8th October 2024: Ada Lovelace Day
Did you know the second Tuesday in October is Ada Lovelace day? A day to remember this amazing woman is needed more than ever to remember women who pioneered new thinking and that history likes to forget.
Sometimes referred to as the world’s first computer programmer, you might be surprised to learn that this was a woman. A remarkable woman. Ada Lovelace.
It seems that Ada took after her mother, Baroness Anne Isabella Milbanke, who was highly-educated with a strong knowledge of science and mathematics. This would be unusual for these times as Ada was born in 1815, it was surely her mother who encouraged Ada’s education and interest in maths.
As a young woman and her mother being a Baroness, you can imagine that they mixed with the great and the good of the day and this was how Ada met Charles Babbage.
In 1842 Ada was asked to work on a translation for a lecture that Babbage gave at the University of Turin about his Analytic Engine. This was a complex translation but Ada was clearly the woman for the job. It took Ada almost a year to complete the translation and Ada even spotted an error in one of Babbage’s calculations. Babbage was impressed with her mathematical ability (forgive me for this, but you can imagine at the time he added, ‘for a woman’). In the completed translation, Ada included a set of notes, longer than the translation itself, describing how the engine of the machine could complete a sequence of numbers. And so the life of the dreaded algorithms began. Of course, we forgive Ada for that because she could not have known what humans would have used them for.
Sadly, Ada died at the age of 36 survived by her husband and three children. But what a life she led. To understand mathematics as well as the masters of her day and to be able to translate their works into other languages.
You may have noticed that I have not referenced her father above. That is because Ada should be known for who she was and what she accomplished in her short life.
Did Ada get the recognition she deserved in her lifetime? Well, there are differing versions of events. From Babbage calling her the “Enchantress of numbers” (which is patronising in today’s terms) to taking her ideas as his, it is not entirely clear that she was given the credit she deserved in her lifetime.
Ada deserves to have a day to celebrate her to and to inspire the next generation of women in science and mathematics.
