Ada Lovelace Day

What the day is

Ada Lovelace Day is observed on the second Tuesday in October. It celebrates the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and it was founded in 2009 by the technologist Suw Charman-Anderson, originally as a blogging campaign to make women in these fields more visible.

Origin and background

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, lived from 1815 to 1852. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, raised deliberately toward mathematics by her mother, and she worked with Charles Babbage on his designs for the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer that was never built.

Her substantial contribution is a set of notes appended to her translation of an Italian paper on the engine, published in 1843. The notes run considerably longer than the paper itself. The last of them, Note G, contains a detailed method for using the engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, and it is generally described as the first published algorithm designed to be executed by a machine.

The more striking part is conceptual. Babbage saw a calculating machine; Lovelace wrote that if the engine could manipulate symbols according to rules, and if those symbols could represent things other than quantity, then it could in principle operate on anything, including music. That is a description of general-purpose computing written a century before one existed.

She also stated its limit plainly, in a passage later quoted against artificial intelligence claims: the engine has no pretensions to originate anything, and can only do what we know how to order it to perform.

How to take part

• Write or share something about a woman in science or engineering whose work you know. That was the original point of the day.
• Read Note G, or a good annotated summary of it.
• Look up the women in your own field who are not household names.
• Check whether local universities or science centers are running events; many do.
• If you teach or manage, look at who gets cited, credited and promoted in your own organization.