I was going to buy you a “Happy Ada Lovelace Day!” greeting card with “Happy Ada Lovelace Day!” spelled out in pink binary code (OF COURSE) but they were all sold out when I went to the greeting card store.
So instead you’ll have to make do with this article on a few of the wonderful things that women have invented but have received little credit for, thanks to their inverted genitals. We’ll start with Lovelace, although I’m sure you already know all about her. Right???
The daughter of Lord Byron, Lovelace was steered toward math by her mother, who feared her daughter would follow in her father’s “mad, bad, and dangerous” literary footsteps. Luckily, she loved the subject, and remained devoted throughout her brief life—she died in 1852 at age 36, soon after an ambitious, proto-Moneyball attempt to beat the odds at horse racing by developing mathematical models to help place her bets.
When she was barely 20, she started collaborating with the inventor Charles Babbage at the University of London on his “Analytical Engine,” an early model of a computer. In 1843, she added extensive notes of her own to a paper on Babbage’s machine, detailing how the Engine could be fed step-by-step instructions to do complicated math, and trained to work not only with numbers but also words and symbols “to compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”
The notes are considered the first descriptions of what we now call algorithms and computer programming, and for decades, historians have argued over whether Lovelace came up with them herself, or Babbage was somehow the real author. “Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the ‘Notes’ than trouble,” writes one historian, and a “manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents.” But Babbage’s own memoir suggests she deserved credit for the “the algebraic working out of the different problems,” and more recently she’s been honored with, among other things, a British medal of honor, a Google Doodle, a tunnel boring machine in London, and her own annual celebration. In 2011, the Ada Initiative was founded to help promote women in computer science and open-source technology.
Here’s another great article on Lovelace, courtesy of Slog tipper Karen.
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