According to Lovelace's Wikipedia entry, “During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine ever been built. Based on his work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer and her method is recognized as the world’s first computer program…In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lovelace’s notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognized as an early model for a computer and Lovelace’s notes as a description of a computer and software.”
Interestingly, Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who died when she was nine. Apparently her mother was obsessed "with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Lord Byron".
So, in the spirit of Ada Lovelace Day I bring you... Gertrude Bell!
One of the first working female archaeologists, she was a force in what was a man's world - and in Iraq! She did some serious work in Mesopotamian archaeology as well as travelling the world and writing books about her adventures. Read her entire story here. This obituary, written by a male colleague, is just the definition of perfection. If I could write my own obituary, this would be it.
"No woman in recent time has combined her qualities – her taste for arduous and dangerous adventure with her scientific interest and knowledge, her competence in archaeology and art, her distinguished literary gift, her sympathy for all sorts and condition of men, her political insight and appreciation of human values, her masculine vigor, hard common sense and practical efficiency – all tempered by feminine charm and a most romantic spirit."
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