Stories in code
Ada Lovelace Day — Remembering Ada’s Role Models
Ada Lovelace’s mother was a key role model, but she needed a good education and a room of her own to achieve it.
This week we have celebrated Ada Lovelace day, a recognition of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). The dearth of women studying and working in STEM areas is well documented and Ada Lovelace day aims to increase the profile of women working in STEM areas to create role models to encourage more girls into STEM careers.
To celebrate role models, I’d like to give a shout out to two women who could be counted as Ada Lovelace’s role models: Anne Isabella Noel Byron, 11th Baroness Wentworth and Baroness Byron, her mother, also a noted mathematician and Mary Somerville, a scientist, writer and polymath who was one of Ada’s tutors.
Annabella, Ada’s mother, was by all accounts strictly religious and her marriage to the agnostic and less than pious poet Lord Byron was both a surprise and short lived. Ada was their only child. Annabella was herself a gifted child and highly educated. She studied under a former Cambridge University professor and received the equivalent education of any man attending that august institution. She studied classical literature, philosophy and her favourite subject, mathematics. Byron nicknamed her “princess of parallelograms” because of her fascination with mathematics.
Her marriage to Lord Byron ended acrimoniously when Ada was a baby. Annabella was determined that Ada be educated in mathematics and logic to counteract any possible inherited tendency towards Lord Byron’s perceived insanity and romantic excess.
Mary Somerville, after who Somerville College Oxford is named, studied mathematics and astronomy and was, with Caroline Herschel, the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
She was also politically engaged and put her signature on the petition presented to the British Parliament by John Stuart Mill in 1866 asking that women be given the right to vote. She was passionate about promoting education for girls. She lived during the French Revolution and noted:
From my earliest years my mind revolved against oppression and tyranny, and I resented the injustice of the world in denying all those privileges of education to my sex which were so lavishly bestowed on men. (1874)
There are two observations that I’d like to make about these role models. The first is that they both received a broad education and had wide ranging interests. They were not just focused on STEM, but studied and were engaged with philosophy, music, art, religion, politics. Encouragement of the pursuit of a wide range of study and interests is fundamental to nurturing imagination. Albert Einstein noted:
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.
The second observation is that interest and encouragement towards computing, engineering, maths etc. is not the sole purview of schools. It starts in the home. If we want to encourage more girls in these areas, perhaps we need to look there and think how we can help parents, particularly mothers, who we know tend to be extremely time poor and preoccupied.
Mary Somerville speaks of having the time and space to think and engage with the world beyond household duties. Virginia Woolf spoke a truth when she talked about having a room of one’s own.
The debilitating toll of lengthy domestic duties is a known factor mitigating against women pariticpating in the arts, sciences and other paid professions (UN Women).
Mother’s need that space and that time and in that quieter place they can nurture their own imagination and curiosity. They will then be role models and pass this on to their daughters.
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