Tom Simonite, online technology editor
Today, bloggers around the world are posting about enchantress of numbers, Ada Lovelace - the "world's first programmer".
March 24 has been declared "Ada Lovelace Day" by social software consultant Suw Charman-Anderson
in an attempt to use the Victorian countess as a poster girl for the contribution of women to technology past, present and future. Nearly 2,000 posts have already written on the topic, and there are likely a lot more to come. Plenty of media outlets are also taking part
Lovelace is dubbed the first programmer because in 1843 she wrote a series of instructions for Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical computer
that would calculate Bernoulli numbers
. She was the first to make a conceptual leap that had huge effects nearly 100 years later when electronic computers arrived.
Today's online activity is supposed to be a reminder of the contributions women make to technical fields, to inspire future female technologists sometimes deterred by the various social factors that conspire to make technology so male dominated.
You can see a map of all the posts so far here
. Most people are using their posts to flag up other notable female engineers - for example, 1940s film star Hedy Lamar
who invented a technique
used in wireless communications, and Barbara Liskov, a computer programmer awarded the "Nobel of computing"
earlier this month.
To add to the names referenced in the day's posts, I'll dedicate this one to Karen Spärck Jones (1935-2007), a British computer scientist whose contributions to information retrieval are still used in many search engines.