Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli is one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Born in 1921, in the Creeslough area of Co Donegal, she moved with her family to Philadelphia at the age of three.

In the 1940s, with her mathematics degree, she went to work for the US army, calculating trajectories for shells and bullets. Soon, the war effort was requiring faster calculations, heralding the arrival of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), which had to be programmed by hand. Antonelli and five of the other best women ‘computers’ at Moore School were assigned to work on ENIAC, essentially teaching themselves how to program.

Joan was one of the thousands of female code-breakers working at Bletchley Park during WW2, but the only female working on the heart of the quest to crack the German Enigma ciphers. Portrayed by Keira Knightly in The Imitation Game, Clarke was a close friend (and briefly, fiancée) of Alan Turing.

Ada Lovelace was an English writer and mathematician, and is considered the first computer programmer for her calculations that took computing beyond number-crunching. She is best known for writing the first algorithm to be used with Charles Babbage's proposed general purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

Mamie and her husband Kenneth were pioneers in psychology and implicit racial bias, and the first black people to earn doctoral degrees in Psychology from Columbia University.

Maryam was an Iranian-American mathematician and the first woman (since its creation in 1936!) to win the Fields Medal known as the 'Nobel prize of mathematics' for her contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems. Despite being the youngest on our list, Maryam sadly passed away last year after an extensive battle with breast cancer.

NASA’s first black female engineer. 

Alice Ball was the first woman, let alone woman of colour, to graduate from what is now known as the University of Hawaii with a Master's in science, which later led her to the discovery of an intravenous leprosy cure – taken from isolated compounds from the chaulmoogra tree.

Alex Canady became the first black female neurosurgeon in the US in 1981. She specialised in paediatric neurosurgery, and despite a difficult career path, she ended up being Director of Neurosurgery at the Children's Hospital in Michigan. Alongside a career filled of achievements, Canady won the American Medical Women's Association President's Award in 1993.

A computer scientist, Easley started working at NACA doing computations for researchers in 1955. Over her 34-year career, Easley’s work evolved from hand calculations to becoming a computer programmer. She developed and implemented alternative power technology code, which was used for the Centaur upper-stage rocket, as well as early hybrid car batteries.

Sputnick, the Soviet Union’s satellite, launched in 1957. That’s the same year mathematician Johnson provided some of the math for the 1958 document, “Notes on Space Technology.” That document led to the formation of the Space Task Group — NACA’s first official venture into space travel. Later that year, NACA became NASA.

Johnson did trajectory analysis for America’s first human spaceflight — Alan Shepard’s Freedom 7 mission in 1961. She co-wrote a report with engineer Ted Skopinski, marking the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division received author credit of a research report. As NASA prepared for John Glenn’s 1962 Friendship 7 mission, Johnson did the math, making sure the computers that were programmed with the correct orbital equations would control the trajectory of the capsule. She was right and the mission was a success. In a 33-year career, Johnson authored or coauthored 26 research reports. In 2015, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom award, America’s highest civilian honor.