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Presented by Dr Andrew Hodges Mathematician and author

Who was Alan Turing?

Alan Turing was not a well known figure during his lifetime. But today he is famous for being an eccentric yet passionate British mathematician, who conceived modern computing and played a crucial part in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in WW2.

He was also a victim of mid-20th Century attitudes to homosexuality - he was chemically castrated before dying at the age of 41.

Can a machine think?

Turing moved to the University of Manchester, where electronic engineers had already demonstrated a very small stored-program computer.

Now he focused on the use of computers. His main theme had been in investigating the power of a computer to rival human thought. In 1950, he published a philosophical paper including the idea of an 'imitation game' for comparing human and machine outputs, now called the Turing Test. This paper remains his best known work and was a key contribution to the field of Artificial Intelligence.
Why was Turing's work on AI controversial? Take an interactive tour of the Baby

We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.

Turing on the challenge of machine intelligence, 1950

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Alan Turing: Creator of modern computing

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Presented by Dr Andrew Hodges Mathematician and author Alan Turing was not a well known figure during his lifetime. But today he is famous for being an eccentric yet passionate British mathematician, who conceived modern computing and played a crucial part in the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in WW2.

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"Mrs Land worked as a computer out at Langley," my father said, taking a right turn out of the parking lot of the First Baptist church in Hampton, Virginia. My husband and I visited my parents just after Christmas in 2010, enjoying a few days away from our full-time life and work in Mexico.

They squired us around town in their 20-year-old green minivan, my father driving, my mother in the front passenger seat, Aran and I buckled in behind like siblings. My father, gregarious as always, offered a stream of commentary that shifted fluidly from updates on the friends and neighbours we'd bumped into around town to the weather forecast to elaborate discourses on the physics underlying his latest research as a 66-year-old doctoral student at Hampton University.

That black women worked as mathematicians at Nasa challenges much of what we think we know about American history

He enjoyed touring my Maine-born-and-raised husband through our neck of the woods and refreshing my connection with local life and history in the process.

As a callow 18-year-old leaving for college, I'd seen my home town as a mere launching pad for a life in worldlier locales, a place to be from rather than a place to be. But years and miles away from home could never attenuate the city's hold on my identity and the more I explored places and people far from Hampton, the more my status as one of its daughters came to mean to me. That day after church, we spent a long while catching up with the formidable Mrs Land, who had been one of my favourite Sunday school teachers. Kathaleen Land, a retired Nasa mathematician, still lived on her own well into her 90s and never missed a Sunday at church.

We said our goodbyes to her and clambered into the minivan, off to a family brunch. "A lot of the women around here, black and white, worked as computers," my father said, glancing at Aran in the rearview mirror but addressing us both. "Kathryn Peddrew, Ophelia Taylor, Sue Wilder," he said, ticking off a few more names. "And Katherine Johnson, who calculated the launch windows for the first astronauts."

The narrative triggered memories decades old, of spending a much treasured day off from school at my father's office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Langley Research Centre. I rode shotgun in our 1970s Pontiac, my brother, Ben, and sister, Lauren, in the back as our father drove the 20 minutes from our house, straight over the Virgil I. Grissom Bridge, down Mercury Boulevard, to the road that led to the Nasa gate. Daddy flashed his badge and we sailed through to a campus of perfectly straight parallel streets lined from one end to the other by unremarkable two‑storey redbrick buildings.

Only the giant hypersonic wind tunnel complex, a 100ft ridged silver sphere presiding over four 60ft smooth silver globes, offered visual evidence of the remarkable work occurring on an otherwise ordinary looking campus.

Building 1236, my father's daily destination, contained a byzantine complex of government-grey cubicles, perfumed with the grownup smells of coffee and stale cigarette smoke. His engineering colleagues, with their rumpled style and distracted manner, seemed like exotic birds in a sanctuary. They gave us kids stacks of discarded 11x14 continuous-form computer paper, printed on one side with cryptic arrays of numbers, the blank side a canvas for crayon masterpieces.

Women occupied many of the cubicles; they answered phones and sat in front of typewriters, but they also made hieroglyphic marks on transparent slides and conferred with my father and other men in the office on the stacks of documents that littered their desks. That so many of them were African American, many of them my grandmother's age, struck me as simply a part of the natural order of things: growing up in Hampton, the face of science was brown like mine.

