Truly amazing and inspirational.

Lynn Conway

Computer Scientist,
Electrical Engineer,
Inventor,
Research Manager,
Engineering Educator

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/conway.html

Born a boy, but with a female brain. He did some pioneering research on supercomputer design at IBM in the 60s. He was found out to be a transsexual and thus fired.

He left the country and came back as a she with a new identity. Got a job at Xerox, and started fresh. Soon, she did pioneering research in chip design there. But no one knew about her past. Wrote a textbook on VLSI chip design at Xerox with a Caltech prof, that sold 70,000 copies and was used in over 120 universities wolrdwide.

Currently a professor at U Michigan.

Quote :

"Lynn Conway is a famed pioneer of microelectronics chip design. Her innovations during the 1970's at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have impacted chip design worldwide. Many high-tech companies and computing methods have foundations in her work. Thousands of chip designers learned their craft from Lynn's textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems, which she co-authored with Prof. Carver Mead of Caltech. Thousands more did their first VLSI design projects using the government's MOSIS prototyping system, which is based directly on Lynn's work at PARC. Much of the modern silicon chip design revolution is based on her work. Lynn went on to win many awards and high honors, including election as a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the highest professional recognition an engineer can receive. # What no one knew till recently is that Lynn also did earlier pioneering research at IBM in the 1960's. Fresh out of grad school, she invented a powerful method for issuing multiple out-of-order instructions per machine cycle in supercomputers. By solving this fundamental computer architecture problem way back in 1965, she made possible the creation of the first true superscalar computer, and participated in its design at IBM. Lynn called her invention dynamic instruction scheduling (DIS). By the 90's, chips held enough transistors so that entire superscalar computers could be put on single chips. Lynn's DIS invention suddenly became used in almost all the powerful new PC chips, making them much more powerful than they'd otherwise have been. Lynn's work thus had yet another big impact on the modern information technology revolution. Most computer engineers thought DIS was a generalization of decades of work, and had no idea it had been invented in 1965. It caused Lynn great angst to see her wonderful invention so widely used, and described in all the computer architecture textbooks, without anyone knowing it was her idea."

Read the rest at http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnsStory.html

Also be sure to check out these pages:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/BioSketch.html
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Impact/Impact.html (MUST READ for the techies)
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

[Edited on August 22, 2006 at 8:45 PM. Reason : ]

8/22/2006 8:43:01 PM

amazing and inspirational if you like women with cocks

8/22/2006 10:05:39 PM

In conclusion, women still suck at computers.

8/22/2006 10:14:14 PM

^^ we don't want trolls in here. this ain't chit chat. GTFO.

^ and how do you figure that? s/he was born with a FEMALE brain.

and besides, even you are being a troll.

i am surprised no techie on here knows of her pioneering contributions.

[Edited on August 22, 2006 at 10:21 PM. Reason : fucking trolls]

8/22/2006 10:21:28 PM

I'm sure that you'll dismiss me as a troll too, but you continuing to say he has a female brain is fucking retarded.

But this is Tech Talk and not the place for such discussion.

8/22/2006 10:40:14 PM

^ then you really don't know about the topic, do you? (topic of transsexuality)

there is a difference between one's physical gender, and one's brain gender. the medical community took a long time to embrace this idea, and indeed it has been prove now.

before the medical community accepted it, countless intersexed infants were subjected to cruelty, such as hormonal treatments and sex reassignment surgeries, which completely focused on their physical gender, and completely ignored their brain gender. this happened in the 60's to 80's. when these kids grew up, their bodies told them one thing, and their brains told them the opposite. so, they started dressing and acting like members of the "opposite" sex, and hence, were shunned by society and family. these people have now come out and told the world how they were fucked up the medical community's lack of knowledge.

if you want more info, look up her website.

hey, i don't really blame you, because most americans don't know about this too well.

here is an excerpt:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TS.html#anchor107763

Quote :

