St. Monica and the Mothers' Coffee in the 4th centuryOn December 17, 1913 or 1914, Mary Kenneth Keller was born in Cleveland, USA. At the beginning of the 1930s she applied to join the Congregation of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an institute founded by an Irish nun just a hundred years earlier. Finally, in 1940, she made her solemn profession.
Without hanging up her habits, Sister Mary Keller graduated in Mathematics. This made her a pioneer in a world that was rather closed to women and where the presence of a nun was a surprise. Not content with that, she went on to study for a master's degree in mathematics and physics that would prepare her for her next academic achievement.
Some sources say that in 1958 he joined a laboratory in which only male members were admitted. Together with his colleagues he developed the programming language "BASIC", the basis for some of the languages used today. However, other sources consider this to be false. What has been proven is that he participated in some projects at Dartmouth College.
Dr. Mary Kenneth Keller
Be that as it may, in 1965, she submitted her thesis "Inductive Inference of Computer Generated Patterns". At that time she became the first PhD in Computer Science in the United States. On the same day, June 7, Irving Tang also defended his doctoral thesis, a fact that was ignored for years, so many still think that Keller was the first person to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science in the United States, without reference to her sex.
With his thesis completed, he began working at Clark University, a center founded by his congregation. There he opened the Computer Science department and headed it for twenty years.
Throughout her life, Mary Kenneth Keller promoted women's access to computing and ensured that there was much to discover about the potential of computers. She helped establish partnerships that would bring computing into the educational arena and even spoke out about a artificial intelligence for the future. After a life dedicated to the university and to his congregation, he died in 1985.
