ADA Lovelace Day – October 11, 2022, history, significance
Ada Lovelace Day on October 13 highlights the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Launched in 2009 as a celebration of women in science, the event promotes programs that encourage girls and women to pursue careers in STEM.
A daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace is widely known as the first person to recognize the potential of early computers and published what is known as an algorithm. Before most others, Lovelace recognized that computers could do more than simple number-crunching, opening the door to complex functions and ushering in the modern era of computing.
History of Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is a worldwide celebration of the achievements that women have made in STEM industries, which stands for science, technology, engineering, and maths. The day is about increasing the profile of females in STEM. The hope is that by doing this we will help to create new role models for women all across the globe! This will help to encourage more females to take roles within STEM sectors.
The date was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson back in 2009. One of her reasons for creating this date is because she was concerned that females in the tech world were invisible. Instead of highlighting the problem, she decided that the best way to tackle this would be to highlight unseen women, shouting loud about all of the incredible things that these women have accomplished. It is not hard to see why Ada Lovelace was the obvious choice to kick things off!
ADA LOVELACE DAY TIMELINE
1843
First Algorithm
Lovelace publishes her translation and appended notes of Babbage’s lecture about his Analytical Engine, a proposed general-purpose computer. Her added notes are now recognized as the first algorithm.
November 27, 1852
Lovelace Dies
Ada Lovelace dies of uterine cancer at the young age of 36. It’s only a century later that the innovative ideas in her work are recognized.
1980
Ada Gets an Eponymous Computer Language
The U.S. Department of Defense names a new computer language Ada to honor Lovelace. The reference manual for the language is numbered with her birth year, 1815.
2009
First Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day is designated as the second Tuesday of October. The event aims to raise the profile of women in STEM fields and encourage girls to study science, engineering, and maths.
5 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT EARLY COMPUTERS
The first computer weighed 27 tons
Built in 1945, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) took up 1,800 square feet and was used for military calculations until 1955.
The first mouse was wooden
The first computer mouse, invented by Doug Engelbart in 1964, was made of wood.
The first gigabyte drive cost $40k
In 1980, the first gigabyte drive sold for $40,000 and weighed 550 pounds.
The computer’s precursor was a loom
In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a system of wooden punch cards that “programmed” fabric patterns into a loom.
Memory has gotten way bigger
Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine had a memory of 1,000 40-digit numbers. Today, it’s not uncommon to carry a terabyte’s worth of data — something like 75 million printed pages — on a pocket-sized flash drive.
How to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day
There are many different things that you can do to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. The obvious place to start is by getting to know more about Ada Lovelace and her achievements. A lot of people would say that her biggest achievement was that she was the first person to see the Engine’s creative potential. She explained how the engine could do a lot more than just calculate numbers. She believed it could create art and music so long as it was given the correct inputs and programming.
You can also spend some time on Ada Lovelace Day learning about other women in this industry who have had a massive impact. We will give you some names to give you a helping hand with your research! How about the world’s first astronaut-neurologist and Canada’s first female astronaut? These titles go to Roberta Bondar.
She was also been inducted into the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame, as well as boasting more than 22 honorary degrees. Another woman who has made her mark on the STEM industries is Irene Au. She has built outstanding design teams for the likes of Yahoo and Google, yet her biggest accomplishment has to be the creation of her own program of study in the field of human-computer interaction.
Another woman that is definitely worth a mention on Ada Lovelace Day is Adriana Ocampo, the Science Program Manager at NASA Headquarters. A Columbian-born planetary geologist, she was worked on a number of the planetary science projects run by NASA. We’d also recommend delivering into the stories of statistician and social reformer Florence Nightingale, computer scientist and inventor Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, iconographer Susan Kare, Internet pioneer Radia Perlman, and NASA space scientist Katherine Johnson.