Christine Darden (née Mann) in the control room of Nasa Langley's Unitary Plan Wind Tunnel in 1975. Photograph: Credit: Nasa

My dad joined Langley in 1964 as a co-op student and retired in 2004 an internationally respected climate scientist. Five of my father's seven siblings made their bones as engineers or technologists and some of his best buddies - David Woods, Elijah Kent, Weldon Staton - carved out successful engineering careers at Langley. Our next-door neighbour taught physics at Hampton University. Our church abounded with mathematicians. Supersonics experts held leadership positions in my mother's sorority and electrical engineers sat on the board of my parents' college alumni associations. My Aunt Julia's husband, Charles Foxx, was the son of Ruth Bates Harris, a career civil servant and fierce advocate for the advancement of women and minorities; in 1974, Nasa appointed her deputy assistant administrator, the highest-ranking woman at the agency. The community certainly included black English professors, like my mother, as well as black doctors and dentists, black mechanics, janitors and contractors, black cobblers, wedding planners, real estate agents and undertakers, several black lawyers and a handful of black Mary Kay salespeople. As a child, however, I knew so many African Americans working in science, maths and engineering that I thought that's just what black folks did.

My father, growing up during segregation, experienced a different reality.

"Become a physical education teacher," my grandfather said in 1962 to his 18-year-old son, who was hellbent on studying electrical engineering at historically black Norfolk state college.

In those days, college-educated African Americans with book smarts and common sense put their chips on teaching jobs or sought work at the post office. But my father, who built his first rocket in junior high metal shop class following the Sputnik launch in 1957, defied my grandfather and plunged full steam ahead into engineering. Of course, my grandfather's fears that it would be difficult for a black man to break into engineering weren't unfounded. As late as 1970, just 1% of all American engineers were black, a number that doubled to a whopping 2% by 1984. Still, the federal government was the most reliable employer of African Americans in the sciences and technology; in 1984, 8.4% of Nasa's engineers were black.

Nasa's African American employees learned to navigate their way through the space agency's engineering culture and their successes in turn afforded their children previously unimaginable access to American society. Growing up with white friends and attending integrated schools, I took much of the groundwork they'd laid for granted.

John Glenn enters his Mercury 7 capsule for a test at Cape Canaveral. Photograph: Bettmann Archive

Every day, I watched my father put on a suit and back out of the driveway to make the 20-minute drive to building 1236, demanding the best from himself in order to give his best to the space programme and to his family. My father secured my family's place in the comfortable middle class and Langley became one of the anchors of our social life. Every summer, my siblings and I saved our allowances to buy tickets to ride ponies at the annual Nasa carnival.

Year after year, I confided my Christmas wishlist to the Nasa Santa at the Langley children's Christmas party. For years, Ben, Lauren and my youngest sister, Jocelyn, still a toddler, sat in the bleachers of the Langley activities building on Thursday nights, rooting for my dad and his "NBA" (Nasa Basketball Association) team, the Stars. I was as much a product of Nasa as the moon landing.

The spark of curiosity soon became an all-consuming fire. I peppered my father with questions about his early days at Langley during the mid-1960s, questions I'd never asked before. The following Sunday I interviewed Mrs Land about the early days of Langley's computing pool, when part of her job responsibility was knowing which bathroom was marked for "coloured" employees. And less than a week later I was sitting on the couch in Katherine Johnson's living room, under a framed American flag that had been to the moon, listening to a 93-year-old with a memory sharper than mine recall segregated buses, years of teaching and raising a family and working out the trajectory for John Glenn's spaceflight. I listened to Christine Darden's stories of long years spent as a data analyst, waiting for the chance to prove herself as an engineer.

Even as a professional in an integrated world, I had been the only black woman in enough drawing rooms and boardrooms to have an inkling of the chutzpah it took for an African American woman in a segregated southern workplace to tell her bosses she was sure her calculations would put a man on the moon. These women's paths set the stage for mine; immersing myself in their stories helped me understand my own. Even if the tale had begun and ended with the first five black women who went to work at Langley's segregated west side in May 1943, the women later known as the "West Computers" , I still would have committed myself to recording the facts and circumstances of their lives.

