Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy

nightcats writes: Nature has an extensive piece on the legacy of the "enchantress of abstraction," the extraordinary Victorian-era computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Her monograph on the Babbage machine was described by Babbage himself as a creation of "that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force that few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it." Ada's remarkable merging of intellect and intuition — her capacity to analyze and capture the conceptual and functional foundations of the Babbage machine — is summarized with a historical context which reveals the precocious modernity of her scientific mind. "By 1841 Lovelace was developing a concept of 'Poetical Science', in which scientific logic would be driven by imagination, 'the Discovering faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of science.' She saw mathematics metaphysically, as 'the language of the unseen relations between things;' but added that to apply it, 'we must be able to fully appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious.' She also saw that Babbage's mathematics needed more imaginative presentation."

Comments

Lord Byron

[whoever57]

When Lord Byron was attending Trinity college at Cambridge, he kept a bear. He was hauled in to be told to get rid of the bear, because domestic animals were prohibited by college rules from college rooms. His response: the bear is not a domestic animal. He got to keep the bear!

Re:hurrrudururrururur

[dryeo]

In that era, upper class women often dappled in (higher) mathematics, with womans magazines often having mathematical puzzles.

Re:hurrrudururrururur

[Anonymous Coward]

One day, hopefully, you'll get to see why this position is a little simplistic. Yes, criticise anyone for any reason; sounds fair. But sexism is quite prevalent and one side is starting with a disadvantage.

Here's another example from a slightly later period - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmy_Noether. If you're completely - completely - happy that we're all now on a level playing field criticise away.

Otherwise, let's take gender out of it and try to get over the general geek thing of I'm-some-hot-shot-IT-geek-and-no-one-else-knows-anything nonsense. Try finding the positive rather than criticise. The "yeah, but..." thing is tiresome.

Re:I am sure the women in the crowd will like this

[phantomfive]

The article is not flattering. When the article says, "She also saw that Babbage's mathematics needed more imaginative presentation," it's not being complimentary. It is a compensatory way to suggest that she really didn't know how to program the machine. The wording of the article is very careful, for example, here is how it describes that she didn't know how to program:

Lovelace is sometimes loosely described as the first computer programmer. She did produce an elegant set of tables showing how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers, but based on equations supplied by Babbage. Lovelace's originality lay in her conceptual definitions of the engine's mathematical functions, and her brilliant speculations on its design possibilities, going far beyond anything Babbage himself articulated. She wrote: “We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Overall, the article is somewhat insulting, implying that "the only contribution a woman can make is to bring her imaginative, creative views to the table when she copies men. Put her in marketing." The article doesn't quite say that, but it is the natural conclusion from what the article says.