October 16: Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

October 16th is Ada Lovelace Day, a day designed to honor formerly forgotten female scientists. Tandem celebrates UC Davis’s past present and future female scientists.

UK’s Guardian has a nice article about the day as does National Geographic. Wired has a list of Sites to Avoid on Ada Lovelace Day.

According to Ada Lovelace’s Wikipedia entry:

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron and now commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage‘s early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this, she is sometimes considered the world’s first computer programmer.^[1][2]

Ada was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (with Anne Isabella Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth). She had no relationship with her father, who died when she was nine. As a young adult, she took an interest in mathematics, and in particular Babbage’s work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with a set of notes of her own. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program — that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Ada’s notes are important in the early history of computers. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.^[3]

Celebrate the day with any of the female scientists you know.