Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace was a 19th-century mathematician and is considered the founder of programming.

Ada was a noblewoman and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Her parents had a tumultuous relationship and separated when Ada was very young. Due to her father’s problematic behavior, which included excesses and affairs, including one with his own half-sister, her mother kept Ada away from her father as much as possible and tried to eliminate any form of artistry or creativity from the home.

As a noblewoman, Ada was highly educated. However, due to her mother’s aversion to poetry or anything else that would remind her of Lord Byron, Ada’s education was strictly limited to “rational” subjects, primarily maths and natural sciences. Ada was raised by some extremely strict women, her mother and her teachers, who never allowed her space to breathe or to be a child. Nonetheless, Ada was a very brilliant girl, and at age 12, she drew up a model for a steam-powered flight machine. Even this type of imaginative expression was not welcomed, and Ada was not encouraged to continue her technical models.

All her education was never actually intended to lead Ada anywhere. At age 19, she married and gave birth to three children. As a woman, Ada was not allowed to go to libraries. In the beginning of their marriage, her husband encouraged her search for knowledge and would often copy texts by hand so that she could read them at home.

When she was 17, Ada had met the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, who had attempted to build an analytical engine that could process mathematical equations used at ship docks more easily. The machine was built but never functional; the technology was simply not there yet. Babbage was not a nobleman, and after the British government had given him thousands of pounds (around 2 million pounds in today's currency) and he could not deliver, he was refused more funding. Being a noblewoman, Ada might have seemed to be a lifeline to more funding. He did, for certain, try to use her fame to protest the cut of his funds, but Ada did not allow it, wanting to keep their relationship factual.

Ada and Babbage corresponded about mechanics and mathematics. In 1843, Babbage asked Ada to translate a piece written about his machine by the mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea into English. The piece had already been translated into French at that point and Ada agreed to do the same for English. She translated a piece and amended it with her own comments and evolutions of the machine. In the end, her notes were longer than the piece itself. In these notes, Ada explained concepts that were way ahead of her time. She realized that for a mechanical engine, a computer, to work, the machine does not only need to deal with simple numbers but that those numerals or symbols need to be in a certain relation to each other in order to work. She also understood the difference between hard- and soft- ware. Her evolution of the machine would have been even less possible to build than the original, but her ideas played a huge role in the development of Information Technologies in the 1980s. In her notes on Menabrea’s piece, Ada also published a table for the computing of the Bernoulli numbers, thus making her the first publisher of a formal computer program in global history.

Ada could not publish the piece nor the notes under her own name; she was not formally prohibited, but nobody would have done it at the time. In the end, the piece was published under her initials: A.A.L. Around the age of 30, Ada developed an opium and alcohol addiction due to chronic illness and pain. She was also addicted to gambling and lost a lot of money on horse races. She died at the age of 37.

In many parts of the world, IT is a male coded subject. However, stories like Ada’s tell us that women played a huge role in the development of this science. IT was actually not well respected for a long time and it was mainly delegated to (underpaid) female mathematicians. Women worked as coders and mathematicians for institutions such as the military or NASA. As is so often the case, the subject became “for men” once it became evident that there was a lot of money to be made, and the achievements of its mothers are ignored. In some countries, IT is still female coded, mostly because it can be done from home, it is safe, and can be combined with domestic duties. It is important to keep in mind that women are not just “naturally” worse at something. The prevalence of one gender in one field usually has economic and social reasons more than anything else.