Just as islands, isolated places with unique, rich biodiversity, have relevance for the ecosystems everywhere, so does studying seemingly isolated or overlooked people and events from the past turn up unexpected connections and insights to modern life. The idea that black women had been recruited to work as mathematicians at the Nasa installation in the south during the days of segregation defies our expectations and challenges much of what we think we know about American history. It's a great story and that alone makes it worth telling.

In the early stages of researching my book, I shared details of what I had found with experts on the history of the space agency. To a person, they encouraged what they viewed as a valuable addition to the body of knowledge, though some questioned the magnitude of the story.

"How many women are we talking about? Five or six?"

I had known more than that number just growing up in Hampton, but even I was surprised at how the numbers kept adding up. These women showed up in photos and phone books, in sources both expected and unusual. A mention of a Langley job in an engagement announcement in the Norfolk Journal and Guide. A handful of names from the daughter of one of the first West Computers. A 1951 memo from the Langley personnel officer reporting on the numbers and status of its black employees, which unexpectedly made reference to one black woman who was a "GS-9 research scientist".

I discovered one 1945 personnel document describing a beehive of mathematical activity in an office in a new building on Langley's west side, staffed by 25 black women coaxing numbers out of calculators on a 24-hour schedule, overseen by three black shift supervisors who reported to two white head computers. I can put names to almost 50 black women who worked as computers, mathematicians, engineers or scientists at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory from 1943 through 1980, and my intuition is that 20 more names can be shaken loose from the archives with more research.

While the black women are the most hidden of the mathematicians who worked at the Naca, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, and later at Nasa, they were not sitting alone in the shadows: the white women who made up the majority of Langley's computing workforce over the years have hardly been recognised for their contributions to the agency's long-term success. Virginia Biggins worked the Langley beat for the Daily Press newspaper, covering the space programme starting in 1958. "Everyone said, 'This is a scientist, this is an engineer' and it was always a man," she said in a 1990 panel on Langley's human computers. She never got to meet any of the women.

Nasa space scientist and mathematician Katherine Johnson at Nasa Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia, 1980. Photograph: Donaldson Collection/Getty Images

"I just assumed they were all secretaries," she said. Five white women joined Langley's first computing pool in 1935 and by 1946, 400 "girls" had already been trained as aeronautical foot soldiers. Historian Beverly Golemba, in a 1994 study, estimated that Langley had employed "several hundred" women as human computers. On the tail end of the research for Hidden Figures, I can now see how that number might top 1,000.

To a first-time author with no background as a historian, the stakes involved in writing about a topic that was virtually absent from the history books felt high. I'm sensitive to the cognitive dissonance conjured by the phrase "black female mathematicians at Nasa". From the beginning, I knew I would have to apply the same kind of analytical reasoning to my research that these women applied to theirs. Because as exciting as it was to discover name after name, finding out who they were was just the first step. The real challenge was to document their work. Even more than the surprisingly large numbers of black and white women who had been hiding in a profession seen as universally white and male, the body of work they left behind was a revelation.

There was Dorothy Hoover, working for Robert T Jones in 1946 and publishing theoretical research on his famed triangle-shaped delta wings in 1951. There was Dorothy Vaughan, working with the white "East Computers" to write a textbook on algebraic methods for the mechanical calculating machines that were their constant companions.

There was Mary Jackson, defending her analysis against John Becker, one of the world's top aerodynamicists. There was Katherine Johnson, describing the orbital trajectory of John Glenn's flight, the maths in her trailblazing 1959 report as elegant, precise and grand as a symphony. There was Marge Hannah, the white computer who served as the black women's first boss, co-authoring a report with Sam Katzoff, who became the laboratory's chief scientist. There was Doris Cohen, setting the bar for them all with her first research report - the NACA's first female author - back in 1941.

My investigation became more like an obsession; I would walk any trail if it meant finding a trace of one of the computers at its end. I was determined to prove their existence and their talent in a way that meant they would never again be lost to history. As the photos, memos, equations and family stories became real people, as the women became my companions and returned to youth or returned to life, I started to want something more for them than just putting them on the record. What I wanted was for them to have the grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved. Not told as a separate history, but as a part of the story we all know.

