Who is Ada Lovelace and why are we celebrating her?
An exploration into the legacy of Ada Lovelace and the journey of women in STEM since 1815.
Starting today, October 11th and running until October 15th, we are highlighting women in STEM in our week-long celebration of Ada Lovelace Day.
October 12th is Ada Lovelace Day. Since its founding in 2009, Ada Lovelace Day has been celebrated on the 2nd Tuesday of October to highlight the often-overlooked contributions of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM).
In this first part of a 2-part series kicking off our Ada Lovelace week, we are exploring Ada’s legacy and why she is such a phenomenal figure in the history of women in STEM. Part 2 dives deeper into the challenges and barriers women face in the industry and examines the importance of diversity — read it here.
Who established #AdaLovelaceDay?
Ada Lovelace Day was founded in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson, a London-based journalist, social software consultant, blogger and public speaker named one of the “50 most influential Britons in technology” by the Daily Telegraph. Suw founded Ada Lovelace Day as an effort to erase the invisibility of women involved in tech.
The life and legacy of Ada Lovelace
Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace — generally called Ada Lovelace — was an English mathematician and writer, and known as the first computer programmer.
Ada was born to a Romantic poet as a father and mother who loved maths. Ada’s mother feared that Ada would follow her father’s volatile and erratic temperament and raised her on a strict regimen of maths, music, French, and science.
“Lovelace is an unusual example of a woman for her time because she was not only allowed to learn mathematics but encouraged to learn mathematics”
— Valerie Aurora, executive director of the Ada Initiative
At 17, she met and befriended Charles Babbage, the renowned mathematician, and started regularly exchanging letters discussing Ada’s mathematical studies and Babbage’s gigantic clockwork calculating machine projects.
One of Babbage’s projects was the Analytical Engine — a machine combining an array of numbered wheels capable of making reliable calculations with an elaborate punchcard operating system. Babbage never built the machine due to its complexity, but it had all the essential components of a modern computer.
Mathematician Luigi Menabrea wrote a short article on this machine for a Swiss academic journal. Ada translated it from French to English and expanded the article with her own notes, turning an 8,000-word essay into a 20,000-word paper. Ada’s notes alone were three times the length of the original paper and touched on almost all the difficult and abstract questions related to the subject at the time.
Most strikingly, Ada described with great clarity and completeness how the machine would work and its potential uses, including calculating a long sequence of Bernoulli numbers and also creating music. Ada’s elaborate descriptions transformed the machine into a computer program, and Ada is renowned as “the first computer programmer”. Babbage’s vision and Ada’s notes inspired Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.
“The notes of the Countess of Lovelace extend to about three times the length of the original memoir. Their author has entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.”
— Charles Babbage
Years later, mathematicians and historians would dispute the fact that Ada actually wrote the notes. The Babbage historian Bruce Collier argued that her contribution had been greatly overstated, saying “it is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents and a rather shallow understanding of Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine.”
Thankfully, there are many others that reject this interpretation and are fighting to recognise Ada for the work she has contributed.
In conversation with Betsy Morais for a New Yorker article, Suw Charman-Anderson said that Lovelace’s story resonates “because there are still people who seek to discredit her achievements. It is something that many women working in tech are only too familiar with. We can look at Ada and recognise that our own challenges are similar to hers, and her achievements are the sorts of things that we strive towards”.
We want to do our part in changing all of this. Throughout this week, we will be sharing interviews with founders who are building startups in STEM, communities and support networks, our own perspectives and advice on working in STEM. And all of this content will be focussed exclusively on women.
We hope you can join us — use #AdaLovelace and #WomenInTech on socials to shout your support and celebrate the women you respect.
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