Honouring computing’s 1843 visionary, Lady Ada Lovelace | Hacker News Reader

Honouring computing’s 1843 visionary, Lady Ada Lovelace

googleblog.blogspot.com

38 pointscleverjake10 comments

The Lovelace & Babbage comic is fun: http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/

(that's the one Sydney Padua did for Lovelace Day, but there's lots more on the site). The cartoons are in a steampunk comedy style, but backed with copious footnotes and links to the source documents about the details and characters.

Calling Ada Lovelace's program to compute Bernoulli numbers "the first published algorithm" is slightly odd choice of wording, since mathematical algorithms have existed long before there were machines to mechanically compute them.

Euclid's algorithm for computing greatest common divisors of integers, from his work Elements circa 300 B.C. is sometimes called the oldest surviving(?) algorithm in writing.

Nevertheless, very exciting article about a very special visionary.

> So much of world history leaves out or minimizes the contributions of women, and so “of course” most of us had no idea who she was.

This sounds amazing. I thought she's really well known amongst the techie crowd.

We were taught about her and Babbage in our History of Computing module at university, but outside of university I haven't heard much about her to be fair.

University educations are still good for some things! It's good to know your roots :)

Well, but what have you heard of Babbage outside of university?

When I first read that paragraph, I thought she was talking about a school trip.

It turns out that it wasn't a bunch of yet-to-be-educated 14-year-olds, but a group including at least two senior female professionals in the technology industry.

In their defence, it could just be because they are foreign. There are probably plenty of highly significant historical Americans of whom I've never heard, but every US schoolchild is expected to know intimately.

A further defence might be that she does know all about Lady Lovelace, and that this "Never heard of her" business is just a rhetorical device to so that the reader and the author appear to go on the same journey of revelation.

I think the writer even though working at Google is not a tech guy.

I was delighted to learn that Byron was her father! What an interesting family.

I was also surprised by the framing of this. Of course history is not studied by many people now, but how many who would know of Babbage would not know of Lovelace? She is very famous.

Personally, I've always seen more coverage of Lovelace than of Babbage--she's thoroughly celebrated, at least at my university, along with Grace Hopper and our own local famous female engineer (for whom the college of engineering is named). There is no Babbage Day or anything of the sort, he's just this guy that didn't quite build a computer.

Related discussion. Happened a while back here on HN:

Marie Curie day: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4658763

Reply on news.ycombinator.com