Jean Jennings Bartik (1924-2011) was born on a farm in Gentry County, Missouri. She “read voraciously as a child and longed to leave Missouri. She saw marriage as an impediment to her desire for adventure claiming, “Why would I want to get married I haven’t been anywhere I haven’t done anything.'” Jean majored in mathematics in school and worked on a project where she first manually calculated ballistics trajectories and eventually taught the first electronic digital computer, the ENIAC, to do those calculations.
“A ship in port is safe, but that is not what ships are for. Sail out to sea and do new things.” —Grace Hopper