Adaweek : Celebrating Women in Engineering

This week is Adaweek in the Paris region. Adaweek is a week (duh!) of events,  debates and discussions around the "Women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics)" question(s). (Criteo is hosting the event on Thursday, come and visit us!!)

I encourage you to read about the role Ada Lovelace played in the field of Computer Science (Wikipedia is the best place to start). To summarize, she was the first one to understand the fundamental difference between a pocket calculator and a computer. And she did so a full century before the first practical implementation of either was built.

You would be forgiven for thinking that a computer is just a more powerful pocket calculator. That is not the case. As was formalized later by Alan Turing , another major English contributor to Computer Science, the abstract model of a computer can be used to think about 'computation' in a rigorous, mathematical way.

In her own words : "The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, is not merely adapted for tabulating the results of one particular function and of no other, but for developing and tabulating any function whatever. In fact the engine may be described as being the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity..." (source).

As she was the daughter of Lord Byron, I expected it would be easy to find a poem about her. That is not the case (I'll refer you to Wikipedia to understand why it should have been obvious...). However, I did find this little gem on PoemHunter that I share here for your enjoyment.

Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's child,
With the numbers made poetry.
By computing, she was beguiled.
Computer programmer was she,
A pioneer of the machine
That intertwines all life today.
She foretold what it all could mean,
Way ahead of her time, do say.
She loved to gamble and did try
To find a mathematic spin.
On making bets - it went awry.
But otherwise, she was a win.

'The Enchantress of Numbers' got
10/16 as her numbered spot.