March 8th is International Women’s Day and the perfect opportunity to highlight remarkable women and their cultural, political, and socioeconomic contributions to humanity. One such woman was Ada Lovelace, a brilliant mathematician who saw the potential of machines and was the inspiration for later great minds, such as Alan Turing. She is now the figurehead for women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).

In 1815, Ada Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron and was the only legitimate daughter of the famous poet, Lord George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, and Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth. Lord Byron was famously characterized by one of his (married) mistresses as “mad, bad and dangerous to know” – an understatement for someone who was a suicidal, alcoholic, drug-addict who fathered a child with his half-sister!

Annabella, was the complete opposite — a privately-educated, extremely intelligent, sweet-tempered philanthropist. She was evicted by her husband one month after Ada was born, so he could be with his latest mistress. 

At a time when women were not formally educated, Annabella fostered Ada’s intellect by hiring the best private tutors, and she encouraged the study of science and mathematics (her own favourite subject). At the age of 12, Ada used her analytical mind to tackle the problem of mechanized flight, designing a steam-powered machine 15 years before a similar idea was patented.

When she was 19, Ada married William King, the 8th Baron King, with whom she had three children. Three years after their marriage, William became the 1st Earl of Lovelace, which made Ada the Countess of Lovelace.

Ada was working on the forefront of calculus, but it is her intellectual collaboration with Charles Babbage, which began when she was only 17 years old, to which she owes her fame. Charles is credited with inventing the first adding machine, the Difference Engine, and the first computer, the Analytical Engine. However, neither machine was actually completed; Charles kept tinkering with the designs, funding was impossible to secure, and the required manufacturing precision was difficult to achieve given the techniques of the time.

Ada’s contribution to the project was explaining its theory and seeing its potential. In the process of translating a paper about the Analytical Engine from French into English, Ada corrected errors and annotated the work, tripling its length. She chose a complex series of numbers (i.e. Bernoulli Numbers) as an example and reduced them to the simple functions that the machine could use (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division). Then she described the instructions that would be given to the machine. By doing so, she became the first computer programmer: “the first person to write and publish a full set of instructions that a computing device could use to reach an end result that had not been calculated in advance.” She even anticipated future computing developments, suggesting the use of symbolic logic and graphic design by the Analytical Engine.

Although she was mentally a century ahead of her time, Ada was physically trapped in an era when disease was rampant and cures were few. At the age of 13, she was left paralyzed and bed-ridden for a year after contracting measles. After the birth of her second child, she was ill for months. She had also suffered though a cholera infection. Then, she developed uterine cancer and died in 1852, at the age of 36.

This article is a summary of a more detailed discussion of Ada Lovelace, the challenges she faced and her contributions to what we now call STEM. To find out more about this year’s theme, “Choose to Challenge,” visit the International Women’s Day website. 

As someone who as a child was told by my father that I could not have a train set because that was a toy for boys, I encourage you to foster STEM education for girls. “Celebrate women’s achievement. Raise awareness against bias. Take action for equality.”

This article was originally printed in THE BERGEN NEWS and is being reprinted with permission.