Top Ten Geek Girls

TurboPatrol writes "CNET have published a list of the Top Ten Girl Geeks throughout history. The winners include the elegant Ada Byron (the world's first computer programmer), Grace Hopper (invented the compiler) and Lisa Simpson (invented the perpetual motion machine — well, in the world of cartoons). Some of the entries are fascinating, for example Marie Curie apparently used to carry plutonium in her jacket pockets. Have they missed anyone out?" At least two entries on the list are stupid. I guess someone thought they were funny.

Real geeks only please

I'm glad to RTFA and see people like Eugenia or Steph the Geek not on the list, HOWEVER, wtf is Paris Hilton, LISA FSCKING SIMPSON, or Aleks Krotoski on the list? Did they run out at 6 or 7 geeks, and needed filler? Paris Hilton is described as "She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary." WTF?

Re:Real geeks only please

Well, inside she's mostly zero's..

Re:Real geeks only please

I have a hunch where the 1 gets inserted

Re:Foregone conclusions..

I call the left nostril!

Re:Real geeks only please

I second this. One of the members of a local open source club wanted to encourage the fairer sex to join. I was gonna send this as an idea for encouragement, then I got to Paris Hilton.

Yeah, that just insulted girl geeks everyone,

Re:Real geeks only please

Paris Hilton is described as "She might look trendy on the outside, but inside this girl is all binary." WTF?

It must be very empowering to women to know that it's apparently impossible to compile a list of even ten prominent geek women without padding it with fictional characters and vacuous celebrities.

-Eric

Re:Real geeks only please

If you think "geek" is a slanderous term, then you have either come here via a time-warp from 1970, are not a geek yourself, have never been to this site before, or various combinations of all three.

Geek is very chic nowadays, lots of people who are not geeks *wish they were*. Geek is in.

Re:Real geeks only please

Yes. Where the hell is Anousheh?

Ok, you go to space, you blog about it, the blog gets slashdotted. And you don't even beat Paris Hilton in geekiness? Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Real geeks only please

Even Hillary Clinton is more geeky than Paris Hilton, just for being married to a guy who used to work with the guy who invented the Internet, and then moved on to make a world-renowned powerpoint presentation about the weather.

Re:Real geeks only please

Being a gamer does not a geek make, except to the media. Playing Madden all day with your frat brothers suddenly makes you a world-class hacker. Its bad enough from dead-tree publications with 100+ years of history but from Cnet? Worse, they can't even get this list right. Almost half of it is fluff. I really do hope they just retract this shoddy piece of entertainment 'journalism.'

On the flip side I don't see anything wrong with the occasional silly entry. Say if this list was a solid 9 geeky women and one Lisa Simpson that's cute. If its 5 solid women and 5 fluff women, then its silly bordering on insulting.

Lisa Simpson?

Isn't it a little bit sad when one of the Top 10 geek "girls" throughout history has to be a cartoon character. Are there really that few women geeks to choose from?

Re:Lisa Simpson?

I doubt this article will end up in any history textbooks. However, I think Lisa Simpson is a much better candidate in every way than Paris Hilton. As a cartoon, she has all the fakeness of Paris Hilton, but the benefit of script writers to give her a personality. =)

Re:Lisa Simpson?

What's sad is that we haven't learned from history and realized that women have smaller brains then monkeys and cannot be practically educated. Khazakistani scientists have proven it time and time again. :)

Hedy Lamarr

She was originally married to a German weapons supplier. Consequently, she knew about things like tanks and torpedoes.

Came up with what we now call frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology, trying to make a torpedo which could be directed after launch, but couldn't be jammed.

Reasonably good actress. Brainy as all hell. Drop-dead gorgeous.

Now THERE'S a Geek Girl rolemodel who simply needs better publicity.

Plutonium? Unlikely

Plutonium was created in the 1940's. Marie Curie died in the 1930's.

