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

Re:hurrrudururrururur

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, don't be a dick.
I agree they aren't being respectful, but then again why should they?

All this talk about being politically correct is utter crap.
We also talk dirty amongst men; for example I think RMS is a dick head, and nobody will feel like I'm being harassing or being non inclusive towards bearded autistic men. Instead they will think I'm some sort of BSD/Microsoft sucker.

Women want equality, that means not putting them in a high pedestal.
They want to play the game? Fine, here is your insult manual and have a great time.

--Me