|
| Ada Lovelace Day
March 24 2009 is Ada Lovelace Day, on which we recognize female role models in science and technology.
Amongst the women whom I admire most in science & engineering history are pioneers in
Top of the list is Ada Lovelace herself, along with her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke (Wikipedia) , who steered her into mathematics.
Ada's mother hoped that mathematics might temper any wild tendencies she might pick up from her father,
the free-living incestuous poet Lord Byron.
Nevertheless, Ada died young (at 36), but not before becoming the world's first computer programmer.
The Victorian computer of Charles Babbage (Wikipedia) , with its mechanical cogs, was never finished,
but the memoir on it is an important mathematical paper.
Ada, Countess Lovelace, wrote a longer commentary on this memoir,
which we might now call the "documentation" (or manual) for Babbage's computer.
One of Ada's "Notes" is an example program, which (roughly speaking) does trigonometry
(it computes Bernoulli numbers, which appear as coefficients in the Taylor series of the tangent function).
Babbage's comments about Ada's contributions seem positively patriarchal.
He thought to "save [her] the effort" by writing her program for her,
but she "sent it back for amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process".
This is what women have been up against and must still fight today:
sexism disguised as concern, or (to quote an ex-President) the "soft bigotry of low expectations".
Babbage himself may also have been an early example of the "15% more famous" type
(as in, "I should be roughly 15% more famous than I actually am")
since he is said to have been tight-lipped about others' influence on his work.
Anyway, it seems to me one can acknowledge Babbage's patronizing attitude
while still recognizing his role as Ada's collaborator and mentor.
As anyone will know who's read the classic historical account The Soul of a New Machine (Wikipedia) ,
the process of building a computer is as much a feat of large-scale engineering, management and corporate financing
as it is of individual technical application.
But writing a computer program on paper is a task any programmer can identify with today.
Then there's Delia Derbyshire.
Delia's electronic music is beautiful: many people will recognize her most famous piece, the Doctor Who theme music (Wikipedia) .
Just go listen to that bassline and then tell me the screaming synth doesn't chill your bones
and the major-chord change doesn't bring tears of awed relief 
(Well, maybe you had to be there: 8-year-old kids hiding from Daleks behind the sofa, waiting for the Doctor to save the day. Ahem.)
Turns out the real time traveller was Delia, being sampled by Coldcut and others well into the 21st century.
Then, of course, there are the many women in biology.
Some of my favorites:
Rosalind Franklin (DNA structure), Barbara McClintock (jumping genes), Bonnie Bassler (quorum sensing), Ruth Nussinov (RNA folding grammars).
I would like to write more about each of these; perhaps on Ada Lovelace days in future years.
I will mention the last, Ruth Nussinov, since she is closest to my work (e.g. see this homework exercise).
Her 1978 paper is not indexed in PubMed:
- Nussinov R, Piecznik G, Grigg JR and Kleitman DJ (1978) Algorithms for loop matchings. SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics.
However it is a classic algorithm for structured pattern-finding in RNA that lays the foundation for understanding evolutionary motifs using a Chomsky normal-form language
(see, for example, the book Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al).
-- IanHolmes - 23 Mar 2009
Edited to add:
How could I forget Margaret Dayhoff's continuous-time model of protein evolution?
Thanks, Iddo!
I would have added Dorothy Hodgkin (Wikipedia) but I will be at it all day (oh, I guess that's the point) |
