The award, considered the “Nobel Prize of computing”, also recognised Allen’s instrumental work in assisting the precursor to the US National Security Agency’s code-breaking activities during the cold war.
The announcement was made in New York by the Association for Computer Machinery, which has awarded the A M Turing prize since 1966 in honour of Alan Turing, a World War code-breaker considered one of the fathers of modern computing.
Fran Allen is an IBM Research Fellow Emerita at the T.J. Watson Research Center. She taught high school math for two years in northern New York State in the mid-1950s, before she went on to earn a master's degree in mathematics and join IBM's famous research organization in 1957, to teach the programming language FORTRAN.
Thirty years later, in 1989, Allen became the first female IBM Fellow in recognition of her leadership both at IBM and the wider world of computing. She was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1994.
“Fran Allen's work has led to remarkable advances in compiler design and machine architecture that are at the foundation of modern high-performance computing,” said Ruzena Bajcsy, chair of ACM's Turing Award Committee and computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Her contributions have spanned most of the history of computer science, and have made possible computing techniques that we rely on today in business and technology.”
“It is interesting to note Allen's role in highly secret intelligence work on security codes for the organization now known as the National Security Agency, since it was Alan Turing, the namesake of this prestigious award, who devised techniques to help break the German codes during World War II,” said Professor Bajcsy said.
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