From the Earth to the Moon: Two Stories of Women and Mathematics

Abstract

We will tell two stories with a common denominator: in both cases we talk about extraordinary women and challenges, successful thanks to a lot of mathematics and computer science. The first story is well rooted on the ground: it speaks of Eniac, the first general purpose computer, built as part of a secret project of the US Defense during World War II. Six young women mathematicians designed its software, while programming languages, or even manuals and operating systems, were not available; without knowing the exact top secret architecture of the new computer, they became familiar with it and they performed complicated calculations of ballistic trajectories, founding this way the modern programming. The second story takes us to the Moon, where the protagonist made Apollo 11 land: it is the story of Margaret Hamilton’s adventure the head of the project of the Apollo Guidance Computer software project, the on-board computer of the command and the lunar module. Two stories that, twenty years far from each other, present (fortunately) significant differences, but also surprisingly similar and curious experiences, starting from the methods with which the selection for hiring took place…