
Honouring computing’s 1843 visionary, Lady Ada Lovelace - cleverjake
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/12/honouring-computings-1843-visionary.html
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bazzargh
The Lovelace & Babbage comic is fun:
<http://sydneypadua.com/2dgoggles/lovelace-the-origin-2/>

(that's the one Sydney Padua did for Lovelace Day, but there's lots more on
the site). The cartoons are in a steampunk comedy style, but backed with
copious footnotes and links to the source documents about the details and
characters.

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exDM69
Calling Ada Lovelace's program to compute Bernoulli numbers "the first
published algorithm" is slightly odd choice of wording, since mathematical
algorithms have existed long before there were machines to mechanically
compute them.

Euclid's algorithm for computing greatest common divisors of integers, from
his work Elements circa 300 B.C. is sometimes called the oldest surviving(?)
algorithm in writing.

Nevertheless, very exciting article about a very special visionary.

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shmerl
_> So much of world history leaves out or minimizes the contributions of
women, and so “of course” most of us had no idea who she was._

This sounds amazing. I thought she's really well known amongst the techie
crowd.

~~~
davedx
We were taught about her and Babbage in our History of Computing module at
university, but outside of university I haven't heard much about her to be
fair.

University educations are still good for some things! It's good to know your
roots :)

~~~
cafard
Well, but what have you heard of Babbage outside of university?

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1123581321
I was delighted to learn that Byron was her father! What an interesting
family.

I was also surprised by the framing of this. Of course history is not studied
by many people now, but how many who would know of Babbage would not know of
Lovelace? She is very famous.

~~~
jff
Personally, I've always seen more coverage of Lovelace than of Babbage--she's
thoroughly celebrated, at least at my university, along with Grace Hopper and
our own local famous female engineer (for whom the college of engineering is
named). There is no Babbage Day or anything of the sort, he's just this guy
that didn't quite build a computer.

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Surio
Related discussion. Happened a while back here on HN:

Marie Curie day: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4658763>

