Brenda Baker facts for kids

Brenda Sue Baker is an American computer scientist. She is famous for her important work in computer science. She helped create a special method called Baker's technique. This method helps solve tricky math problems using computers. She also worked on finding repeated parts in computer code and solving puzzles about packing things into boxes.

Brenda Baker's Early Life and Education

Brenda Baker studied at Radcliffe College for her first degree. She then went to Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. in 1973. Her studies at Harvard were about how computers think and understand languages. Her professor, Ronald V. Book, guided her research.

Brenda Baker's Career Path

After her studies, Brenda Baker taught at Harvard. She also taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Later, she became a professor at the University of Michigan. She then joined Bell Laboratories, a famous research company. There, she became a top expert in her field.

Brenda Baker's Family Life

Brenda Baker is married to Eric Grosse. He is also a computer scientist. He later became a Vice President at Google. Their son, Roger Baker Grosse, also works as a computer science researcher.

What Brenda Baker Researched

Brenda Baker's main work was about computer algorithms and software tools. Algorithms are like step-by-step instructions that computers follow to solve problems. Software tools are programs that help people create or fix other computer programs.

Solving Computer Puzzles

She worked on problems like finding patterns in text. This is called string pattern matching. She also studied combinatorial algorithms. These are ways to solve problems by looking at all possible combinations of things.

Making Algorithms Better

Brenda Baker also focused on approximation algorithms. These algorithms find good, but not always perfect, solutions to very hard problems. These hard problems are called NP-hard problems. They take too long to solve perfectly, so approximation algorithms are very useful.

Tools for Computer Code

She created special tools to check and compare computer code. One tool, called Dup, finds repeated parts in source code. Source code is the human-readable instructions that programmers write. Another tool, Pdiff, also compares parts of code.

She also made a tool called Exediff. This tool helps create small updates for computer programs. It can do this even without having the original source code. This was a very helpful invention for software developers.