In 1960, Katherine Johnson and Ted Skopinski, an engineer, coauthored Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position, a report explaining equations describing the landing position of a spacecraft. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report. She also did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard's May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America's first human spaceflight, confirmed the calculations that synched Project Apollo's Lunar Module with the lunar-orbiting Command and Service Module, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports.
Guido Van Rossum created Python, the leading application language in important emerging areas such as natural language processing and big data. Due to the success of Python, from 1995 to 2000, he worked in the US in northern Virginia at CNRI (Corporation for National Research Initiatives). From 2005 to 2012, he worked at Google, and in 2013 he started working for Dropbox. In 2006, the ACM recognized him as a Distinguished Engineer, and since he made Python an open source, Van Rossum has accepted the title of Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) from the Python user community, for which he helps mediate disputes emerging from the language’s ongoing development.
Elizabeth J. Feinler's main contribution to computer science was her creation of the naming registry for websites, including domains such as ".gov", ".com", ".edu", and ".org". She also helped maintain a directory for the whole network of computers at Stanford Research Institute International through ARPANET. She was involved in multiple projects such as the development of a Resource Handbook in which she was so successful she got her team $11 million in funding. In 1989, she helped develop the guidelines for a variety of NASA based websites, and while doing all this, represented women as she navigated throughout the computer science field, paving her path as one of the first woman pioneers of the digital age.
