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

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

My friend and I invented mechanical computation, and all I got was this lousy language named after me.

Re:She was lucky

[jabuzz]

On the first issue of voting that needs to be seen a wider context. Most of the British population where unable to vote during Ada Lovelace's lifetime (she died in 1852). Specifically until the Representation of the People Act 1867, only around 15% of the adult males in the United Kingdom could vote. Even with the Representation of the People Act 1884 around 40% of adult males in the United Kingdom could still not vote.

On the issue of property you are flat out wrong. Women where also allowed to own property for the entirety of Ada's lifetime. The one restriction was that when they married their property became that of their husbands to do as they saw fit under the doctrine of Coverture. That did not start changing until the Married Women's Property Act 1870 and was not completed until the Married Women's Property Act 1893.

It was not uncommon for wealthy women to not marry for this very reason.

The situation in Scotland was different, because Coveture was a Norman thing introduced by Henry II. There where separate married womens property acts that covered Scotland.

Re:hurrrudururrururur

[LaurenCates]

With stuff like this, we wonder why women complain or feel harassed?

I feel genuinely put upon when I hear guys say things like this.

So, I'm going to say this in every thread where I encounter this statement.

I am a woman. I do not feel harassed. Stop fucking speaking for women and let us stand up for ourselves if it is necessary.

Please do not presume to speak for me, and further, please look up the definition of "harassed", because even if the above statement was insulting to all women (it isn't), it certainly does not count for the dictionary or legal definitions of "harassment".