Ada Lovelace Day

I’m only aware that it is Ada Lovelace Day thanks to The Memes of Production, but there’s not much I can contribute to a discussion of women in technology.

Women in literature, sure. But technology and I don’t talk much these days, not since I bought my Mac and stopped going to technology singles bars to chat to—really tortured metaphors.

Sorry about that.

I do know a little about Ada Lovelace, though—only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. And that’s how I know her, really: I know a little of her contribution to mathematics and science, but I mainly know her in the shadow of the famous father whom she herself didn’t know.

And that doesn’t seem entirely fair.

This has never been a link blog but here are some links about the woman herself for Ada Lovelace Day:

• her biography from the fascinating Biographies of Women Mathematicians.

• her page from Women in Science at the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

• her Wikipedia page, if only because I admire a woman who can programme computers and look gorgeous in silver satin.

• a page on the Analytical Engine, with Ada’s own notes.

• and, for further reading (if you have access to a scholarly databases, anyway), why not throw Ada’s mother Annabella Milbanke into the mix, in Judith S. Lewis’s examination of mathematics and gender in the nineteenth-century British aristocracy.

Happy Day, Ada. I’m sorry I don’t know more about you and I haven’t followed in your footsteps, but, if it helps, I always thought your dad was a bit of a prat.