Vera Watson

Vera Watson (1932 – October 17, 1978) was an American computer programmer, mountaineer and rock climber who made the first woman's solo climb of Acongagua,[1] the highest mountain in the Americas. She also made several first ascents in the Kenai Mountains in Alaska.[1] She was a member of the successful first all-women team to climb Annapurna, but was killed along with her partner Alison Chadwick-Onyszkiewicz while preparing to attempt the unclimbed central summit of the mountain.[2]

Watson worked at IBM Research in San Jose, California, from 1973 onwards.[1] She was initially active in machine translation, before moving into database management system design. She worked on System R, which was the first implementation of SQL, a standardised database query language which has since become a dominant standard.[3][4] She took a leave without pay to make the solo attempt on Aconcagua, and then again for the expedition to Annapurna.[3] She was married to John McCarthy, a pioneer in the discipline of artificial intelligence and creator of the Lisp programming language.