Sister Mary Kenneth. Born in Ohio around 1913, Keller entered the order of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1932 and took her vows in 1940, officially becoming a nun. In 1943, she earned her Bachelor's degree in Science with an emphasis in Mathematics. In 1958, Mary began working in a computer science workshop run by the National Science Foundation of the United States at Dartmouth College, a predominantly male college in the United States. time, where he participated in the development of the BASIC programming language. BASIC is an acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code; in Portuguese: Code of Symbolic Instructions for General Use for Beginners.
BASIC is a means of translating computer codes more directly and aims to expand computer programming in non-mathematical and scientific fields, which allowed anyone to learn the language, making it more accessible to the population.
In 1965, after completing her doctorate, Mary founded a computer science department at Clarke University in Iowa. She spent 20 years of her life dedicated to and passionate about the potential of what computers could become and aimed to increase access and information, promoting education. Today Clarke University has the Keller Computing and Information Services Center, due to the services it offers in telecommunications and computing to students, staff and professors. There is also a scholarship in Computer Science in her name at the same institution. Sister Keller advocated for the inclusion and involvement of women in computer science, and contributed to the founding of the Association of Small Computer Users in Education (ASCUE). His four books on computing and programming are references in the field. For her, computing brought an explosion of information and this information was useless unless it was available. She believed that with computing it would be possible to mechanically simulate the cognitive process and thus invest in areas such as artificial intelligence. She believed in the importance of teaching with the help of technology and how computing could help human beings learn.
Sister Mary Keller passed away on January 10, 1985, at the age of 71.