Who is Maria Deluca from Permutation City and what is their importance?

Maria Deluca is a young computer programmer and software designer. She lives alone in a house in Sydney, Australia and earns a living completing freelance projects. Maria spends most of her spare time working in a cellular automation environment called the Autoverse. When she publishes a letter about her research in the Autoverse to a small journal, she comes to the attention of Paul Durham, who hires her to design a prototypical Autoverse planet on which it might be possible for life to evolve.