Voices Raised： Celebrating Women in STEM ｜ Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace. This name matters because it's the name of the first person to ever write a computer program. She didn't write it in the 70s. She didn't write it in the 60s. Because Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in the 40s. The 1840s. 130 years before the first personal computer was ever put on sale. Ada was born in 1815 to aristocrat Lady Annabelle and the poet Lord Byron. The infamous poet would abandon her and her mother only one month after Ada was born. Afraid her daughter would inherit her father's ways, Ada's mother raised her with a near obsessive focus on mathematics and science and was quick to shun away the arts. Ada's upbringing, though unusual, meant by the time she was a young woman she was already considered to be a mathematical genius. Ada now needed a mentor but found many were skeptical of a woman in mathematics. But she persisted and eventually began working with world-renowned mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage. The two would focus their work on Babbage's conceived analytical engine, an early kind of calculator. When it came time for the two to publish their work, Ada opted to write the paper's supporting notes, a task made more difficult since the best library in the area didn't allow women. But she didn't let that stop her and when she completed the notes they would come as a surprise. Not only were they three times longer than the paper itself but buried within them, Ada did what Babbage couldn't. She took his analytical engine and figured out how to make it work. Babbage may have designed the machine but Ada wrote its language and today that language is regarded as the first computer program in the world. But somehow more incredible still. While everyone was convinced this machine could only be a calculator, Ada saw something more. She saw what it could really do. She predicted a machine like this could be used to create graphics, aid in scientific research, and even compose music. And so she comes up with the concept of a general purpose computer by connecting the notion of sort of the humanities and art to science and technology. And she made all these predictions nearly 200 years ago. Ada's life is a testament to the fact that not only can women be the catalyst to seismic shifts in technology, but that they always have been.