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Lynn Conway (born 1938) is an American computer scientist and inventor. Her most notable achievement is probably the world-wide Mead & Conway VLSI design revolution, which she started with Carver Mead - a world-wide incubator of the emerging EDA industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by almost all modern processors to improve performance.

IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role. Harry Benjamin treated her. She had made an earlier transition attempt in the late 1950s that failed due to the medical climate at the time.

While living as a man, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children.^[1] After losing her IBM job and access to her children, she restarted her career from the ground up as a female, working as a contract programmer. She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she worked on VLSI design. With Carver Mead she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook.

In the early 1980s Conway worked for DARPA on strategic computing, and then became a Professor at the University of Michigan in 1985; in 1989, she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her accomplishments in VLSI design.

After retiring from her professorship in December 1998, she decided to out herself as a transsexual woman again in 1999 after she realised that the story of her IBM work might soon come out. Since then, she has been a prominent spokesperson for rights of transsexual people.

In 2002, Conway married her husband, Charlie, with whom she had lived since 1988; as of 2006, they reside in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

1. ^ Michael Hiltzik. "Through the Gender Labyrinth", Los Angeles Times, 19 November 2000.

• Lynn Conway's website. Primarily written in English, but many articles are provided in other languages as well.

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