What is interesting, in a disturbiung way, is that Marie Curies workbooks that she used while discovering radium are still considered dangerously radioactive.

Re:Plutonium? Unlikely

I havn't visited her old rooms (in the basement of the Sorbonne) myself, but I've met a few people who have. If you turn off all the lights, you can see the walls, glowing in the dark.

They had a big scare a few years ago, when they were auctioning off some old furniture. Turned out some of it dangerously radioactive.

Her notebooks are horrifying.

You read descriptions of what she and her husband would do with samples of radium and you want to cry. They had no idea what they were doing to themselves.

Re:Plutonium? Unlikely

Plutonium was created in the 1940's. Marie Curie died in the 1930's.

Holy shit... are you saying Marie Curie could travel back in time!? WTF? OMG?!

Re:Plutonium? Unlikely

Well she had to get plutonium back to herself somehow. I'm sure in 1985 you can get plutonium at your local conrer store but in the 1930's it's a bit harder to come by.

Re:Plutonium? Unlikely

It was probably Polonium and not Plutonium. However since she did work with pitchblend there where possibly trace amounts of plutonium in some of her samples but none that really amounted to anything. As far as the Geek girl list goes yea Paris Hilton should be booted. Isn't her 15 minutes of fame over yet? They missed one of my all time favorites Hedy Lamarr. She invented spread spectrum radio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr [wikipedia.org]

Re:Plutonium? Unlikely

"North America was created in 1492."

Yes, Christopher Columbus "created" North America in a supercollider (in his parents' basement, I'm sure). It wasn't until decades later that trace elements of North America were found naturally occurring in extremely small amounts, thanks to North America's extremely long half-life combined with one-in-a-million occurrences of natural plate tectonics.

Paris Hilton??? W - T - F

I'd have gone for Willow Rosenberg [wikipedia.org] instead.

where the hell

is morgan webb?

Where TF is....

Sophie Germain [wikipedia.org] was quite the math geek - even has a type of prime number named after her. Had to use a psedonym because women weren't supposed to be mathematicians back then. Clearly the folks who wrote the article didn't do any real research.

Re:where the hell

Or another obvious choice Florence Nightingale - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_nightingale [wikipedia.org] after all she did invent the pie chart while nursing.

It annoys me that these were the 10 women (Paris Hilton, et al) they chose. It must be really insulting, when they leave out so many serious 'girl geeks' that actually did have a positive impact on the world.

Grace Hopper

A woman invented COBOL? This does not surprise me. *ducks*

Re:Grace Hopper

A woman invented COBOL? This does not surprise me. *ducks*

Actually, no, the article is wrong. Grace Hopper did many incredible things, but she didn't actually invent COBOL. She did, however, come up with the idea that computer programming languages could be designed that were more like English and, thus, be easier to use. I would say that is a much greater accomplishment. She also created a language called FLOW-MATIC that was a precursor to COBOL, and which strongly influenced the CODASYSL committe who created COBOL. So, COBOL was created by a committee (of men), but many of the basic concepts and ideas that are fundamental to most of the technology you use today was, in fact, invented by a pretty damn amazing woman.

Cynthia Breazeal!

It's a shame they missed her: http://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/ [mit.edu]

Re:Cynthia Breazeal!

'Fess up, you were watching PBS last night, weren't you?

Yuck.

Ah, CNet. Just when one thought you couldn't get any less useful, you squander a potentially really neat article idea on tired Simpsons and Paris Hilton jokes. I hate to say this to anyone.. but you are really not funny.

A girl geek friend of mine works for CNet. I wonder how well her and her fellows are taking this.

Paris Hilton or Madame Curie... hmmm

Did I just see Madame Curie and Rosalind Franklin compared with Paris Hilton and Lisa Simpson? One two time Nobel Prize winner and another near Nobel Prize winner compared to a coke snorting self promoting gamer and a cartoon character.

I give up.

