Vera Watson

Vera Watson (1932 – October 17, 1978) was an American mountaineer and rock climber who made the first woman's solo climb of Acongagua,[1] the highest mountain in the Americas. She also made several first ascents in the Kenai Mountains in Alaska.[1] She was a member of the successful first all-women team to climb Annapurna, but was killed along with her partner Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz while preparing to attempt the unclimbed central summit of the mountain.[2]

Watson was a computer scientist, working at IBM Research in San Jose, California, from 1973 onwards [1]. She was initially active in machine translation, before moving into database management system design. She worked on System R, which was the first implementation of SQL, a standardised database query language which has since become a dominant standard.[3][4] She had taken a leave without pay to make the solo attempt on Aconcagua, and then again for the expedition to Annapurna.[3] She was married to John McCarthy, a pioneer in the discipline of artificial intelligence and creator of the Lisp programming language.

References
  1. Allen, Fran (1979). "Vera Watson, 1932 - 1978". American Alpine Journal: 345–347.
  2. Blum, Arlene; foreword by Maurice Herzog (1998). Annapurna, a woman's place (20th anniversary ed.). San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. ISBN 1-57805-022-7.
  3. "The 1995 SQL Reunion: People, Projects, and Politics - Vera Watson". www.mcjones.org. Retrieved 2019-10-30.
  4. Astrahan, Morton & Blasgen, Mike & Chamberlin, Donald & Eswaran, Kapali & Gray, Jim & Griffiths, Patricia & III, W. & Lorie, Raymond & McJones, Paul & Mehl, James & Putzolu, Gianfranco & Traiger, Irving & Wade, Bradford & Watson, Vera. (1976). System R: Relational Approach to Database Management. ACM Trans. Database Syst.. 1. 97-137. 10.1145/320455.320457.


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