Two brilliant minds have met at Bletchley Park.
Dr Fran Allen, the first and only woman ever to win the Association of Computing Machinery's prestigious AM Turing Award, came face-to-face with Mavis Batey, accomplished World War Two codebreaker.
This remarkable event took place when Dr Allen, winner of what is regarded as the Nobel Prize for Computing, made a pilgrimage from the US to the Park.
Mrs Batey, 87, Bletchley Park Codebreaker from 1940 to 1945, was a key figure in the codebreaking intelligence which led to the Allied victory at the Battle of Cape Matapan; the biggest naval success since the Battle of Trafalgar.
Highlights of Dr Fran Allen's visit to Bletchley Park included demonstrations of the rebuilds of the Bombe and Colossus, the world's first electronic, semi-programmable computer, and an insight into the secrets of Ultra and Enigma by Mavis and her husband Keith, a mathematician and also a Second World War Bletchley Park Codebreaker.
Dr Brian Oakley, former president of the British Computer Society and now a Bletchley Park historian and tour guide, hosted the visit on September 19.
He said: "This was a monumental celebration of the last 70 years of intellectual triumphs of women in the fields of mathematics, codebreaking, science and computing and the colossal contribution of their achievements to technology and the modern age."
After her tour Dr Allen said: "Bletchley Park is a unique place where some of the most brilliant and focused minds of their generation lived and worked on one problem: breaking German codes during the Second World War.
"Visiting Bletchley Park is to feel the urgency, the joy of success and the despair of failure, to learn how the codebreaking worked and how it influenced the outcome of the war".
Dr Fran Allen also paid tribute to the work of the Bletchley Park Trust in its on-going campaign to transform Bletchley Park into a world-class heritage and educational centre, adding: "It was an enormous privilege for me to visit the place where the most phenomenal technological advances were made to achieve the astonishing aim of foreshortening the war by two years.
"It would be a global tragedy if these buildings were allowed to crumble away and I have great admiration for the Trust's work in its fight to obtain the funding needed in order to restore and preserve this crucial piece of history for future generations."