Hedy Lamarr (2018) (opens in new tab)

Oppenheimer was based on “American Prometheus”, thus all the Prometheus references.

Just a hacker huh? Is a female hacker different than a male one?

Also, @dang, it's fascinating that a streak of downvotes on a recent comment percolated on these two comments with the same exact magnitude and at the same time, on a thread that has no more traction.

how interesting...

especially this one, I see no reason why it went from +2 to 0 at the same time that the parent went from +7 to +5 since it doesn't say anything controversial or offensive

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37636480

It would be great if people could se who downvoted them

cannot edit anymore, but after reading dang's comment, I wish to emphatise that "mother of the Wi-Fi" is a reference to the article content and not the title.

Specifically

Such achievement has led Lamarr to be dubbed “the mother of Wi-Fi” and other wireless communications like GPS and Bluetooth.

Weird choices. Clean water is not really on par with the phonograph.

It was, briefly. Long before Wi-Fi was a household name when 802.11 (no b) was just standardized for industrial use there was an FHSS PHY. I think Proxim or one of the other defunct industrial data capture companies sold it into the 2000s.

In any case there’s a lot of overlapping commonality in the information theory and engineering of frequency hopping and more modern SS.

No, but an early wireless midpoint between nascent wifi deployments and really shitty WAP in a world before data over cellular networks was Ricochet Networks. Frequency hopping over the public bands of the era (900MHz mostly I think) it was able to give decent wireless internet in the mid 90s to those of us living in supported areas of Silicon Valley. When laptops were a new thing and public wifi still years away it was fun ‘work remote’ in some corner of a coffeeshop when everyone else was chained to office desktops.

Yes, otherwise interference would be a right pain (or render it unusable completely). This happens for many wireless systems (like bluetooth too).

Bluetooth uses frequency hopping. WiFi and GPS do not.

But a piano-roll (presumably of type she discovered in music boxes) is quite ingenious solution for synchronised key sequences, for the technology of the time. Kinda similar analogical transfer going on for the Jacquard loom as early "program storage".

Yes, this is one of my favorite articles discussing the early patents dealing with frequency hopping and spread spectrum.

https://www.americanscientist.org/article/random-paths-to-fr...

And the spread spectrum as used in modern devices is not frequency hopping.

exactly. every single one of these cases is an absolute stretch and diminishes the work of the people who actually developed it. its historical revisionism at best

at worst its offensive to the person because it suggests they were so small minded that they didn't or couldn't actually develop the technology to a sufficient enough degree such that they are actually associated with it. these people are hidden not because they're women, but because they didn't really contribute anything at all to the field

Looking at the early Wikipedia pages is fairly telling. From the first day that her page is up, Hedy Lamarr had a large section devoted to this invention[1]. But her co-inventor's Wikipedia only made a brief mention of it for the first several years[2]. It seems clear that people were interested in exaggerating her contributions in particular.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hedy_Lamarr&oldid... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Antheil&ol...

Got her own joke name in Blazing Saddles. No greater honour.

Wow, I'm old. I know who Hedy is, had to look up Margot Robbie.

Bigger than Robbie, much bigger

She became a US citizen in 1953. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr