Judith Faulkner, every mention

Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired Apr 21, 2025 · 34 mentions

• ▶ 8:46 David Rosenthal Then you've got Judy.
• ▶ 8:47 David Rosenthal And at this point in time growing up, she's mostly just interested in math.
• ▶ 8:51 David Rosenthal So, she loves to tell the story about how when she was in seventh grade, a teacher asked the class a number theory problem.
• ▶ 9:16 David Rosenthal So Judy hears this problem and is just like, my future is in math.
• ▶ 9:22 David Rosenthal So in 1961, Judy graduates high school.
• ▶ 9:24 David Rosenthal She goes to Dickinson College to major in math.
• ▶ 9:28 David Rosenthal And while she's there, she gets a summer job one year at the University of Rochester, just a little bit farther north.
• ▶ 9:37 David Rosenthal And for the work that she had to do over the summer, she needed to learn computer programming.
• ▶ 9:49 David Rosenthal So they give her a book, like a manual on Fortran and Judy teaches herself Fortran in a week and becomes one of the best programmers in the lab.
• ▶ 9:58 David Rosenthal If you're not getting the picture here, like Judy is a genius.
• ▶ 10:01 David Rosenthal She is an incredibly talented person.
• ▶ 10:22 David Rosenthal Judy is intertwined with the beginning of computer science as a field.
• ▶ 10:28 David Rosenthal So she absolutely falls in love with programming that summer in Rochester.
• ▶ 10:32 David Rosenthal She'd later say that
• ▶ 10:33 David Rosenthal She felt like a kid playing with clay, and that programming a computer was like this amazing combination of math, which of course she loved, but it was also language and art together with math.
• ▶ 10:44 Ben Gilbert Cuz she has an artistic side too.
• ▶ 10:46 Ben Gilbert For as mathy as she is, she also has a hyper-creative streak.
• ▶ 10:51 David Rosenthal Totally, and obviously her story is very different, and she is a very different person than him, but the echoes that you're seeing here in Judy, in
• ▶ 11:01 David Rosenthal What she's exposed to as a kid, how she thinks, how she operates as an entrepreneur.
• ▶ 11:07 Ben Gilbert I thought you were gonna say Steve Jobs with the peacetime orientation around her upbringing and sort of the, I don't want to say hippie for Judy, but almost hippie-esque movement too.
• ▶ 11:30 Ben Gilbert She is going to build her company in almost the exact same time frame that Apple and Microsoft were built.
• ▶ 11:37 David Rosenthal So, when Judy gets back to Dickinson, to college, she decides that she's going to apply to grad schools in math.
• ▶ 11:43 David Rosenthal So she applies to five PhD programs.
• ▶ 11:45 David Rosenthal She, of course, gets into all of them.
• ▶ 11:47 David Rosenthal And on her CV, she lists her Rochester experience and her Fortran programming experience.
• ▶ 11:53 David Rosenthal So two of the schools she applied to, Stanford and the University of Wisconsin,
• ▶ 12:01 David Rosenthal When she applied, they didn't have computer science departments and in the interim they started them.
• ▶ 12:05 David Rosenthal And so they saw Judy's application and like, obviously this is a brilliant person who we want here at the university.
• ▶ 12:14 David Rosenthal They unilaterally shift her applications to their new CS schools.
• ▶ 12:19 David Rosenthal And so Judy's like, oh, God, I didn't even realize I could go get a PhD in computer science.
• ▶ 12:25 David Rosenthal So she ends up choosing Wisconsin, goes off to Madison, Wisconsin to start her PhD in computer science, which as we shall see, she never finishes, but she also never leaves.
• ▶ 12:37 David Rosenthal If Judy had gone to Stanford instead, we would probably still be telling this story about her, but it would be a very different story.
• ▶ 12:44 Ben Gilbert She would have been indoctrinated by a very different type of DNA and what computers are for and what
• ▶ 12:51 Ben Gilbert What types of companies you should be building with computers if she was in the Silicon Valley at that point.