Born: 1911 (Budapest, Hungary)
Died: 1963
Biography:
Klára Dán von Neumann (born Klára Dán; 18 August 1911 – 10 November 1963) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, self-taught engineer, and computer scientist, noted as one of the first computer programmers. She was the first woman to execute modern-style code on a computer. Klára made significant contributions to the world of programming, including work on the Monte Carlo method, ENIAC, and MANIAC I. She was introduced to much of her work through her husband, John von Neumann.
Early Life:
Klára Dán, known as Klárí to her friends and family, was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 18, 1911, to Károly Dán and Kamilla Stadler, a wealthy Jewish couple. Her father had previously served in the Austro-Hungarian Army as an officer during World War I, and the family moved to Vienna to escape Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic. Once the regime was overthrown, the family returned to Budapest. Growing up in a wealthy household, Klára had the opportunity to interact with people from various walks of life through the parties held by her family. At the age of 14, she became a national champion in figure skating. Klára attended Veres Pálné Gimnázium in Budapest and graduated in 1929.
Work:
After getting married, Klára and John von Neumann immigrated to the United States, where he held a professorship at Princeton University. At the time, Klára’s listed profession was housewife. However, with the outbreak of World War II and the Attack on Pearl Harbor, more job opportunities for women opened up in the U.S. Klára seized this opportunity and secured a position at Princeton herself, becoming the Head of Statistical Computing Group.
In 1943, John von Neumann moved to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico to work on calculations for the Manhattan Project. Klára remained at Princeton until 1946, working at the university’s Office of Population Research. During this time, she shared an office with Adele Goldstein. In 1947, Klára also enrolled in calculus at Princeton. Soon after, both Goldstein and Klára were contracted to work in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the early summer of 1947.
In New Mexico, Klára joined her husband to program the MANIAC I machine, which was capable of storing data. It was designed by John von Neumann and Julian Bigelow. This work was groundbreaking and had never been accomplished before. Klárá scored the job due to the prevailing belief at the time that programming was menial work, similar to human computing, which was commonly done by women. Unfortunately, this devaluation of programming work persisted for decades, allowing women to play a significant role in the field.
Klára’s role was to translate mathematical instructions into a language the computer could understand. To do this, she would look up codes – sequences of symbols representing instructions or data – in books such as Tables for the ‘Elephant Calculating Machine’ by Irene Lee. Klára’s work on programming the MANIAC I machine was crucial for its successful operation and paving the way for future advancements in computer programming.