Everything about Lynn Conway totally explained
Lynn Conway (born
1938) is an
American computer scientist,
inventor, and
transsexual activist. She is notable for several technical achievements, including the world-wide
Mead & Conway VLSI design revolution, which she started with
Carver Mead - a world-wide incubator of the emerging
EDA industry. Conway worked at
IBM in the
1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in
out-of-order execution, used by almost all modern processors to improve performance.
Career
Conway worked for IBM until 1968. She joined
Xerox PARC in
1973, where she worked on
VLSI design. With
Carver Mead she co-authored
Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design.
In the early
1980s Conway was a key architect of the
Defense Department's
Strategic Computing Initiative at
DARPA, a research program studying high-performance computing,
autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology. She became a professor at the
University of Michigan in
1985, where she's now
professor emerita, and was elected to the
National Academy of Engineering in 1989 for her accomplishments in VLSI design.
Transsexual activism
After learning of the pioneering research of Dr.
Harry Benjamin in transgender treatment, Conway realized that she was a
transsexual woman and that transition to a female gender role was possible. After suffering from severe
depression over her situation, Conway contacted Dr. Benjamin, who agreed to counsel her and prescribe
hormones. Conway had made an earlier transition attempt in the late
1950s which failed due to the medical climate at the time. Under Dr. Benjamin's care, she began preparing for a successful transition.
Although she hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in
1968 after she revealed to them that she was
transsexual, and was planning on
transitioning to a female
gender role.
While living as a man, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. After losing her IBM job and access to her children, she restarted her career from the ground up as a female, working as a contract programmer.
After retiring from her professorship in December
1998, she decided to out herself as a
transsexual woman again in
1999 after she realised that the story of her IBM work might soon come out. Since then, she's also been involved in transsexual issues – she was a leader of a 2003 campaign against
J. Michael Bailey and his controversial book,
The Man Who Would Be Queen.
Northwestern University investigated Bailey as a result of complaints filed by Conway and others, but didn't reveal the findings of that investigation and didn't comment on whether or not Bailey had been punished. Conway and other transgender women "found the tone of the book abusive, and the theory of motivation it presented to be a recipe for further discrimination."
Further Information
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