Author Talk & Book Signing: Kathy Kleiman

Celebrated author and global speaker Kathy Kleiman returns to her home library to discuss her book Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World's First Modern Computer. Kleiman's previous book talk venues include the Smithsonian Institute, the National Science Foundation, UCLA, Princeton, The Cooper Union, American University, Drexel University, and the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Discover a fascinating look into the lives of six historic trailblazers in this World War II-era story of the American women who programmed the world’s first modern computer.

At the start of World War II, the US Army improved artillery accuracy by hiring young women math majors from around the country to hand-compute ballistics trajectories. They called them Computers and sent them to work on a secret Army project in Philadelphia. Later, the Army funded a highly experimental project, the first general-purpose, programmable, all-electronic computer, to speed up these calculations. It was not supposed to work, but when it did, the Army asked six of its best Computers to program it and, with no manual or programming languages, they did (and went on to found modern programming concepts and organizations). While most students of computer history know of the great ENIAC computer, few have known of the pioneering contributions of these women -- until now. 

About the Author

Internet law professor Kathy Kleiman discovered this story in college and became friends with four of the original six ENIAC Programmers. She recorded extensive oral histories about their work, produced an award-winning documentary, and later wrote this book. Proving Ground restores these women to their rightful place as programming pioneers we all should know, and is the celebration their deserve. 

Awards

Kathy Kleiman’s documentary The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival in 2014 and won the UNAFF Grand Jury Award For Best Short Documentary at the United Nations Association Film Festival in 2016. 

Her book Proving Ground was published by Grand Central Publishing in 2022 in hardback and 2023 in paperback, Hurst Publishers (EU, UK & Commonwealth countries), Hanbit Media (Korean translation and distribution), and Kyoritsu Shuppan Publisher (Japanese translation and distribution). It received the IEEE William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award in 2023 and Sejong Book Award in 2024.