Maria the Jewess was one of the founding practitioners in western alchemy, in the 1^st–3^rd centuries CE. She invented several types of chemical apparatus, ran a school of alchemy in Alexandria, Egypt, and was noted for her alchemical sayings. She is the earliest recorded Jewish woman to have published a book.

From hardware to software, from developing new programming languages to revolutionizing applications, Jewish women have been part of significant projects on the cutting edge of computing in the United States.

Noa and her sisters pushed for something which, at the time, wasn’t recognized as an inherent right. Today, we need to do the same with broadband internet access.

I shadowed at Lincoln High School in eighth grade, and what I saw in six hours challenged my entire perception of Silicon Valley.

As one of four white girls in my Girls Who Code Summer Immersion class of twenty, I was confronted by my privilege in a way that I'd never been before.

Female leaders in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) are few and far between, and Jewish female role models in those fields are even harder to find. Emmy Noether and Martine Rothblatt are superheros whose hard work and intellect propelled them to defy the odds and make contributions to the world that will outlive them.

The filmBombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story, which premiered in theaters last November, explores the unusual and tumultuous life ofHedy Lamarr—a Jewish and Austrian-born Hollywood actress considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world.

My brother-in-law, Alex, is incredibly smart. He’s a Harvard-educated banker in his early thirties, and he genuinely loves to debate. His style of debate isn’t to make other people feel stupid, but it’s clear that he loves feeling like he has changed someone’s mind or broadened their perspective. I’ve realized, through many conversations with him, that this is something with which I struggle.

Sheyna Gifford’s passion for both scientific exploration and writing has enabled her to work for NASA in many different capacities, from science journalist to health and safety officer on a year-long simulated mission to Mars.

Let’s face it, admitting you’re a gamer right now will probably invite more horror and social stigma than at any time since the 1980s.

Leaders in the Lab

Stars of STEM and Screen

Women who make history rarely feel the need to adhere to others' narratives—and that goes double for Jewish women.  So it's not surprising that when Radia Perlman, architect of many of the routing and bridging protocols that make the modern Internet possible, discusses her childhood, she casually disposes of the standard geek-culture heroic origin story: "I did not fit the stereotype of the 'engineer.' I never took things apart or built a computer out of spare parts."  Irene Greif, a fellow computer scientist who brought ethnographers, anthropologists and sociologists into systems design through her field of computer-supported cooperative work, cheerfully admits: "I have a whole history of always choosing marginal roles and in marginal subjects of research and so on for myself."  Her work, though, has turned out to be anything but marginal. 

MIT’s Shafi Goldwasser won the Alan M. Turing Award for her work in computer cryptography, which revolutionized internet security.

I sometimes direct tourists toward 'the HP garage,' which is marked with a plaque and gets photographed a lot. It is three blocks down the street from my house.

Judith Resnik never showed any particular interest in space travel – but when NASA began recruiting women and minorities, she decided to apply anyway.

Back in October, eJewishPhilanthropy ranan article by Leo Margul joking about a "Jewish update" to the Apple iPhone's automated personal assistant, Siri. "Jewish Siri" has all sorts of features to simplify the life of the modern Jew, like automatic sweater notifications so that everytime the weather dips below 75 degrees, Siri will notify your parents that you are indeed wearing a sweater. (Read more atThe Jewish Week,via Rabbi Jason Miller.)

In 1998, Northeastern University announced that it had received a two-year federal grant to “identify, locate, secure, and make accessible the most important and at-risk historical records of Boston’s African American, Chinese, gay and lesbian, and Latino communities.” Later that year, I met Joan Krizack, Northeastern’s University Archivist and Head of Special Collections, who had conceived the“Documenting Diversity Project.”  I could see immediately that this diminutive woman (who has been a member of the Jewish Women’s Archive Technical Advisory Committee since 2006) had a “tiger by the tail” and was not about to let it go.

Back before Microsoft, IBM, and Apple, the word "computer" referred to a person whocomputes.