John Hall: “I thank my colleague, Ms. Woolsey from California, for introducing this resolution honoring Dr. Frances Allen. Through…”

“I thank my colleague, Ms. Woolsey from California, for introducing this resolution honoring Dr. Frances Allen. Through her years of groundbreaking work at IBM, Frances Allen has been described as a pioneer, teacher, mentor and friend, and I am proud to say a constituent of mine in New York's 19th District. Now, the A.M. Turing award winner can be added to that last list. The A.M. Turing award is considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, and I cannot think of an individual more deserving than Frances Allen. Her work has been groundbreaking; not an exaggeration to say it's been part of one of the great technological revolutions in history. Over the course of her career, Frances Allen's long journey took her from a teacher of FORTRAN to a nationally recognized leader in computer science. At IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, her research and development of program languages and algorithms helped to create the theory of optimization and laid the foundation for much of today's compilers and high performance computing systems. Her work has been a bridge from the theoretical to the practical in the computer science. Just as her work has been pioneering, Frances herself has been a pioneer in advancing the role of women in computer science.”