This month is women’s history month in the US and an excellent excuse to celebrate women who have changed the field of meteorology. There are many to choose from, but today I’m going to write about Klára Dán von Neumann.
You might have heard of her husband, John von Neumann, a mathematician who became famous for his work on the Manhattan Project. After the war he helped to produce the first computer-based weather forecast in 1950 using ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) – one of the earliest electronic computers. It was one of the most important breakthroughs in weather forecasting and the cornerstone of modern weather forecasts.
But while the male scientists were lauded for their achievement, the numerous female computer operators were merely thanked in the research paper’s acknowledgments. Many of these women spent hundreds of hours manually calculating the equations before the experiment even began, and one woman in particular was key to the success of the project.
Klara, a Hungarian-born self-taught computer programmer, instructed the meteorologists how to code ENIAC and managed the experiment’s 100,000 punch cards, working flat out for the 32 days of the experiment and taking responsibility for the final code. Her brilliance is described in a feature in the Smithsonian Magazine, which is well worth a read.