Paris Hilton should be on every list

Paris Hilton is the loveable hateable icon of absurdity. She should be on every list. Sexiest woman (#47 Paris Hilton), best actress in a foreign film (#23 Paris Hilton), world's strongest man (#97 Paris Hilton), most downloaded interent video star (#3 Paris Hilton), most likely running mate for Barak Obama (#2 Paris Hilton), and people who remind you of the Olsen Twins (#1 Paris Hilton).

We laugh today... but I wouldn't be surprised if Paris isn't the first female US president... and most likely will be the first president to put electrolytes in the water supply.

Hedy Lamar

Seriously, Paris Hilton and Lisa Simpson, but they snubbed Hedy Lamar [wikipedia.org]? I mean seriously, how can you top a gorgeous movie star geek?

Hedy Lamarr (November 9, 1913 - January 19, 2000) was an Austrian/American actress and communications technology innovator. Though known primarily for her great beauty, she also co-invented the first form of spread spectrum, a key to modern wireless communication.

Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil received U.S. patent #2,292,387 for their Secret Communication System. This early version of frequency hopping used a piano roll to change between 88 frequencies and was intended to make radio-guided torpedoes harder for enemies to detect or jam. The patent was little-known until recently because Lamarr applied for it under her then-married name of Hedy Kiesler Markey. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil made any money from the patent. It had expired by the time the U.S. military barely began using this system after 1962. It took electronics technology a long time to catch up with the concept.

Lamarr's frequency-hopping idea served as the basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology used in devices ranging from cordless telephones to WiFi Internet connections. In 1997, the two of them received an EFF Pioneer Award for the invention.

Now that's hot, Paris.

Where the hell is Kari?

Kari Byron [google.com] from MythBusters.

WTF?! Some of the entries are total bullsh*t.

I want to know what the hell the author was smoking when this was written, beause that's some really potent stuff!

Why the f**k is Darryl Hannah on this list? She not a f**king geek! She's a left-wing, activist actress! Oh, wow, she made two board games. So what? That does not qualify her to bear the category of "geek" in any way, shape, or form.

Lisa Simpson? Paris Hilton? Others have discussed the stupidity of these entries, so I'm not going to bother reiterating them.

Why the hell are two of the most prominent girl geeks around not on this list -- Aluria Petrucci (aka Cali Lewis) and Amber McArthur [tv.com]? Cali Lewis is one of the most famous tech geeks out there with her GeekBrief.TV video podcast that gets tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of downloads every day. Even if she's just a nice-on-the-eyes presenter, she still has far more qualifications than Hanna, Simpson, or Hilton. And Amber McArthur is just about every geek's wet dream - intelligent (holds several college degrees), co-host and producer of several tech podcasts and TVs shows, host of commandN video podcast, clearly has a love for tech, and is incredibly easy on the eyes.

I certainly can agree with Marie Curie, Ada Byron, and the others. I'll even give the nod to Mary Shelley. But some of the entires in this list completely destroy the credibility of whoever the person is who made this list.

No Emmy Noether?

I can't believe that they omitted Emmy Noether [wikipedia.org], one of my role models and possibly, IMO, the greatest geek girl of all time.

Despite the incredible sexism and rise of the nazi rule that she faced during her day, she was brilliantly accomplished, contributing huge amounts to the fields of commutative algebra and theoretical physics.

What About...

...Hedy Lamar [wikipedia.org]? She looks infintely hotter than the real geek girls on that paltry list and she was responsible for co-inventing Frequency-hopped spread spectrum technology used in WiFi today...

Roberta Williams Paris Hilton

Roberta Williams belongs on this list. Married to the brash and brilliant programmer and founder of Sierra On-Line, Ken Williams, the mousey Roberta wrote fantastical good-natured interactive tales in the form of text adventures. In the company's infancy she also "manned" the only customer support phone, and took great delight in hearing direct praise and personally coaching players through her games without giving direct hints. She later went on to author the Kings Quest series which won countless critical and commercial accolades.

