Why read Proving Ground?

Book cover of Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer

Book description

A fascinating, forgotten story of the six brilliant women who launched modern computing.

As the Cold War began, America's race for tech supremacy was taking off. Experts rushed to complete the top-secret computing research started during World War II, among them six gifted mathematicians: a patriotic Quaker, a Jewish bookworm,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Proving Ground as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Aram Sinnreich

Author

I’ve always been a big fan of books that explode the “great man” myth and lift the curtains to show all of the unsung heroes behind history’s greatest accomplishments. The sociologist Howard Becker’s classic Art Worlds did this for creative professions, and Kathy Kleiman’s Proving Ground does the same thing for digital computers.

The birth of modern computing is usually credited to the mathematician Alan Turing. But the actual work of programming the world’s first general purpose digital computer, named ENIAC, was undertaken by six remarkable women mathematicians (Kathleen McNulty, Jean Jennings Bartik, Frances Elizabeth Snyder, Frances Bilas Spence, Marlyn…

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