Female Warrior Flower Power: Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace Day is today, October 10, 2017.

Ada Lovelace Day (ALD) is an international celebration day of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). It aims to increase the profile of women in STEM and, in doing so, create new role models who will encourage more girls into STEM careers and support women already working in STEM. ~ FindingAda.com

For months, I’ve been working on this post about Ada Lovelace, and I haven’t shared it with you. It’s so long – too long. I’m having a hard time simplifying her life down to a few paragraphs. Since I apparently can’t shorten this enough to make a quick read, here are some links to make it easier for you to skip around and read only what’s interesting to you:

• who is Ada Lovelace?
• education, accomplishments and fairies
• what makes her a warrior
• what do dandelions have to do with all of this?

If you want even more info about Ada, there’s a detailed write-up about Ada Lovelace on Wikipedia. There are also quite a few biographical books. The one I’ve been reading and really enjoying is “The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter” by Benjamin Woolley, 1999.

Disclaimer: I’m not a historian, an expert, or even a very good writer. What I’ve written here is my interpretation of what I’ve learned about her life and shouldn’t be used or referenced as any sort of authoritative text. This is just me babbling about what I understand and admire about her.

Who is Ada Lovelace?

Her full name is a whopper: Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace. She’s impressive, but also an interesting person, and so she’s the first woman to be featured in my art series named Female Warrior Flower Power (FWFP for short). Ada lived during the Victorian age, from 1815 until 1852, and passed away at only 36 years old. She was the only legitimate child of the flamboyant and charming poet, Lord Byron.

Widely thought to be the first person to write a computer program, she lived a life balanced between her love of metaphysics and her rigorous, formal study of mathematics. Though short, her life was filled with sickness, intrigue, family strife, and close calls with scandal. Her mother strongly disapproved of her father’s lifestyle, and when Ada was only one month old, they separated – an unusual occurrence back then. Ada never saw Lord Byron alive again, and he died when she was eight years old. As she matured, Ada enjoyed a full social life. She was a charming belle of the Court, and later took up gambling, becoming a bit too chummy with male acquaintances and stirring up gossip.

Education, Accomplishments and Fairies

Throughout her early childhood, Lady Wentworth, Ada’s mother, was scandalized by Lord Byron’s affairs and other excesses and considered them a form of insanity. Ada was an imaginative child and Lady Wentworth worried that Ada was too much like her father, feeling threatened by what she called Ada’s mental wandering. She hoped a serious focus would stop Ada from succumbing to Lord Byron’s insanity and pushed her to focus. Relentlessly driven by her mother to study, study, study, Ada blossomed as an exceptional student and a brilliant mathematician.

As her abilities grew, fellow mathematician Charles Babbage took notice of the transformation, befriended her, and they formed a working relationship. He saw the importance of intuition and creativity to her process and affectionately called her his “Lady Fairy.” She even referred to herself as a fairy in her writings to Babbage, with statements like this: “science has thrown its net over me, & has fairly ensnared the fairy, or whatever she is.” [from the Woolley book linked above]

Because she understood his advanced ideas, Babbage eventually hired Ada to assist with translations of his famous paper on the Analytical Engine – a paper that very few men or women of that time period could read and understand. While studying his paper, she brilliantly realized that the engine could potentially be used as a general-purpose computer. She then wrote in the notes to go along with one translation, Note G, the first ever description of a computer program, and history was made. That’s right – a woman who loved fairies and metaphysics wrote the first computer program. That makes me want to stand up and do Snoopy’s happy dance every time I think about it.

Writing the world’s first computer program is an amazing accomplishment, but I was dumbstruck when I first learned about her interest in metaphysics and the nature of reality. I can really relate to that! She preserved this fascination throughout her life and valued creativity and intuition as much as she valued science and math. Ada wasn’t afraid to allow her imagination to wander, contemplating fairies and other magical unseen things, and then used this creativity to great advantage in her mathematical pursuits.

As a computer scientist myself, I don’t know what I would have done without my intuition and my dreams to help solve some of the more difficult problems I had to tackle. I can’t tell you how many times I went home from work stumped over a particularly tough program and let my dreams solve it for me overnight. Now I put that same dreaming and intuition process to work to imagine how to bring my paintings to life.

Here’s another glimpse into Ada’s thought process. This was written to her mathematics tutor, Augustus De Morgan:

“I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one’s elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar.”

via Wikipedia – Toole, Betty Alexandra (1998), Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers: Prophet of the Computer Age, Strawberry Press, ISBN 0912647183.

What Makes Her a Warrior?

She appears to have maintained an open mind and embraced both science and metaphysics during the Victorian era, a prosperous period of time where romanticism and mysticism were often at odds with science and technology (note: I’m no historian and am going by what I’ve read, so please accept my apologies if you disagree on this – apparently people disagree on historical “facts” and stuff!!!). Ada, while brilliantly embracing science and mathematics as demanded by her mother, also was able to keep intact that part of herself that adored romanticism and mysticism.

This “poetical science” was what enabled her to see the Analytical Engine in a creative new way. Doing that required a lot of courage and resolve on her part – these are the hallmarks of a warrior. She had to first present the information, and then to defend it against the critics, and she was a woman in the Victorian age. Even today, we have a low percentage of women studying and working in STEM fields. I think that a woman having such a huge success in mathematics back in the mid-1800s is really impressive. There couldn’t have been more than a handful of other women working in that field. Apparently, I’m not the only one who’s impressed, because in 1980, the United States Department of Defense created a computer programming language and named it after her. Every year on the second Tuesday of October, Ada Lovelace Day is celebrated as a way to highlight women’s achievements in STEM and encourage mentoring.

Dandelions and Transformation

In my fanciful mixed-media painting titled “Lady Fairy” (pictured at the top of this page), I toy with how Ada Lovelace feels imagining herself to be a fairy, while at the same time seeing herself fluttering about in the air, as a fairy in her mind’s eye. She’s adorned with dandelions, a flower that goes through a major transformation during its life cycle. Ada underwent a transformation into a renowned mathematician, yet was able to balance science and intuition in her life. I’ll be writing more about transformation in a future blog post and in my newsletter.

Thanks for sticking around to the end of this long post. I hope the next warrior woman write-up will be more concise! Prints of Lady Fairy can be purchased at my Etsy shop.