Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
WomanUp, America! joined the computer world on March 24 to celebrate the first Ada Lovelace Day, held to honor the First Lady of Information Technology (IT). The honor is way overdue for Lady Lovelace, for her recognition as the world’s first computer programmer did not come until 1953, some 110 years after she published her interpretation of Charles Babbages’s Analytical Engine, which used punched cards to read instructions and data for solving mathematical problems.
In 1842 she published her translation of the Italian “Bernoulli numbers,” which furthered the potential of the Analytical Engine. She signed her work with the initials “A.A.L.” to prevent her gender from automatically bringing “discredit among mathematicians,” she later noted. Her translation, mathematical interpretation and philosophical annotations astonished the mathematical world, and academicians of the day sought to correspond with A.A.L never realizing who the author actually was.
Lady Lovelace, born as Augusta Ada Byron, was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke. Lord Byron left the family when Ada was only two months old, and never saw his daughter again. Her mother purposely steered her daughter away from her father’s world and the “eccentricities of Romantic literature” into math and science.
Augusta Ada met the great mathematician Babbage in 1833, and together they constructed analytic devices: first the Difference Engine and, later, the “Analytical Engine.” The significance of her original notes on the Analytical Engine were overlooked until they were republished in 1953. Scientists then easily reached consensus that the engine itself was a model for a computer and that Lady Lovelace’s 1842 notes actually described software programming.
Ada Byron became Lady Lovelace throughher 1835 marriage to William King, the first Earl of Lovelace, and they had three children. She died at the age of 37. Her contributions put her, as noted in Computer Weekly, “at the confluence of two radical phenomena: information technology and female emancipation,” and noted her will to go beyond the expected “softer” skills of her age.
Ada’s name now lives on in millions of bits of information, as The U.S. Department of Defense in 1980 settled on the name “Ada” for a new standardized computer language.
The Genius of Lady Lovelace
The following is a very small section of the 1842 “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” translated with mathematical equations and philosophical annotations by the Countess of Lovelace. **She hid her gender by using only her initials at the end of the published work.
"Thus the idea of constructing an apparatus capable of aiding human weakness in such researches, is a conception which, being realized, would mark a glorious epoch in the history of the sciences. The plans have been arranged for all the various parts, and for all the wheel-work, which compose this immense apparatus, and their action studied; but these have not yet been fully combined together in the drawings and mechanical notation. The confidence which the genius of Mr. Babbage must inspire, affords legitimate ground for hope that this enterprise will be crowned with success; and while we render homage to the intelligence which directs it, let us breathe aspirations for the accomplishment of such an undertaking.”
A. A. L.
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Amazing Grace
Admiral Hopper was born Grace Brewster Murray in New York City in 1906. She first pursued mathematics and physics at Vassar and then at Yale, where she earned a master’s degree in 1930. After her marriage to Vincent Hopper, she went on to earn her doctorate in mathematics from Yale, in 1934, and her career as an educator and industry consultant began. During World War II she enlisted in the Naval Reserves, helping in the new areas of computational projects.
Her contributions to programming techniques – always with the goal of making computers more programmer- and application-friendly – took her from academia to business and industry, with her service in the Navy always remaining a prime passion. Admiral Hopper met early resistance to her belief that computers should be “user friendly” and recommended that an entire programming language be developed using English words.
She later wrote: “I was told very quickly that I couldn’t do this because computers didn’t understand English.”
She persevered with her ideas, though, and published her first paper on her English “compiler” language in 1952, which launched her recognition as a programmer, speaker and teacher. Her many degrees and awards included her receipt in 1969 as the Data Processing Management Association’s inaugural “Computer Science Man-of-theYear (sic) Award”.
Matching her aim to “use English words,” Admiral Hopper is credited with popularizing the term “computer bug,” which came after colleagues at Harvard discovered a moth in a circuit relay. She described the removal of the moth as “debugging the system.” (The remains of the moth are in a log book in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History.)
She also always dared her listeners to extend their ambitions, and often used her now-famous quote: “A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what a ship is built for.”
Admiral Hopper died in 1992 at the age of 86, but her name lives on not only in association with the programming languages COBOL and FORTRAN, but also with the christening of a Navy destroyer – the USS Hopper. It is the USS Hopper’s Latin motto that probably best exemplifies the spirit of the Admiral: Aude et Effice, which translates to “Dare and Do.”
Photo of the “first computer bug” – a moth found by Admiral Hopper and Harvard colleagues in an interrupted circuit relay. The logbook and moth are now preserved in a display at the Smithsonian Institution.
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Alice Munro
Alice Munro’s life and the settings for her writing have never strayed far from her rural roots in southwestern Ontario, Canada, where she was born in 1931. However, within those small boundaries Ms. Munro has produced stories with lessons that resonate on an international scale.
Ms. Munro began writing when she was 12 years old, and she hoped to pursue a literary degree in college.However, she had to leave the University of Ontario due to financial difficulties, and subsequently married James Munro.While they were rearing three daughters in Victoria, Ms. Munro ran a bookshop and “stole” as many hours as she could to write.
At the age of 28 she wrote “The Peace of Utrecht,” which she has called the turning point of her career, as she sought to describe and reflect on her reaction as a 12-year-old girl to her mother’s having developed Parkinson’s disease. Her first collection of short stories (Dances of the Happy Shades) was published in 1968.
The critics immediately took notice of her ability to write “accessible, moving stories that explore human complexities in a seemingly effortless style,” according to one review.
The coming of age of young girls in small towns, with accompanying family dilemmas and revelations “that give meaning to events,” has long been a hallmark of Ms. Munro’s work.
More recent collections reflect the passage of years, as she has turned her focus toward middle age and the elderly and the consideration of “women alone.”
When asked how she could capture such universal experiences and truths from her small-town life, Ms. Munro said, “I think there's perhaps an advantage living here of knowing more different sorts of people than you would know in a larger community, where you'd be shut up, mostly, in your own income or educational or professional ‘class’. Human experience, though, doesn't seem to me to differ, except in fairly superficial ways, no matter what the customs and surroundings.”
Ms. Munro and her second husband Gerald Fremlin divide their time between homes in Ontario, close to her childhood home, and in British Columbia.
Her newest collection of stories is titled Too Much Happiness ; it will be published August 25 by McClelland and Stewart publishers. Woman Up, America! congratulates Ms. Munro on her receipt of the Man Booker Prize, and notes with appreciation her lessons about, in her words, “ . . . the big, bulging, awful, mysterious entity called THE TRUTH.” (Review Alice Munro’s bibliography )