The Science Museum of the University of Navarra celebrates the International Day of Ada Lovelace, the first programmer in history, with a video about her life.
The scientific institution has produced a new video of the series "Women in Science" to praise the work of this scientist who created the first software
13 | 10 | 2020
Ada Lovelace, the first programmer in history, is the protagonist of a new video in the series "Women in Science", an initiative of the Science Museum of the University of Navarra to promote the role of women in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Ada Lovelace did not have an easy life. Her childhood was lived in Victorian England, and was marked by the early separation of her parents, by a very strict education, and because at the age of fourteen she contracted a serious illness -possibly measles- that forced her to rest for a couple of years.
During her youth, she was in contact with prestigious scientists and intellectuals such as Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens or Mary Somerville, the most famous mathematician in the country, who was her tutor and a great influence in her life. Lovelace married Lord William King, Earl of Lovelace, with whom she had three children. From then on, Ada would always sign her name as Ada Lovelace.
An important milestone in Ada's life was meeting Charles Babbage, a mathematician who designed, but never built, the "analytical machine," a mechanical calculator that worked without the help of a human being.
Ada's passion for mathematics, and her intuition and scientific ability led her to develop - based on the technology used in looms - punched cards that would "weave" a sequence of numbers into Babbage's machine. This code is considered to be the first algorithm designed to be executed by a computer.
A posthumous recognition
Scientists of the time did not take Lovelace's work seriously because of her feminine condition. It took a hundred years after her death for the scientific community to recognize that Ada Lovelace had created the first computer program or software. Her notes were published under her real name.
In 1980, the U.S. Department of Defense created the Ada programming language, used in aeronautics and air traffic management, in her honor. The following year, the Association of Women in Computing created the Ada Lovelace Award, and since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded the Lovelace Medal, the most prestigious award in computing in the United Kingdom.
"Women in Science" is an initiative of the Science Museum with the collaboration of the Women for Science and Technology group of the University of Navarra. This informative project -funded by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) / Ministry of Science and Innovation-is part of the Science Museum's STEM strategy to make the teaching of subjects related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics more attractive, especially among girls and young women.