The Ada Lovelace exhibition opens today at the Science Museum in London to celebrate Ada Lovelace Day and the bicentenary of her birth.
Ada Lovelace was a Victorian pioneer of the computing age and has seen been recognised for being the first programmer. She is celebrated for having discovered the potential in symbols rather than just numbers and foreshadowing modern technology almost a century in advance. She was the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Bryon and intellect Annabella Milbanke.
Ada Lovelace is celebrated for having studied maths and science at a time when women rarely did and for collaborating with Charles Babbage on calculating machines.
The free exhibition includes Lovelace’s portraits, letters and notes, alongside the calculating machines she worked on.
Curator of the new exhibition is Dr Tilly Blyth who told the Guardian in a recent article that she hopes the exhibition will breathe life back into her story in the year of her 200th birthday.
Blyth said she wants the exhibition to encourage visitors to appreciate Lovelace’s true legacy, which was something more profound than her instructions for Babbage’s unfinished machine.
“I would say what is really more significant is that intellectual leap that she made for considering what the analytical engine could do,” she said speaking to the Guardian.
“[Babbage] was thinking about the different simultaneous equations that the engine could calculate but what she saw is [that] this isn’t just about number; it’s about symbol and therefore music and possibly letters – and [the machine] could calculate a whole range of different things.”
