IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 47
DECember 2016
∕
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
WIKIMEDIA/PUBLIC DOMAIN
While educational opportunities for women began to
change slowly with the introduction of the salon culture [3]
the conventional education of
a privileged female child still
represented exclusion, prejudice, and stereotyping.
Ada Lovelace, as a daughter of the 19th century, was
certainly born into privilege
and a conventional "feminine"
education would have been
her birthright. However, while
privileged and wealthy, Ada's
parents did not fit the stereotypes of the era, nor was her
life to follow convention. Ada's
mother, Anne Isabella, known
as Annabella, was intellectually gifted and had received,
unusually for a young woman
of the time, an education that
included science and mathematics. As a consequence of
her sharp mind (paired, presumably with her family
wealth), Annabella was a particularly appealing target for
the romantic attentions of the
poet Byron, who named her
his "Princess of the Parallelograms." However, this was not
a marriage of like minds or
shared values, and whether
intended or unintended, a
consequence of the union of
Annabella and Byron was the Portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, by Alfred Edward Chalon (1838).
arrival of Ada Lovelace.
Following the separation of her parents shortly after
perhaps most notably, the inventor of the world's first
her birth, Ada was raised by her mother in an environtheoretical computer - the "Analytical Engine -
ment that ran counter to the conventions of the day.
Charles Babbage. Theoretical in the sense that it had
Against tradition, Ada was schooled rigorously in mathnever been built, the device intrigued Ada. It made her
ematics and science, on the basis of her mother's
reason about what such a device could do and from
belief that this would protect or insulate her against
that reasoning a paradox emerged that Ada could not
the madness Annabella believed to possess Ada's
have predicted or even been aware of. She described a
father, who she believed (perhaps correctly) to be a disfundamental concept in a field of science that did not
solute and depraved individual as well as a romantic
exist, which would later be invented by a man that had
literary genius.
not yet been born.
Ada possessed natural talents for language and
Ada's Paradox
numeracy but as a young woman of her time, she was
Is it possible that the unintended consequences of
excluded from attending university. Instead she received
exclusion, prejudicec and stereotyping of the era into
further education and tutoring from a variety of individwhich Ada was born, coupled with the privilege that
uals, such as Mary Somerville, Augustus de Morgan and,
47
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