Ada Lovelace Day 2022: Celebrating the first computer programmer and achievements of women in STEM – WION

Born on December 10, 1815, Ada Gordon or most often known as Ada Lovelace was the child of poet Lord Byron (George Gordon) and mathematics aficionado Annabella Milbanke. (Photo: @newscientist) Photograph:( Twitter )
According to Padua’s book, Babbage described Ada as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it,” or simply “The Enchantress of Numbers”.
Ada Lovelace Day is marked every year on the second Tuesday of October. This day is seen as an international celebration of the achievements of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
It was launched in the year 2009 with a simple pledge on the British civil action website which received the support of nearly 2,000 people on March 24. The aim of the celebration of this day is to increase the profile of women in STEM which in turn creates new role models who will likely encourage more girls to pursue a career in STEM and support women already working in the fields.

Who was Ada Lovelace?
Born on December 10, 1815, Ada Gordon or most often known as Ada Lovelace was the child of poet Lord Byron (George Gordon) and mathematics aficionado Annabella Milbanke. According to the book written by author Sydney Padua, titled “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” her mother feared that she would inherit her father’s volatile “poetic” temperament. This caused her mother to raise Ada with a strict regime of science, logic, and mathematics.

Lovelace herself was fascinated with machines since childhood and often designed several boats and steam-flying machines including various new inventions during the Industrial Revolution. When she was 19 years old she was married to an aristocrat, William King. In 1838 when he was made the Earl of Lovelace, she became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, said the excerpts of the book.
In 1833, Ada’s mentor, scientist and polymath Mary Sommerville introduced her to Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics. By then he had already garnered some attention for his visionary and often unfinished plans for clockwork-calculating machines. Babbage and Lovelace went on to become lifelong friends.
‘The Enchantress of Numbers’
According to Padua’s book, Babbage described Ada as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it,” or simply “The Enchantress of Numbers”.
Lovelace was deeply intrigued by Babbage’s plans for the extremely complicated device he called the “Analytical Engine”, but while it was never built the design had all the essential elements of a modern-day computer. In 1843, Lovelace published what is now called the computer program to generate Bernoulli Numbers.
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A year prior to the publication, Babbage gave a lecture about the Analytical Engine when an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, present in the audience took notes and Lovelace was asked to translate them from French to English. The book titled Ada Lovelace: Victorian computing visionary, written by technologist Suw Charman-Anderson, tells a detailed account of how Lovelace quietly corrected the errors in Menabrea’s notes and added her knowledge to his notes. She was asked by Babbage to expand on them.
She tripled the original paper’s length and in these notes, Lovelace outlines several early computer programs including one to calculate Bernoulli Numbers, at Babbage’s suggestions. The Bernoulli Numbers were a complex numerical system first described by the Swiss mathematician Jakob Bernoulli. According to the book, any complex series of the numerical system could have been chosen, the aim was to show that they could be calculated independently by the machine based on its first principles.
While Babbage and his assistants had sketched out programs for his engine, it was this elaborate and complete version by Lovelace that was published and went on to become significant for modern computers. Therefore, she is now referred to as “the first computer programmer”.
However, it did not stop there, Lovelace was also the first to foresee the creative implications of the Analytical Engine and explained that it could do much more than just calculate numbers. She believed that with the right programming and input the engine could create music and art, but her unmatched vision went unrecognised by her peers for nearly a century.
Lovelace died of cancer at the age of 36, a few years after the publication of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator”. The Engine was never built but Ada’s notes went on to become one of the critical documents that inspired the work of Alan Turing in the 1940s on the first modern computers. It was her passion and vision of technology that made her a powerful symbol for modern women in the field of technology.
How is this day celebrated?
Founded by technologist Suw Charman-Anderson, this day is celebrated in many countries across the world. In London, it features the flagship “Ada Lovelace Day Live!” a ‘science cabaret’ as described by the finding Ada website where women in STEM talk about their work and research in an informal, theatre-like setting. In 2022, like last year, the day will be celebrated online with blogging, and posts on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

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The website also talks about how mundane the explanation for the date chosen to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, “The date is arbitrary, chosen in an attempt to make the day maximally convenient for the most number of people.” This included avoiding major public holidays and seasons, which is why they did not choose Ada’s birthday in December due to Christmas in the UK.

Some facts about Ada Lovelace
1. Lovelace was taught mathematics and science at a time when these subjects were forbidden for girls.
2. She theorised that the Analytical Engine has the potential to process more than just numbers but even text, music, and pictures.
3. Her notes, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator” were ahead of their time it took over a century for it to be recognised as the “first computer algorithm”.
4. In 1980, the US Department of Defence named a computer language for large-scale programming “Ada” after her.
5. In 2018, she was one of the contenders to be the new face of the 50-pound note in the UK.

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