This is a regular blog featured on the Midnight site, and as it’s titled, the seventh one of these we’ve presented.

It stemmed from one weekend when I watched three different documentaries about certain women - I loved each of the film, and loved the women (and wound up creating plays about two of them - Linda Ronstadt (JUST ONE LOOK) and Sr. Jacques-Marie (A MODEL FOR MATISSE). And the Women We Love title was borrowed from classic Esquire magazines where, monthly, they would feature a Woman They Loved - usually an up and coming actress, usually talented, always barely clad. At the end of a calendar year, they would do a big feature on Women They Loved - this one including women of achievement and substance.

I’ve continued this series - sometimes focusing on theatre collaborators, and then, somewhat oddly, featuring women who had recently died - women who’d always lived to a ripe old age, women who had amazing lives, and women I’d never heard about.

This is another of those.

Ms. de Menil died in August at the age of 92. She was born privileged (the Schlumberger multinational oil-field service company). Fleeing Europe during the march of the Nazis, the family headed to Cuba, and wound up in Houston, Texas, where Christophe was raised. While she still a child, her family established trust funds for her and her siblings.

This financial backing supported her life and work. Her first husband abandoned her so seek enlightenment through mind-altering drugs in Mexico. He wound up a scholar of Buddhism and a monk, and later married a German-Swiss model who had divorced Timothy Leary. One of their children was the actress Uma Thurman.

Christophe entered Columbia University, and while there began throwing a series of parties and exhibits that began her association with some of the greatest artists of her time. She sponsored performances and exhibits from artists including Merce Cunningham, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, and became a patron of Willem de Kooning and Twyla Tharp.

She then decided to redesign a Manhattan townhouse she purchased, and hired the up and coming Frank Gehry to redesign it, further underlining her eye for emerging talent.

And she began creating clothes and jewelry, and began her most important artistic relationship. She was discovered by the avant-garde theatre artist Robert Wilson, and became one of his most regular and trusted collaborators. She went on to design costumes for his landmark stage creations for over two decades. Mr. Wilson also passed away this summer.

Christophe continued to use her considerable fortune to support artists, and to design her own fashions, with celebrated pieces adorning Marie-Helene de Rothschild and Bianca Jagger.

Christophe de Menil - a trust fund baby who used her resources to profoundly support and create art.

Ms. Jordan died in August at the age of 96. She was born in Detroit, abandoned by parents, and raised by grandparents in Pennsylvania. Returning to Detroit for a tumultuous life with her mother, her life was altered while in high school when she heard the music of Bird, saxophonist Charlie Parker.

She plunged into Detroit’s thriving jazz scene in the 40’s, began singing and even go to meet Charlie Parker, who told her “You have million dollar ears, kid.”

She moved to New York City, married and quickly divorced, and to support a child, kept a clerical day job at the major ad agency, Doyle Dane Bernbach, for decades. But she would sing several nights a week at NYC clubs, and was discovered by a series of innovative jazz musicians who loved her voice. Late in life, she finally began recording, and her discs are treasured by afficionados.

A daredevil improviser, she always seemed to be singing first for her fellow musicians. Her taste was regarded as impeccable, but she remained little known to the general public. But she never stopped singing, and audiences who did hear her adored her.

Her first album was on the Blue Note label, which by policy never recorded singers, only instrumental record - but they heralded her as an important new voice in jazz.

She was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master in 2012 at the age of 84.

Sheila Jordan - an underground and under appreciated jazz artist who continued to expand her global fan base right up to her death. She said “I just want to keep this music alive by inspiring others to love it as much as I do.”

Ms. Boden died in July at the age of 88. She was born in London, attended Cambridge, and while pursuing a doctorate at Harvard came across a boo “Plans And the Structure Of Behavior,” collaborative work by psychologists George Miller, Eugene Galanter and Karl Pribram. She said “It was the first book which took the idea of computer programs and applied that idea to the whole of psychology. It changed my life in five minutes.”

Her work then went on to use the language of computers to explore the nature of thought and creativity, leading her to prescient insights about the possibilities and limitations of artificial intelligence.

She was trailblazer in a field dominated by men, and produced a number of books that helped shape the philosophical conversation about human and artificial intelligence for decades.

She remained a skeptic as to whether machines would one day be capable of achieving superintelligence or matching or outperforming human thought. She stressed that computers don’t think or understand in the way humans do. They manipulate symbols without consciousness or intentionality. When asked if robots would ever take over society, Margaret said “The truth is they certainly wouldn’t want to. Because…robots, unlike humans, don’t care. Their goals are empty of feeling.”

Margaret Boden - a philosopher and scientist of the mind - the minds - of humans and computers.