Today, my hometown, the hamlet that in 1962 dubbed itself "Spacetown USA", looks like any suburban city in a modern and hyperconnected America. People of all races and nationalities mingle on Hampton's beaches and in its bus stations, the "whites only" signs of the past now relegated to the history museum and the memories of survivors of the civil rights revolution. Mercury Boulevard no longer conjures images of the eponymous mission that shot the first Americans beyond the atmosphere and each day the memory of Virgil Grissom fades away from the bridge that bears his name. A downsized space programme and decades of government cutbacks have hit the region hard; today, an ambitious college grad with a knack for numbers might set her sights on a gig at a Silicon Valley startup or make for one of the many technology firms that are conquering the Nasdaq from the Virginia suburbs outside of Washington DC.

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the Naca became Nasa; before the supreme court case Brown v Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. For a group of bright and ambitious African American women, diligently prepared for a mathematical career and eager for a crack at the big leagues, Hampton, Virginia, must have felt like the centre of the universe.

This is an edited extract from Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly, published by William Collins (£8.99). To order a copy for £7.64 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

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Hidden figures: the history of Nasa's black female scientists

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The diversity of Nasa's workforce in 1940s Virginia is uncovered in a new book by Margot Lee Shetterly. She recalls how a visit to her home town led to a revelation

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Business Insider

In honor of National Engineers Week (February 19-25), we bring you our annual shout-out to the most powerful women engineers in US tech.

Yes, the tech industry is doing a well-documented terrible job of attracting women into engineering. And once they enter this male-dominated world, some women are subject to some appalling sexism and sexual harassment.

But that tells only part of the story. There are women who are leading important tech teams at important companies. And there are women who are building cool cutting-edge technologies at startups.

In other words, there are women having fabulous careers as engineers, building the technology that millions of people use on a daily basis. With that in mind, here are 43 powerful American women who are developers, designers, engineering directors, bio scientists, nuclear scientists, and rocket scientists.

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The 43 most powerful female engineers of 2017

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In honor of National Engineers Week (February 19-25), we bring you our annual shout-out to the most powerful women engineers in US tech. Yes, the tech industry is doing a well-documented terrible job of attracting women into engineering. And once they enter this male-dominated world, some women are subject to some appalling sexism and sexual harassment.

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Apple employees share a personal message for the It Gets Better Project. If you are considering suicide or need help, call the Trevor Project now: 866-4-U-TREVOR (866-488-7386).

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Earlier today, we shared our latest workforce demographic numbers on our Global Diversity & Inclusion website. This update provides a snapshot of the gender and racial composition of Microsoft's employee population as of September 30, 2016. I encourage anyone with an interest in diversity and inclusion - both at Microsoft as well as within the tech industry as a whole - to visit our website and familiarize themselves with our ongoing strategic commitments, initiatives and comprehensive demographics.

Our current diversity demographics demonstrate that there is no easy path to achieving successful outcomes or systemic change. In summary, ours is a story of modest progress, as we deepen our commitment to advancing the diversity and inclusion agenda within the company.

Measuring progress through a "point in time" number sometimes only tells part of the story. Driving transformative culture change is about so much more than a set of numbers. On the upside, we are encouraged by some of the hiring trend lines we are seeing, but of course know there is much more we still need to do. We are enthused by the heightened commitment our leaders are demonstrating in embracing diversity in its many dimensions and, more importantly, modeling inclusive behaviors. This is crucial to the change we hope to see, because the more inclusive we are as a company, the more progress we will see in our diversity data.
Women at Microsoft
Beginning first with women at Microsoft, let me share my takeaways in terms of our results. Company-wide, the representation of women employed at Microsoft declined by 1 percent this past year, from 26.8 percent to 25.8 percent. When we look at this number in isolation, it certainly falls short of where we want to be. For some context, this decline was largely due to the business decision we shared last year to restructure our phone hardware business ( Sharpening Our Focus), which resulted in the closure of some factories (which we refer to as "direct production") outside the U.S. The workforce at these factories had a higher representation of women, so their closure impacted our total representation of women.

If you dig beneath the surface, however, there is another story unfolding - one that we find more encouraging. Outside of direct production work, the percentage of women at Microsoft actually increased by 0.4 percentage points. What's more, our representation of women in technical roles increased 0.6 percentage points, and our representation of women in leadership roles also increased by 0.6 percentage points.

It is also important to look at our hiring trends, which provide a leading indicator of where we're headed. This past year, women represented 27.7 percent of all new employees (almost 2 percent over our current representation), and 21.7 percent of all new employees in technical jobs, (more than 4 percent over our current representation).

