Ada Lovelace Day

Today is Ada Lovelace Day.  And I will be making a very small contribution to the day by commenting on a female who has made a major impact on technology. Something about Ada from the Science Museum site: “Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852) is often referred to as the world’s first computer programmer. The daughter of the famous poet Lord Byron, and the admired intellect, Annabella Milbanke, Ada Lovelace represented the meeting of two alternative worlds: the romanticism and art of her father versus the rationality and science of her mother. In her attempt to draw together these polar opposites and create a ‘poetical science’ during the Victorian age, Ada collaborated with the renowned mathematician and inventor, Charles Babbage.”

It has been organised by Suw Charman-Andersen and picked up by others including the Science Museum There will be thousands of postings today and they will all be linked together and co-ordinated.

I first learned about Ada via tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Acardia (1993) which has a femal character like Ada who is a brilliant mathmatician.  Ada was, in the real world, Babbage’s programmer: an astonishing acheivement as she was inventing the entire science of programming as she was writing robust and rigorous code as she went.

My choice is Rosalind Franklin.  She was one of the triumvirate who discovered dna along with the more famous and acknowledged duo: Crick and Watson.   Arguably her contribution was as significant as the other pair yet she never received the acknolwedgement or recognition.