Margaret H. Wright
[5] She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997 for development of numerical optimization algorithms and for leadership in the applied mathematics community.Wright was born in San Francisco in 1944, and spent her early childhood in Hanford, California.[6] At age 10, her family moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she attended junior and high school.[6] After completing her M.S., she worked at GTE Sylvania from 1965 to 1971 where she wrote software to implement mathematical simulations.At that time, it was legal for employers to discriminate against women, and she was earning significantly less than men with lower qualifications.During her Ph.D. studies, Philip E. Gill and Walter Murray, two researchers from the National Physical Laboratory (United Kingdom), came to visit and ended up having a profound impact on her Ph.D. and career.[2][9] In 1988, Wright moved east and joined Bell Labs, where she was ultimately promoted to Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff.Highlights include the following: From 1995 to 1996, she served as the (first female) president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).In 2019, she was awarded the John von Neumann Prize "in recognition of her pioneering contributions to the numerical solution of optimization problems and to the exposition of the subject.