It would be unfair to reduce Hildegard von Bingen s achievements to those of an esoteric healer Although the abbess also has a wealth of knowledge about herbs she is first and foremost a scientist and composer and one of the most amazing persons of the High Middle Ages Born in 1098 as the last of ten children she is put into the care of a convent due to her frail health Even as a child the subsequent polymath has reli gious visions Today it is assumed that she was suffering from migraine headaches Hildegard von Bingen not only masters the challenge of founding two convents but goes on to become an adviser to influential personages of her time monarchs such as Fred erick Barbarossa or high ranking members of the clergy up to and including the pope amazing mojo for a woman who lived at a time when contemporary writings would describe women as inferior and therefore having to subordinate themselves to men THE POLYMATH About women in the Middle Ages The story was a worldwide success as a book and a movie but did Pope Joan really live Several medieval sources mention a woman who purports herself to be a man and rises to the highest ecclesiastical office However fiction and truth are often not far apart from each other in papers written in those days It s also possible that Pope Joan was Marozia From 914 on the Roman senatrix bends several popes to her will and in doing so establishes a rule of mistresses pornocracy Pope Joan is said to have lived at about the same time In 1843 she writes the first computer program and essentially it s her dissolute father s fault Ada Lovelace is the daughter of the poet Lord Byron Her parents separate one month after her birth To prevent Ada from following in her father s footsteps her mother bans any kind of poetic note from Ada s educa tion and instead has her taught in natural sciences by the fa mous mathematician Augustus De Morgan among others De Morgan recognizes her talent but doesn t promote it because he basically deems women to be unsuitable for science The young girl only feels all the more challenged by his attitude At the age of twelve Ada designs a flying machine modeled on a dead crow with a steam engine to power the wings Unfortunately the machine won t fly At the age of 17 Ada meets Cambridge professor and mathematician Charles Babbage His project the Analytical Engine a mechanical computer that is decades ahead of its time albeit will never be built Ada Lovelace recognizes its potential more than its inventor does She writes a numerical list of commands with operations and variables which today is acknowledged as the first com puter program One sentence in her papers is currently being hotly debated in the wake of the advance of artificial intelligence The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform THE COMPUTER SCIENTIST About female IT pioneers Grace Hopper 1906 1992 in the late 1940s comes up with the idea of writing computer programs in an understandable language instead of just in ones and zeros In pursuing her idea Hopper per forms important preliminary work leading to the development of the COBOL programming language Hopper her motto If in doubt do it receives more than 90 awards in recognition of her achieve ments Curiously enough in 1969 the Data Process ing Management Association presents her with its Man of the Year award Which goes to show how rare women like Amazing Grace as many of her admirers call her are in the IT sector in her day HILDEGARD VON BINGEN 1098 1179 ADA LOVELACE 1815 1852 in motion 35

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