career story: The importance of being ERNIE

ERNIE is the Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment that caused huge interest in 1957 when it began selecting prize‐winners for the new Premium Bonds, the first government‐sponsored gamble in Britain in modern times. Stephanie Shirley was a young statistician working on ERNIE. Today, as Steve Shirley or Dame Stephanie , she is one of the wealthiest women in Britain—not through winning on Premium Bonds herself, but through the pioneering software company she formed which, for the first time, gave female‐friendly employment to women programmers (and statisticians) who had children and dependants at home to care for. She is now a major philanthropist and a driving force for research into the social effects of the Internet and into autism. She has given more than £50 million to charities in those fields. Julian Champkin interviews her.