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kottke.org posts about Ada Lovelace

Rebel Girls Chapter Books

Rebel Girls Lovelace Walker

The makers of the hugely popular (at least in our household) Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls series are branching out into chapter books. Their first two are available now: Ada Lovelace Cracks the Code and Madam C.J. Walker Builds a Business. Lovelace is, of course, the pioneering computer programmer while Walker a cosmetics industry pioneer and America’s first female self-made millionaire.

You can also listen to the Rebel Girls podcast episodes featuring Lovelace and Walker.


The Brilliant Life of Ada Lovelace

From Feminist Frequency, a quick video biography of Ada Lovelace, which talks about the importance of her contribution to computing.

A mathematical genius and pioneer of computer science, Ada Lovelace was not only the created the very first computer program in the mid-1800s but also foresaw the digital future more than a hundred years to come.

This is part of Feminist Frequency’s Ordinary Women series, which also covered women like Ida B. Wells and Emma Goldman.


Calculating Ada

From the BBC, an hour-long documentary on Ada Lovelace, the world’s first computer programmer.

You might have assumed that the computer age began with some geeks out in California, or perhaps with the codebreakers of World War II. But the pioneer who first saw the true power of the computer lived way back, during the transformative age of the Industrial Revolution.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone!


Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer

Charles Babbage built one of the first mechanical calculating machines but Ada Lovelace was the first to show how the machine’s arithmetic function could be abstracted to produce things other than numbers: language, graphics, or music.

There are several other Information Pioneers shorts available on Vimeo, including profiles of Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Hedy Lamarr.