In this digital age computers are an integral part of all of our lives. Economics, medicine, education, what have you, almost everything has been enhanced by them. And that’s great and everything, making our lives better or whatever. But what about the truly important things, like this gif of a cat bouncing on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the middle of the galaxy?
Or this video of the Sleepy Hollow cast playing “Colonial American F*ck, Marry, Kill” at Comic-Con?
Have you ever thought about who you really need to thank for all of it?
This lovely lady, Ada Lovelace.
Also known as the Enchantress of Numbers, Ada is the first ever bonafide computer programmer. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, but didn’t have much of a relationship with him. He left her mother when Ada was a few months old and died eight years later without ever seeing her again. Byron was perhaps not the most stable husband, since he slept with like, literally anyone, so Ada’s mother was pretty bitter about him and wanted Ada to stay away from those shady poet ways. That’s largely why Ada had the best education in mathematics.
When she was 17, Ada met and began to work with Charles Babbage on his invention, the Analytical Engine. When she translated Luigi Menabrea’s Italian memoir on the Engine, her added notes were longer than the memoir itself. Sucks to suck, Luigi. She also added a detailed method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli Numbers (some math-y ridiculousness that I tried to look up but still don’t understand) with the Engine.
What the actual crap is this?
Though not possible to test at the time since the Analytical Engine was still theoretical and hadn’t actually been built yet, we now know that if it had been, Ada’s method would have worked. And so she is now credited with being the first computer programmer for this work. There’s even a computer language named after her. Cool, huh? You really need to look her up for yourself. There’s so much more to her than I can describe in one post. Thankfully in recent years more attention has been paid to Ada and her accomplishments. Like right now, I’m typing this post on a computer, and you’re reading it on a computer, and it’s because of her that we have any computers at all! We owe her so much, how can we not love and celebrate her?! There’s even a comic where a steampunk version of Ada and Babbage solve crimes!
Tomorrow is international Ada Lovelace Day, and there are several events going on all around the world and online to help us recognize her and to help other women in the STEM fields. A lot of them include talks about the challenges facing women in these fields and resources they can utilize, as well as improving the Wikipedia pages of female scientists and mathematicians. At the very least we can all help spread the word about the Enchantress of Numbers and her momentous contribution to technology.
So thank you Ada, for getting the ball rolling on all the cat gifs and Tom Mison videos and the ability to fangirl with someone on the other side of the country (or the world!) about the most amazing book that you just read. You go, girl.
What other lady geeks should we be celebrating!?
