Ada Lovelace Gets Honored on Wikimedia Commons

Dana Hunter

This is actually quite intensely cool: this portrait of Ada Lovelace was today’s Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day:

Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (Ada Lovelace), 1840. Portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon (1780–1860). Image courtesy Science & Society Picture Library via Wikimedia Commons.
Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (Ada Lovelace), 1840. Portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon (1780–1860). Image courtesy Science & Society Picture Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Amazing to think that this computer I’m writing on exists in part because of her, a poet’s daughter who became a mathematician, and explored the collaboration between human and machine.

Charles Babbage called her “The Enchantress of Numbers.” I might have to do a Halloween costume round that…

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Ada Lovelace Gets Honored on Wikimedia Commons

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6 thoughts on “Ada Lovelace Gets Honored on Wikimedia Commons”

  5. F [is for failure to emerge]
    5

    I was gonna say: You do read 2D Goggles, don’t you? :) I love Padua’s stylizing of Lovelace. I do find that watercolor interesting, it makes the clothing seem almost impossible in places. (I can’t think of a better way to describe it.)

  6. keresthanatos
    6

    One of the most roubust programming languages ever developed used many of her ideas, and is named after her.

    There are many other women that get short shrift on the honor due them. Two that I can think of right off the top of my head….

    Lise Meiter, the physicist that explained fission, and made possible nuclear energy.

    Rosalind Franklin, the true discoverer of the shape of DNA.

    AND MANY MORE

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