18 October: Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated on the third Tuesday of October to "... raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths," and to "create new role models for girls and women" in these fields. So who was Ada Lovelace? Why celebrate her? The following ten facts will tell you.

1. Her real name was Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace. Ada married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, and she became Countess of Lovelace.
2. Her father was the poet, Lord Byron - she was his only legitimate child, although he left her mother when Ada was a month old and never saw her again. Ada didn't even see a picture of her father until she was 20 years old.
3. Ada's mother, Annabella, was very bitter towards Lord Byron and this bitterness was the reason behind Ada being taught maths from an early age, because her mother didn't want her turning out like her father. The bitterness even extended to Ada herself - she was often left with her grandmother and referred to in Annabella's letters as "it". However, since society at the time favoured custody of the children going to the father she had to pretend to be a loving mother and wrote frequent letters to her mother about the child's welfare, with instructions to her mother to keep them all, in case she was ever required to produce evidence that she was a loving mother.
4. At 12, Ada was interested in flight, and determined to fly. She researched the topic thoroughly, including the best material to make wings out of and the anatomy of birds. She decided to write a book, Flyology, on the subject, with illustrations.
5. Before her marriage, she had an affair with her tutor and tried to elope with him. However, being well known at the time, her tutor's relatives recognised her and told her mother, who covered the whole thing up to prevent scandal.
6. She met Charles Babbage through a friend and became most interested in his mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. She worked on it with him and made notes, including an algorithm to be carried out by a machine. Although her algorithm was never actually tested on the machine, it is regarded as the first computer programme and she is regarded as the first computer programmer.
7. Despite her mother's efforts, Ada was interested in poetry as well as science and didn't believe maths and poetry were all that different.
8. Unlike Babbage, who believed computers were little more than calculators, Ada envisaged that the machines, in time, would be able to do so much more than add up.
9. She had a bit of a gambling addiction. She formed a syndicate with some male friends, and came up with a mathematical model for making bets. Sadly, it didn't work. She got into debt and had to admit this to her husband.
10. A few weeks before she died from cancer at the age of 36, she confessed something to her husband on her deathbed. Nobody knows what she said, but her husband walked out and never saw her again. She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.