For the first time since the annual honor began in 1966, a woman is the recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, which is granted by the Association for Computer Machinery and is widely considered the tech industry's equivalent of a Nobel Prize in computing.

Frances Allen, an IBM Fellow Emerita at the T.J. Watson Research Center who started her career as a computer scientist in the 1950s, was honored for her significant contributions in compiler design and program optimization. Her work led to advances in parallel, high-speed computing, including techniques used today in high-performance computers tackling challenges such as weather forecasting, global warming, and DNA matching.
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