Early Life
Liskov grew up in San Francisco, California. She was the oldest of five children; three sisters, one brother. Her siblings are two sets of twins. Her mother was a housewife and her father was an lawyer.
Liskov always did well in math and was in the high-level math courses. Her parents didn’t discourage her from her interest in math, but they didn’t encourage her either. During elementary and middle school the gender balance in her math class was not prevalent until the late years of high school. Although she didn’t have any mentors or teachers encouraging her in school, she still pursued a higher education in physics. (Stephen Hinshaw 2012).
University of California, Berkeley
Liskov originally majored in physics, but was unsatisfied with the course load and decided on mathematics; but minored in physics. She worked some semesters and felt discouraged sometimes because she was the only woman in her classes. She didn’t receive any academic encouragement during her time at the University of California, Berkeley. Liskov avoided asking questions during class or speaking up about her opinions. She still has issues today with speaking up and claims her upbringing is the cause of the issue.
Before graduating from Berkeley, she applied to graduate school and was accepted into Berkeley math. But she felt her commitment wasn’t enough for the intensive courses. Liskov then decided to take some time off and moved to Boston with a friend. She was seeking an interesting job in a mathematical field and came across a computer programming job. (Engineer Girl 2014).
After Graduation
Liskov lived in Boston for two years and worked at the Mitre Corporation as a low level programmer. She currently lived in Cambridge and worked at Mitre for a year. She noticed an ad she saw for a programming job at Harvard sparked her interest. Mitre negotiated pay and position to keep her at their company. But Liskov was unhappy with the way men were paid and treated better than women and left the company. Her work at Harvard was a year long project on language translation. She wanted to do research and while at Harvard decided she wanted to go back to graduate school in mathematics.
Liskov reapplied to Berkeley’s graduate school but was denied. She then applied to Harvard and Stanford’s computer science graduate program. MIT wasn’t on her mind because she felt it was an anti-feminine place. She decided on Stanford in 1963 is because she wanted to move back to California.
Graduate School Stanford
At Stanford Liskov was not only the only female, but the one of the few in the computer science program. Computer science didn’t have its own department when she arrived in ‘63. Liskov met with John McCarthy’s and worked with him on his AI program to support herself. She felt comfortable working with the AI program and she claims the language translation aspect was accidental (Natasha Lomas 2009).
During classes she worked on Stanford’s Burroughs 5000; which were big mainframes. The class would gather in the machine room and everyone would feed programs through it. Liskov remembers the computer’s feedback being slow and non-interactive. Her work would take days before the answers came back. By ’65 Susan Graham was the second women in the Stanford computer program. During that time Stanford’s computer science department was up the first exams were given to Liskov. She remembers being the only woman of the seven people who took the exam.
Career
After graduating from Stanford in 1968 Liskov wasn’t getting any reasonable job offers. Asking for help from an advisor went unanswered. She was offered a one person faculty job at Haywood State but the heavy teaching load wasn’t what she wanted. In a current relationship with her now husband, she decided to move to Boston with him. The MULTICS project caught her eye from MIT, but they didn’t give her the job. She ended up working at Mitre Corporation again, but as a researcher. Liskov was happy with her position because she knew there wasn’t any requirement for fast publication. Although, she was still aspiring to become a faculty member. But she worried she might have to put her career on hold once she’s married and has a family.
Working at Mitre led her to write a research paper about her research project in 1971. This was the Venus research paper. She submitted her paper to the top system project conference. Jerry Saltzer on MIT faculty spoke to Liskov and then encouraged her to apply for a faculty position at MIT. She suspected since Jerry Saltzer who was president had needed more women on the faculty. She still proceeded to apply for the position.
By 1972 Liskov was a faculty member at MIT. Her ideas about the methodology program led her to think of a programming language. She eventually invented the idea of an abstract data type within the few months at MIT. Her first son was born in ‘75 and that didn’t stop her. She hired a full time babysitter and continued her research. She finished the project by 1979 and jumped into distributed computing. She regrets not commercializing CLU and its extension Argus. The language became widely used and other companies such as Sun put their weight on it. Because of this her research led into a new direction. She then went to work on another project “Thor” an object oriented database system.
Current Life
Liskov is currently a member of NAE (National Academy of Engineering), NAS (National Academy of Sciences), and ACM (Association of Computing Machinery. Liskov was awarded the John von Neumann Medal for “fundamental contributions to programming languages, programming methodology, and distributed systems”. She was awarded the Turing Award from ACM in 2008 for her design of programming languages and development of object oriented programming. She is currently a faculty member with tenure at MIT. (Tom van Vleck 2012)