Her games challenged the technologies of the day, with Kings Quest V being the company's first entirely mouse-driven adventure title, and Phantasmagoria being the first adventure game exclusively portraying filmed actors and locations. Despite her mild manner and reserved tongue, Phantasmagoria broke ground as one of the first wide-release PC games unabashedly targeted at mature audiences with scenes of graphic gore and even an infamous rape scene.

Perhaps most important of all, Roberta Williams wrote games for people - not specifically men or women - who enjoyed a good story with strong characters. She is remarkable for excelling in a mostly male-dominated industry without having to resort to the image of "PC game princess".

Rosalind Franklin?

I've always admired Rosalind Franklin, the oft-overlooked molecular biologist who did much of the actual science (intricate lab work) that led to the discovery of the structure of DNA. She died at a young age (37)in 1958 and thus did not share in the nobel prize that was awarded to Watson and Crick in the 1960s. From accessexcellence.org (http://www.accessexcellence.org/RC/AB/BC/Rosalind _Franklin.html) we have:
"After discovering the existence of the A and B forms of DNA, Rosalind Franklin also succeeded in developing an ingenious and laborious method to separate the two forms, providing the first DNA crystals pure enough to yield interpretable diffraction patterns. She then went on to obtain excellent X-ray diffraction patterns of crystalline B-form DNA and, using a combination of crystallographic theory and chemical reasoning, discovered important basic facts about its structure. She discovered that the sugar-phosphate backbone of DNA lies on the outside of the molecule, not the inside as was previously thought. She discovered the helical structure of DNA has two strands, not three as proposed in competing theories. She gave quantitative details about the shape and size of the double helix. The all- important missing piece of the puzzle, that she could not discover from her data, was how the bases paired on the inside of the helix, and thus the secret of heredity itself. That discovery remained for Watson and Crick to make.
After Randall presented Franklin's data and unpublished conclusions at a routine seminar, aspects of her results were informally communicated to Watson and Crick by Maurice Wilkins and Max Perutz, without her or John Randall's knowledge. It was Watson and Crick who put all the pieces of the puzzle together from a variety of sources including Franklin's results, to build their ultimately correct and complete description of DNA's structure. Their model for the structure of DNA appeared in the journal Nature in April, 1953, alongside Franklin's own report.
Rosalind Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had gotten access to her results. At the time of the Watson and Crick publication and afterwards, Franklin appears not to have been bitter about their accomplishment. In her own publications about DNA structure, she agreed with their essential conclusions but remained skeptical about some details of their model. Franklin moved on to work on an even more challenging problem: the structure of an entire virus, called the Tobacco Mosaic Virus. Her subsequent publications on this topic would include four more papers in the journal Nature. Rosalind Franklin was friendly with both James Watson and Francis Crick, and communicated regularly with them until her life and career were cut short by cancer in April of 1958, at the age of 37. She died with a reputation around the world for her contributions to knowledge about the structure of carbon compounds and of viruses. After her death, Watson and Crick made abundantly clear in public lectures that they could not have discovered the structure of DNA without her work. However, because the Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, Rosalind Franklin could not be cited for her essential role in the discovery of the physical basis of genetic heredity. "

Rosalind Franklin, in my opinion, is one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century that few people know about.

Paris Hilton? BAH! Asia Carrera!

Whoever put Paris Hilton on the list needs to be shot. If you want a REAL geek girl who also shows the goods go for (SFW), the self-described "nerd of porn." [wikipedia.org]

Slashdot's taggers are harsh...

I swear, Slashdot's taggers are a harsh crowd. The minute something hits that isn't hard news, they're all over it with that depressing "slownewsday" tag-in-the-face.

You could have a day that goes like this:

Microsoft opens complete Windows source code
Steve Ballmer Resigns from Microsoft, Will Become Carpenter
Nintendo Asks: What Makes a Good Game
Bill Gates and Larry Ellison Announce "Domestic Partnership."
Steve Wozniak bests Steve Jobs in UFC

And that Nintendo story will get a slownewsday tag before the electrons dry...

