Two women programmers played a pivotal role in the birth of chaos theory

Two years after Hamilton first stepped on campus, Ellen Fetter showed up at MIT in much the same fashion: a recent graduate of Mount Holyoke with a degree in math, seeking any sort of math-related job in the Boston area, eager and able to learn. Later, Sarah studied physical oceanography as a graduate student at MIT, joining the same overarching department as both Lorenz and Rothman, who had arrived a few years earlier. In addition to Hamilton and the woman who coded in MIT’s nuclear engineering department, Ellen Gille recalls a woman on an LGP-30 doing meteorology next door to Lorenz’s group.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org