Ada Lovelace
The room was dominated
by a wonderful portrait of her by Margaret Carpenter, appropriate that a woman
who is now seen as an icon for women scientists was painted by another woman.
It’s a lovely image of an attractive fashionable young woman.
There were
interesting cases on her early life when her mother, who had separated from
Byron when Ada was 7 months old, had introduced her to engineers, scientists
and medics. Her tutor was a mathematician.
In 1842 Ada
translated an article by Babbage, the computer pioneer, into English adding her
own notes section to it as a commentary. It was the first article to articulate
the significance of an analytical engine to use numbers to abstract their use.
It was lovely that a model of Babbage’s machine was to one side of the portrait.
There were lots
of letters by and to Ada and I loved a description of her by Faraday in
assuring colleagues that she had written the notes not him in which he called
her a “youthful fairy”!
Closes on 31
March 2016.
Review
Evening Standard
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