Vera Watson (1932 – October 17, 1978) was an American computer programmer, mountaineer and rock climber who made the first woman's solo climb of
Acongagua,
the highest mountain in the Americas. She also made several first ascents in the
Kenai Mountains
The Kenai Mountains ( Dena'ina: ''Yaghanen Dghili'') are a mountain range in the U.S. state of Alaska. They extend 192 km (120 mi) northeast from the southern end of the Kenai Peninsula to the Chugach Mountains, and have an average elev ...
in Alaska.
She was a member of the successful
first all-women team to climb Annapurna, but was killed along with her partner
Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz
Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz (1942 – 17 October 1978) was a British climber, mountaineer, painter and lithography lecturer. She made the first ascent of Gasherbrum III, at the time the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. Chadwick-Onyszk ...
while preparing to attempt the unclimbed central summit of the mountain.
Watson worked at IBM Research in San Jose, California, from 1973 onwards.
She was initially active in
machine translation
Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...
, before moving into
database management system
In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases span ...
design. She worked on
System R, which was the first implementation of SQL, a standardised database query language which has since become a dominant standard.
[Astrahan, Morton & Blasgen, Mike & Chamberlin, Donald & Eswaran, Kapali & Gray, Jim & Griffiths, Patricia & III, W. & Lorie, Raymond & McJones, Paul & Mehl, James & Putzolu, Gianfranco & Traiger, Irving & Wade, Bradford & Watson, Vera. (1976)]
System R: Relational Approach to Database Management
ACM Trans. Database Syst.. 1. 97-137. 10.1145/320455.320457. She took a leave without pay to make the solo attempt on Aconcagua, and then again for the expedition to Annapurna.
She was married to
John McCarthy, a pioneer in the discipline of artificial intelligence and creator of the
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.
Types
* A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping ...
programming language.
See also
*
American Women's Himalayan Expedition
The American Women's Himalayan Expedition was a 1978 expedition to Annapurna which placed the first two women, and first Americans, on its summit. The expedition was led by Arlene Blum and consisted of thirteen women, and six sherpas. On October ...
References
External links
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Picture and obituary.
American female climbers
Mountaineering deaths
1932 births
1978 deaths
20th-century American women
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