On This Day: Ada Lovelace Day | Great Women Spirits

Ada Lovelace Day honors the ingenious mind and foresight of a woman who’s largely regarded as the first computer programmer, and also pays tribute to all women working in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This special day––celebrated each year on the second Tuesday of October–-was inaugurated in 2009 to mark the contributions of women in areas of study historically populated with, as Babbage phrased it, “masculine intellects.”

[She’s an] enchantress who has thrown her magical spell over the most abstract of sciences and grasped it with a force few masculine intellects could have exerted over it.

–-Excerpt of a letter from Charles Babbage to Michael Faraday

about Ada Lovelace, dated September 9, 1843

We may say most aptly, that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

––Excerpt of Lovelace’s “Note A” appended to her translation of

Luigi Menebrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine", 1843