Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke was an American electrical engineer, born in 1883 and died in 1959, who specialized in power system analysis and is regarded as a foundational figure for what later became smart grid technology. In 1919 she became the first woman to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT, in 1922 the first woman professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States, and in 1947, at the University of Texas at Austin, the country's first female professor of electrical engineering. She patented a graphing calculator in 1925 that solved power-system equations roughly ten times faster than previous methods, developed analytical charts used throughout General Electric's engineering work, and wrote the widely used 1943 textbook Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems.