CS Superheroes

Superhero #1

Katherine Johnson: Katherine Johnson was a mathematician at NASA who is most known for her help during John Glenn's Freedom 7 flight. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were not so comfortable of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to mistakes, as they were early technology and not yet as developed. As a part of the preflight checklist, Johnson was to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers John Glenn saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success and was a key factor in the Space Race between the US and the USSR.

Born: August 26th, 1918
Died: February 24th, 2020

Superhero #2

Ivan E. Sutherland: an American computer scientist pioneer, widely regarded as a pioneer of computer graphics. His work in computer graphics is what he is mostly known for. Ivan developed several foundations of modern computer graphics. He received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1988 for the invention of Sketchpad, an early predecessor to the sort of drawing platforms that has become ubiquitous in personal computers. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences among many other major awards. He was also awarded the Kyoto Prize in Advanced Technology for his achievements in computer graphics and interactive interfaces.

Superhero #3

Tim-Berners Lee: Tim Berners-Lee is often cited as creating the Internet, but the technology involved in it has been in development since the 1960s. His contribution was to build the World Wide Web. He introduced the concept of nodes and hypertext as well as the idea of domains to the mix. These are critical elements of the World Wide Web that we know today. At that time in order for scientists at CERN to share and access information they needed to physically move between computers. Berners-Lee realized this was far from efficient and it might be better to form a network using the existing Internet infrastructure of the time to do so.