The takeaway: While we are disappointed in the overall decline in the representation of women at the company, we know why it happened. We are encouraged by the modest gains we're seeing in female representation in technical and leadership roles, and even more significantly, by the hiring trends of the past year that resulted from our efforts to recruit top-notch female talent.
Racial and ethnic minorities at Microsoft
We saw very modest gains in the representation of African Americans/Black and Hispanic/Latino(a) employees at Microsoft. Total African American/Black representation increased by 0.2 percentage points (to 3.7 percent), and total Hispanic/Latino(a) representation by 0.1 percentage point (to 5.5 percent). Representation in technical roles increased for our African American/Black and Hispanic/Latino(a) populations by 0.1 percentage point for each group.

Although these numbers suggest only slight gains, our hiring trends again give us some reason for optimism. Over the past year, for example, 6.6 percent of our new employees were African American/Black and 7 percent were Hispanic/Latino(a). For our technical jobs, 4 percent of our new employees were African American/Black and 4.5 percent were Hispanic/Latino(a). Hiring is only part of the equation when it comes to increasing representation, but again, it is an important leading indicator of the direction we are headed.
University hiring
Another metric we look at closely is the breakdown of new hires coming to Microsoft directly out of colleges and universities - the new "pipeline talent" coming into the company. This past year, 33.6 percent of employees who joined the company directly from college were women, 3.9 percent were African American/Black, and 5.9 percent were Hispanic/Latino(a). For technical roles, women comprised 30 percent of all university hires.

We are also seeing a positive trajectory with our intern hires. Women comprised over 36 percent of all our interns, and in the U.S., racial and ethnic minorities constituted more than 56 percent of all interns we hired last year.

We believe the gains we are making in this area are, in part, attributable to investments we have made over the years in programs like DigiGirlz, TEALS and Explore, as well as through partnerships with organizations like the National Center for Women in Information Technology on their Technolochicas and Aspirations in Computing programs. Equally important, we are expanding our talent sourcing opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities beyond engineering, to optimize for great talent company-wide.
Board representation
Our Board of Directors continues to be among the most diverse of any company in technology today, with three female members, and with women and ethnic minorities combined holding five of our 11 board positions.
The road ahead
Building a more diverse company the size of Microsoft is a journey that will have many milestones along the way, today being one of them. We are heartened by clear signs of progress we're seeing with respect to women and minorities coming into the company, and will leverage these results to fuel our ongoing efforts. If anything, our data show that we are generally on the right path, but it will take committed, intentional, focused efforts in the future to stay on that path and increase our velocity.

To that end, we are dedicating resources against a number of priorities and initiatives focused on retention, culture and pipeline expansion pivots. These targeted actions include:

Creating and delivering compelling career development offerings for women and racial/ethnic minorities.

Continuing mandatory internal trainings on inclusive hiring and awareness of unconscious and unintended bias.

Tying senior leaders' compensation to diversity gains in their respective organizations.

Expanding the reach of our internal Dialogue Across Differences course (which many have called a "game changer") to over 7,000 employees and to nearly 900 managers worldwide.

Continuing to evolve the workplace culture to be more inclusive of all employees.

Conducting recruiting campaigns designed to attract and retain more diverse talent.

Increasing our investment in our Microsoft Software and Systems Academy program to attract more veterans into tech careers.

Launching an Inclusive Hiring website to expand our hiring pipeline and attract diverse talent.

Continuing investments in STEM programs to help fill the pipeline with the amazing potential and talents of diverse people.

Launching an Inclusive Design initiative to create products and technology for diverse audiences: Xbox Gaming for Everyone, which focuses on designing for people with diverse needs and abilities.

Engaging the entire organization in our diversity and inclusion efforts takes constant communication of the business case rationale, our strategy, initiatives and progress. But, it also takes visible leadership accountability for culture change and progress. We will always strive to do more and be better tomorrow than we are today. We have the opportunity to create enduring, long-lasting change that can impact more than just our own interests, but those of society as a whole. The challenge is real - so is the opportunity.

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Global Diversity & Inclusion update at Microsoft: Deepening our commitment - The Official Microsoft Blog

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Earlier today, we shared our latest workforce demographic numbers on our Global Diversity & Inclusion website. This update provides a snapshot of the gender and racial composition of Microsoft's employee population as of September 30, 2016. I encourage anyone with an interest in diversity and inclusion - both at Microsoft as well as within the...

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