Ada Lovelace Day – A Nottinghamshire heroine
Today is Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Ada Lovelace was a mathemematician and contemporary of Charles Babbage. Babbage is credited with the inventing the Analytical Engine, or the first “computer.” Lovelace first met Babbage in 1833, and later she wrote a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers, or the first computer software.
But what I want to celebrate is her Nottinghamshire roots. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, and her grave is next to Byron’s just a few miles from here in Hucknall. She is a wonderful part of Nottinghamshire’s history, and an extraodinary part of the history of the computing.
Ada Lovelace day is about celebrating women’s achievements in technology- and I’ve chosen to highlight my experiences at Nottingham Trent University working as part of what was the NTU Computer Services team. I was working with a talented group of women, whom I want to acknowledge today:
- Carys Thomas – Assistant Director (Service Strategy) Computing Services, Loughborough University
- Stevie Vanhegan – Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Education, Nottingham Trent University
- Julie Plumb – Head of Web Development at Nottingham Trent
- Alison McNab – HEA-ICS ILS Coordinator at Loughborough University
