Unfortunately, high tech is a very guy-dominated industry. I think there’s a lot of sexism inherent in engineering, and even though it’s dramatically improving I do not envy the position faced by women technologists. What’s interesting to me is how ironic this sexism is given that all of modern computing is based on the work of a brilliant woman. Her name was Ada Lovelace, and she was one badass number wizard. Given that this is International Women’s Day, I feel like all of us computer geeks should give homage to the “enchantress of numbers” that ultimately gave us the glowing little boxes that we take for granted every day.
Ada Lovelace was born into one prestigious intellectual pedigree. While her name is taken from her noble title (Countess of Lovelace), Ada’s real name is Augusta Ada Byron – the daughter of the famous English poet Lord Byron. Her father died when she was young though, and Ada quickly moved away from her family’s literary roots into the exciting and nascent fields of number theory and computational theory despite being mostly bedridden due to sickness throughout her youth. Because of the period’s sexist take on education and her health, Ada was taught by homeschooling for most of her life.
Her homeschool teachers were pretty amazing though: Augustus De Morgan (a famous logician and the creator of the well-known De Morgan’s Law), William King (her future husband and famous physicist), and Mary Somervile (the lady who kicked off modern microbiology and fused math with science for the first time). Somervile later introduced Ada to a guy named Charles Babbage, who seduced Ada’s intellectual desires with a nascent field called “computation” and a wacky theoretical concept known as an “analysis engine.”
Ada’s work with Babbage revealed just how much of a smart cookie she was. Babbage is known for coining her the “enchantress of numbers” because Ada was able to fluently move between arcane and abstract mathematics and communication and writing. To get up to speed on Babbage’s work, Ada translated a piece of work on the engine from an Italian mathematician who wrote about the analysis engine as part of his dissertation. But like every other hacker out there, Ada sort of nerded out on it and started adding her own stuff to the translation in the form of footnotes. Eventually, her footnotes vastly outnumbered the lines of translation she grabbed from the Italian text. Babbage noted that Ada was going far above and beyond simple translation, and together they worked to refine his analytical engine and find mathematical applications for it.
The analytical engine – the first computer – would be a hulking mass of churning gears when Babbage eventually created it. In the prime of Ada’s intellectual life though, the engine was confined to designs and specs. Not having a physical copy in front of her didn’t stop Ada, and she used the designs to create complicated mechanical algorithms to calculate complicated stuff like the Bernoulli Series. In this respect, Ada was the first computer programmer. When Babbage later created the Analytic Engine (and his famous Babbage Counting Machine – the foundation of World War 2 era cryptological engines), Ada’s “programs” were some of the first calculation executed on this hulking gear behemoths to do everything from calculate bombing trajectories to help crack ENIGMA.
Given that she did all of her coding without a compiler (or even a computer!), one could imagine how badass Ada would have been on TopCoder or in the ACM ICPC.
Without the research in cryptography and computing done by Turing in World War 2, we wouldn’t have the modern computer. Without Babbage’s counting machine, we wouldn’t have Turing’s work. And without Ada, Charles Babbage would have just been some crazy guy talking about a mythical gearbox that calculated stuff.
Without brilliant women like Ada Lovelace (who now has her own programming language named after her), there would be no computer programmers. Hell, there might not even be computers.
Respect, Mrs. Lovelace. Respect.
Andy talks too much. 