If they were looking for a "gamer"

They should have chosen grandmaster Judit Polgar. [wikipedia.org] You don't get much geekier than chess, and you don't get much better than Judit Polgar.

Also, Flickr Account

Forgot to add, here's a link to her Flickr acct:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/leahculver/ [flickr.com]

I'm not a stalker or nothin, just wanted to post that before I go back to hiding in the bushes with my binoculars.....

Re:Leah?

I'd include Sophie Germaine [wikipedia.org][wikipedia.org] Germain was particularly interested in Joseph-Louis Lagrange's teachings and submitted papers and assignments under the pseudonym "Monsieur Le Blanc", a former student of Lagrange's. Lagrange was so impressed by the paper that he asked to meet Le Blanc, and Germain was forced to reveal her identity to him. Lagrange apparently considered her a talented mathematician and became her mentor. On a lighter note, how about Britney spears [britneyspears.ac][britneyspears.ac]? ;) P.S. I don't post much at /.. Could someone tell me how to post a comment without replying to an earlier comment?(i.e. Reply to This).

No Emmy Noether?

Marie Curie but no Emmy Noether [wikipedia.org]?

Pshaw.

Re:The list is an insult to women

Well, Paris Hilton was an early adopter of the rapidly growing field of celebrity online cocksucking - though I have to say the article's omission of Pamela Anderson (a pioneer in the field) is pretty disappointing.

And also interesting is the fact that there's no mention of how much cock any of the others sucked. Quite shoddy standards, if you ask me.

You are correct.

There have been famous geek girls since the times of Ancient Greece. I forget the name of the woman who graduated from Oxford with a starred degree, got her masters and completed her PhD in mathematics, all by the age of 17, going on to lecture at I think Harvard at 18. That's a fistfull of world records right there. Florence Nightingale was mentioned by another poster, but don't forget Mrs. Mary Seacole, a contemporary of Florence Nightingale who invented a number of surgical techniques in use today. Although I detest her, Margret Thatcher (who has an earned doctorate in chemistry) is certainly famous and has characteristics you could consider geeky. The there's Heather Mills - TV celebrity and world-renown astronomer.

There's an entire chart of about 100 famous women scientists in history up on the web, which is only a tiny fraction of the total number of real geek women. I'd say that there are probably in the order of a thousand plus who are TRULY famous and TRULY geeky (although there are many many more than that who are "merely" really good geeks).

I'd say that it might be much more interesting to compile a comprehensive list and then allow for ranked voting to find the most famous (now) of the truly amazing geek women who live (or have lived) truly amazing lives that go as far beyond what most would call hardcore geek as the hardcore geeks go beyond the mundane in "real life".

Re:The list is an insult to women

>Paris Hilton?

Uh, yeah, ABOUT that.

>The only thing this list proves, it the author's inaptitude as a journalist.

You spelled "asshole" wrong.

Maybe Paris Hilton is on that list to give Mary Shelly new ideas?

Re:The list is an insult to women

True.... even before I read the article I came up with 3 names I knew would not be on it

1) Ellen Hancock, First with IBM (hired as a programmer in the mid 60s, then led the network team [SNA, Token Ring under her watch] first woman Senior VP at IBM), then with Apple (as CTO, she killed Copland... and pushed for the NeXT buy out... in some respects, she may have saved Apple... and then fired by Steve)

2) Kim Polese: Product Manager of original java team, co-founder of Marimba, poster girl of the DotCom(bomb) era.

3) Kari Byron (MythBusters) would be better mass media geekdom icon than Paris or Lisa, at least she sometimes shoots things, ignites stuff, dabbles in ballistic trajectories, welds stuff, and dresses GyrlGeek;-).

YMMV, but those would be my Candidate Substitutions.

Re:Leah?

Great. 'Cause being hot is the quality we should be concerned with when identifying the best geeks.