Comment by rayiner
5 days ago
If I ever got famous, I would hope that people would remember me posthumously by what I did rather than by the fact that I was the "first Bangladeshi" to do whatever. You just mentioned two women professors at Yale and Caltech. I am sure they did amazing things. But your post just says they were women and contains no reference to their actual lives' work.
It is useful to study both their inventions and to learn about the history of discrimination against women. One doesn't make the other more or less valuable to understand. I was responding to a post about gender discrimination with examples.
Both are quite famous. Their work, and summaries of their work, are easily found if you are legitimately curious. Olga Taussky-Todd was a pioneer in matrices theory - certainly relevant and impactful in today's AI, LLM world. I see someone gave a separate synopsis of Admiral Grace Hopper's accomplishments.
Grace Hopper invented COBOL (or its direct predecessor anyway), did a lot of foundational work with compiler design, and generally (if you'll pardon the pun) led the deep integration of computer systems and programs into the military in the very early days. but yes, we should be focusing on what they've done, not just who they are.
What if you were the last Bangladeshi to achieve anything? How would that make you feel?
Grace Hopper gave us COBOL!