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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
theodp writes: To commemorate the 200th birthday of Ada Lovelace, Google's CS Education in Media Program partnered with YouTube Kids on Happy Birthday Ada! for Computer Science Education Week. For those seeking (much!) more information on The Enchantress of Numbers, Stephen Wolfram has penned a pretty epic blog post, Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. "Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today," Wolfram begins. "To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I've been curious for a long time what the real story is. And in preparation for her bicentennial, I decided to try to solve what for me has always been the 'mystery of Ada'." If you're not up for the full 12,000+ word read, skip to "The Final Story" for the TL;DR summary.
If you have not seen the Difference Engine reconstruction at The Computer History Museum in Santa Clara, I highly recommend it. They actually operate it, and it's hypnotic to watch it.
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
She happily married later and had three children with a loving husband.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Engaging in an activity typically pursued by men and risking the wrath of the sperglords for doing so?
Nonsense and bullshit. Wikipedia cites her biography thus, for example (emphasis mine):
She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind."
Somebody lied to you, honey. The "Victorian Britain", however much it is hated by the "progressive" teachers of yours, was not as bad as they were telling you.
Actually, you're really overstating your case. And you're overlooking important hints about what was really going on here. She was admired for her "brilliant mind" not just as a woman, but because she was presented at Court.
She wasn't just a woman -- she was a rich, aristocratic woman who thus had a bit more freedom to do things she wanted to without raising as many eyebrows. But keep in mind that there were still severe restrictions even on noblewomen -- during her lifetime (1830s), Parliament confirmed that women absolutely did NOT have the right to vote, they were basically unable to get a divorce without applying for an individual Act of Parliament to do so, when married their property rights generally didn't exist individually (this was typical of marriage laws back then), etc., etc. You might benefit from reading a bit of the history of feminism in the UK to get a better sense of how restricted women were at this time.
Sure, educated women in the upper classes were allowed to pursue various intellectual pursuits, basically as long as they weren't seen as having any serious practical consequence. If Ada Lovelace wanted to become a lawyer or a doctor or something like that, she would have faced HUGE obstacles. If she wanted to be taken seriously as a scholar and employed as a professor at a major university, it would have taken serious convincing.
But if she -- as a wealthy lady who supposedly had nothing better to do with her time -- spent time fiddling with random gadgets that weren't understood to have any practical purpose as yet and working with some theoretical mathematics that wasn't really groundbreaking (it was the connection to technology which was novel, not the math itself), then she wouldn't be "stepping on the toes" of any men in any serious practical professions.
So, GP's claim was a bit nonsensical, because wealthy aristocratic women did have freedom to pursue intellectual pursuits to some extent. But your response is equally nonsensical in acting like "Victorian Britain" wasn't that bad for women. For women of the lower and middle classes, they certainly wouldn't have had the option to do anything like this. And for upper-class women, this sort of thing was pretty much limited to women who essentially took on the status of "independent scholars" and were generally admired FIRST for their wealth and social standing. But they could participate in intellectual discourse to some extent, as long as they mostly confined themselves to theoretical works without demanding actual recognition or a practical career.