"GENDER BASICS: Gender is the most fundamental part of one's identity as a human being. The very first question everyone asks about us is "Is it a boy or a girl?" Important though it is, most people never think much about gender. They have no idea what causes their sense of being a boy or a girl, a man or a woman. Having never suffered mis-gendering, they take their gender for granted like the air that they breathe, never giving it a second thought. It is an unquestioned birth privilege to have a gender. Conventional wisdom says that people are either boys who grow up to become men, or they are girls who grow up to become women. There are only two possibilities, and you are either one or the other. It's obvious at birth from your "genital sex", and that's all there is to it! However, as we will see, reality is not that simple. What makes us a boy or a girl? What determines our gender identity? During early pregnancy, a fetus that has male genes (XY chromosomes) usually develops into a boy with male genitals. It develops into a girl with female genitals if it has female genes (XX chromosomes). This happens well over 99% of the time. Doctors and parents look at an infant's genitals at birth, and simply declare it to be a boy or a girl. Those declared to be boys usually grow up into men having a male gender identity, and those declared to be girls usually grow up into women having a female gender identity. Again, it all seems pretty straightforward. Although more than 5% of all men and women will grow up to be gay, and will seek love partners of the same sex and/or gender as themselves, they too usually have normal male and female gender identities as men and women, respectively. Intersex conditions - including intersex babies whose gender is ambiguous at birth: Although most infants appear to be either normal boys or normal girls, various genetic and developmental effects can lead in some cases to infants having ambiguous genitalia, so that even the doctors can't be sure whether it's a boy or a girl. In other cases, the genitals look correct for one gender, but aren't consistent with the infant's genes. In yet other cases the child's genes are something more complex than just XX or XY, and the child's gender identity and physical gender trajectory as they mature may be difficult to predict in advance. Children having these genital and/or genetic variations are called "intersex". Intersex babies are produced in about one in every 1000 births. For example, in about one in 13,000 births an XY (genetic male) fetus is unresponsive to fetal male hormones, and develops genitals that look like a girl's, except for a lack of internal reproductive organs. These XY "complete androgen insensitivity syndrome" (cAIS) infants are simply declared to be girls and are raised as girls. Although they cannot bear children, they often develop into slender, attractive women who have a female gender identity. It's rumored that a number of beautiful models have been cAIS girls. In other births, a "partial androgen insensitivity syndrome" (pAIS) results in the external genital appearance may lie anywhere along the spectrum from male to female. (See the Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome Support Group (AISSG) website for more information about AIS conditions). Incredibly, many of these girls are never told about the true nature of their conditions, because their doctors and families feel such shame and embarrassment about thes "terrible secret" that these girls have male genes. Instead they are usually told things like "you didn't develop any female internal organs, and thus can't have babies", and often discover the truth about themselves by accident later in life (for example, read Sherri's Story on the AISSG website). Our society is almost completely unaware of the existence of cAIS girls, and this had led to many problems for them. For example, for more than thirty years the International Olympic Committee (IOC) has conducted genetic "gender-testing" on all women athletes to make sure that they were "really female" (this was done to prevent "sex changes" from competing). In quite a number of cases these tests turned up cAIS girls, identified them as "males", and disqualified them from competition. These were truly tragic mis-identifications, since the presence of the Y chromosome in AIS girls does not make them males either genitally or in gender identity, nor does it confer any strength advantage to them. These mis-genderings were often made public, resulting in total humiliation for the women involved. In a significant recent reversal of this dreadful policy, the IOC dropped all such gender-testing, starting with the summer games in 2000. Then on May 17, 2004, the IOC announced that postoperative transsexual women and men will be allowed to compete, after meeting certain conditions, starting with the summer games in 2004. Therefore, discrimination against participation by IS and TS people in the Olympics is finally over. For an overview of the many categories and prevalence of intersex conditions, see the Intersex Society of North America's page entitled "How Common Are Intersex Conditions?". For more information, see Wikipedia’s excellent page on intersexuality, which includes links to many websites about specific conditions. The existence of XY (genetic male) intersex infants who have female genitals and who grow up to have female gender identity (the cAIS girls), was one of many early-known facts of intersexuality that led scientists years ago to recognize that gender identity IS NOT determined directly by having XY vs XX genes. Instead, they theorized that gender identity must be neutral at birth, and is determined later in early childhood by one's genitalia and upbringing. The leading proponent of this theory was John Money of Johns Hopkins University. According to this theory, a child having a vagina and raised as a girl will grow up to have a female gender identity, independent of her genes. Similarly, it predicted that a child having a penis and raised as a boy would grow up to have a normal male gender identity, independent of his genes. If the child's gender identity didn't turn out according to this scheme, psychologists and psychiatrists assumed that something "went wrong" in the child's upbringing, or that the child was mentally disturbed or delusional in some way (i.e., "mentally ill"). Corrections to any gender identity problems were sought through psychiatry, on the assumption that this "mental disturbance" could be reversed. "

[Edited on August 22, 2006 at 11:03 PM. Reason : ]

8/22/2006 11:01:38 PM

Quote :

"But this is Tech Talk and not the place for such discussion."

Soapbox this thread...

8/22/2006 11:12:38 PM

well i made this thread to discuss her accomplishments in the field of CS, not to have a discussion of rights for TS/TG people.

but, trolls took over the thread and made me change direction.

BUT NO MORE.

AS SOMEONE WHO HAS ONLY DABBLED IN CS/CompE, I WANT TO HEAR FROM THE GURUS IN THE FIELD, BECAUSE I AM CURIOUS ABOUT HER PIONEERING RESEARCH. HER WEBSITE SAYS A LOT OF TODAY'S TECHNOLOGY IS BASED ON HER WORK. I WANT SOME PERSONAL ACCOUNTS OF THE TECHIES ON HERE. HAVE YOU READ HER BOOKS? WAS SHE DISCUSSED IN YOUR COURSES? HAVE YOU COME ACROSS HER WORK ELSEWHERE?

8/22/2006 11:16:59 PM

hahaha. you're a fool if you think anyone's gonna read all that shit.

8/22/2006 11:29:36 PM

I read it.

8/22/2006 11:51:38 PM

^^ Wait, you refuse to read, and I am the fool?

Go ahead, stay ignorant.

Hey, if you have no interest either in CS or TS/TG, GTFO of this thread, or read this and tell me if you have heard of her work:

http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Impact/Impact.html

8/22/2006 11:59:42 PM

trap is posting about women with penises

8/23/2006 2:24:36 PM

So no one wants to answer my questions?

Nothing but trolls in here.

Heh, I will ask tech people in real life.

8/23/2006 5:29:13 PM