conway not only
had one major invention, or even two, but several which changed the face of
computer science and gave birth to much of the modern technology we use today.
However when she heard that story of her early work at IBM was going to be
published she decided to come out as a trans-woman. Since then she has been a
trans-activist in order to “illuminate and normalize the issues of gender
identity and the processes of gender transition.” Lynn Conway suffered bigotry
in the 50s and 60s, transitioned and restarted life as a woman forging an
impressive career in a male oriented industry and becoming an inspiration to
many. Then, later in life, she risked bigotry again by revealing her path and
has fought for justice and equality since then. I had a chance to correspond
with her a few years ago and she is a lovely lady.

Lynn Conway is my heroine on Ada Lovelace Day.
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

Tags: #ALD09, Ada
Lovelace Day, Lynn Conway

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd,
2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Programming, Women In Technology. You can follow any responses to this
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