Celebrating Women in Computing – Ada Lovelace #SheIsWhyICode

SIGUCCS Commuity

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

As the daughter of poet Lord Byron, her mother wanted to make sure that she did not have her father’s artistic temperament and insured that she was taught sciences and math as a young girl. Her work brought her into collaboration with Charles Babbage, “father of computers” where she was asked to translate an Italian article about a military machine – the Analytical Engine.

Lovelace notes

Her notes that accompanied the translation are said to be the first computer program or algorithm. It is also said that she developed a vision for the capabilities of a computer to go beyond calculations and number-crunching; however she dismissed the capabilities of artificial intelligence, stating “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

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About SIGUCCS Editor

The Special Interest Group on University and College Computing Services (SIGUCCS) is an association of professionals who support and manage the diverse aspects of information technology services at higher education institutions. SIGUCCS is one of 36 special interest groups of ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. SIGUCCS focuses on issues surrounding the support, delivery, and management of those services, and provides professional development opportunities for its members and the other individuals in the field.