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IMAGE: Letizia Jaccheri, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology s Department of Computer Science, helped launch the IDUN project, designed to help women in computer science and other. view more
Credit: NTNU
If you ask Letizia Jaccheri what got her interested in computer science as a young girl, she has two ready answers: The first is Pisa, the town in Italy where she was born. Here, engineers built Italy s first home-grown computer, supported by entrepreneur Adriano Olivetti.
The second was a math teacher who taught her, as a 16-year-old, to program a simple handheld Texas Instruments calculator. It was such an important milestone that she even remembers the model number of the little machine, a TI-57.