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

[Gothmolly]

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?

Lisa Simpson?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

where the hell

[wud]

is morgan webb?

Cynthia Breazeal!

[PHAEDRU5]

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

Yuck.

[Rob T Firefly]

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

[maynard]

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.

Re:Lisa Simpson?

[qwijibo]

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:Real geeks only please

[jimstapleton]

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:paris hilton?

[jimstapleton]

doesn't change the fact that to be a geek, your IQ has to be higher than that of an average turnip. A requirement which she most certainly does not meet.

Re:Real geeks only please

[griffeymac]

I agree. Owning a PSP does not a geek make. Now if Paris had a PSP and then installed Linux on it, maybe I'd reconsider....

Re:Me and my joystick

[Ingolfke]

What you failed to mention is that your joystick hasn't been used by anyone other than you since 1983.

Come one... this /. you were asking for it :)

Re:Leah?

[somegeekynick]

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).

Re:Real geeks only please

[elrous0]

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

Where the hell is Kari?

[chibbie]

Kari Byron [google.com] from MythBusters.

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

[WidescreenFreak]

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.

Re:Real geeks only please

[clacke]

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.

No Emmy Noether?

[vorpal22]

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.

Re:Cynthia Breazeal!

[Lev13than]

How about Elonka Dunin [wikipedia.org]? Elonka is a game developer and one of the world's top (amateur) cryptographers - advisor to the FBI, CIA etc... She's even been covered extensively by /. [slashdot.org].

Re:where the hell

[Don_dumb]

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.

Where the hell is Radia Perlman?

[THESuperShawn]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radia_Perlman [wikipedia.org]

Spanning Tree algorithm...she even wrote a poem about it- and she is not a top ten geek girl? And Paris Hilton is? You sure this list isn't the top ten Greek (screwing) girls?

I think this list is meant more for entertainment than fact- even if it is just someone's opinion.

The list is an insult to women

[mwvdlee]

The list is an insult to women, and in particular geek women.

Having filler like Lisa Simpson is bad enough, but Paris Hilton?

If the list were of the top 10 men, would it include Dilbert and some-random-male-gameplaying-celebrity?

Honestly, there are lots of girl geeks (a lot have been mentioned in other posts, I'd like to add Jeri Ellsworth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth)) that would far better fit the list.

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

Re:Real geeks only please

[ajs]

Paris Hilton is a geek in the classic sense. She might as well be biting the heads off of small animals.

Lisa Simpson is clearly a girl-geek role model, even if she's a cartoon.

Aleks Krotoski spends a lot of time advocating 'girl-video gaming' according to her Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], though I've never heard of her.

I have yet to RTFA, but I'm wondering how they drew the line. For example, many geek guys are fans of Ripley from the Alien movies, but SHE is more of a strong female character than a geek per se. Same goes (though without the teen drooling) for Eleanor Roosevelt who was an iconic strong woman with a powerful presence, but not even remotely a geek. On the other hand, I'd say that every woman on the list of female Nobel Prize Laureates [wikipedia.org] is worth a spot on such a list, but very few were strong personalities, and thus are typically not recognized even when their contributions were enormous.

Re:Real geeks only please

[gad_zuki!]

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.

Me

[ggKimmieGal]

You know who they should have had on the list as a top 10 geek girl? Me. :-P

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Real geeks only please

[n0rr1s]

Everyone is pointing out the silly choices and the huge number of worthy candidates not on the list. But I think the most poignant line is the bit about Rosalind Franklin where it says something about DNA and X-ray crystallography (and I've lost the quote because I closed the page and now it's slashdotted - d'oh) and then says in brackets "don't ask". This is supposed to be about geeks ffs, and asking is the first thing geeks do. This just shows that cnet is about the geek as a passing trend, and has nothing to do with intellectualism.

Oh, and I vote for Lisa Randall [harvard.edu] :)

Re:Real geeks only please

[brunes69]

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

[VdG]

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

I disagree. It's chic to say geek is chic, but it's not actually cool to be a geek. Never has been, never will be.

Some geeks may manage to be cool, but that's in spite of their geekiness, not because of it.

Re:The list is an insult to women

[Anonymous Coward]

If the list were of the top 10 men, would it include Dilbert and some-random-male-gameplaying-celebrity?

You mean like Wil Wheaton? Of course it would. And hence by necessity it will leave off legions of men who accomplished far more of much greater significance.

Re:Real geeks only please

[chaoticgeek]

Or a college campus. There are quite a few women in the engineering department, and at least three of them were in IEEE student organization. I know its not many, but 10 years ago one would have been a lot.

Re:The list is an insult to women

[CableModemSniper]

Also why is Mary Shelley on there? She wrote a book that has a "robot" in it? Wow she's really geeky... isn't she?

Ah yes, being one of the pioneers of science fiction gives her no right to be considered a geek.

Re:The list is an insult to women

[Jugalator]

Totally agreed.

I'll say -- fuck that list and just read something like this [wikipedia.org].

Mary Anning - paleontologist

[Anonymous Coward]

Mary Anning [wikipedia.org], a self-taught and respected paleontologist who worked in early 19th-century England, a time when it was pretty tough for a female to get any respect in scientific work.

What a lame list that they had to add fictional characters and Paris Hilton to fill out the list.

Re:Real geeks only please

[Anonymous Coward]

Lisa's character is shunned for her braininess. I want to emulate a woman who is smart, feminine AND successful.

Unshunned does not equal Successful, which is what you're implying here. Unshunned equals Popular, which is another thing altogether. After high school, success can be defined any number of ways other than popularity -- even *in* high school if you're deprogrammed enough.

If they were looking for a "gamer"

[figa]

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.

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

[janestarz]

"some of the entires in this list completely destroy the credibility of whoever the person is who made this list."

Agreed, and may I add that some of the entries completely nullify the validity of the list? Yea, varily, some of the entries will outright downgrade the others on the list. It makes me ashamed to call myself a girl geek, (even though I don't even speak or write a word of C).

To make a list as this one and post it on Slashdot is positively insulting to all those women (see other comments) who are first class geeks. The only thing Curie and Hilton have in common is their gender; to compare Marie Curie with Paris Hilton is to call an apple 'an interesting new kind of plastics'.