One of my favorite things about my new job is that I learn something new every day. A minute piece of trivia that I stumbled across on Friday inspired me to create this new column on my blog. Every week I will spotlight a different woman in history. This is by no means intended as a biography or other in-depth study, but merely a means of bringing to light women whose accomplishments that have impressed me in some way but that I never learned about in school. I will begin with the woman who inspired it all: Augusta Ada King, Lady Lovelace, who is credited with creating the first computer program (which consisted of holes drilled in a wooden card as well as the basic concepts of structured programming that are still followed today). She was also the daughter of poet Lord Byron, though she was raised almost solely by her mother. She not only suggested a program for a machine created by Charles Babbage that would calculate Bernoulli numbers, she also foresaw that such machines could go beyond number-crunching and calculations to create complex music and graphics and as such be used for both practical and scientific purposes. She managed to be both creative and analytical, mathematical and poetical. Which makes me identify with her because I've always been good at math, but had a passion for creative writing (a trait I've not found to be common among my other creative writing-inclined friends). It is a marvel to me that such a woman could have been raised in Georgian-Victorian England--a time period not precisely known for looking kindly on women's education or rights. And it makes me even more interested in studying that period on a graduate school level.
(Sources: Ada Byron Network, "Ada Lovelace Biography" by Betty Alexander Toole, Ed.D. and "Ada Lovelace" - Wikipedia)
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