Dame Stephanie Shirley

Dame Stephanie Shirley was born Vera Stephanie Buchthal to a Jewish family in Dortmund, Germany. Her father Arnold Buchthal was a judge who lost his job when the Nazi regime came to power in 1933. In July 1939, at age five, Stephanie and her nine-year-old sister Renate were sent alone to the UK as Kindertransport child refugees. She was placed in the care of foster parents, Guy and Ruby Smith, in Sutton Coldfield in the Midlands. Her biological parents survived World War II and she was later re-united with them, but said she never really bonded with them. After attending a convent school, she moved to Oswestry near the Welsh border, where she attended the Oswestry Girls' High School. Mathematics was not taught at the school, so she got permission to take math lessons at the local boys' school. At age 18, she became a British citizen and changed her name to Stephanie Brook. In 1959, she married Derek Shirley, whom she met when they were both working at the Post Office Research Station in Dollis Hill, North London, where she built computers from scratch and programmed them in binary code. She went on to become a hugely successful tech entrepreneur. In 1962, she founded a pioneering all-woman software company called Freelance Programmers, which was ultimately valued at $3 billion, making millionaires of 70 of her team members. She retired in 1993 at the age of 60, and has since focused on her philanthropy, giving away most of her £150 million personal fortune to different projects. Her only child Giles Shirley, who died at age 35 in 1998, had a severe form of autism, and she became an early funder of research in the field. Among many other honors for her work, she was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2000. Her memoir Let It Go: My Extraordinary Story was published in 2012.