Facing Arguments Against Lovelace's Authorship
During her lifetime and even after her death, Lovelace encountered the detrimental social effects of the frail, incompetent Victorian female stereotype. Lovelace's anonymous translation and Notes were received respectfully by the scientific community, but "she couldn't actually put her name on her greatest work because it was improper for women to be doing scientific work at that level...."-Valerie Aurora, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization, during student phone interview [9]
"Arguments against Lovelace's authorship include: [22] |
Click numbers to read arguments against Lovelace.
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"Interestingly, these arguments are rarely used to question men’s authorship of joint works; indeed mental instability or difficult personalities sometimes seems to add to the reputation of male scientists and mathematicians (Nikola Tesla, John Nash, and Isaac Newton, to name just a few). Certainly I’ve personally never seen a single published mathematical error (actually, in her case merely failure to correct someone else’s error) used as an argument against a male scientist’s competency as a whole." -Ada Initiative 2013 [22] Double click to read Padua's comic on Lovelace's comic. "Anyone who has read more than a little about Ada Lovelace will become gradually aware of an asterisk that hovers over her status as the 'first computer programmer." Padua 2015. [2]
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"People argue that “the algebraic working out” of the numbers of Bernoulli means that Babbage wrote the program to calculate the numbers of Bernoulli. Yet the paper contains an actual algebraic equation for calculating the numbers of Bernoulli – separate from the computer program – which would seem much more likely to be what Babbage is referring to."-Ada Initiative 2013 [22] Click brown link to read more about Babbage crediting Lovelace for her work.
Lovelace did not only face questioning and accusatory eyes while she was alive. During the 20th century, after her death, open, scathing criticism was published against her.
At the time her work was published, Lovelace knew she was a knife against the current of societal standards. Even today, critics continue a tumultuous relationship with Lovelace. However, Lovelace's encounter with society-then and society-now is one more reason gender discrimination in scientific work has been brought to light.
Different Views on Lovelace
Mouse over pictures to read captions of Sydneyn Padua's cartoon [22].
"Sydney Padua gave me another perspective on why people are so opposed to [Lovelace] getting any credit for being a computer programmer... There's another side to it, very specifically the people who are huge Babbage fans. Their point of view is: Babbage was robbed over and over again of the credit he deserved for many things in life, and it was really unfair, so for them, there's this sense of another group of people showing up to take away credit from Babbage. "
-Valerie Aurora, co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization, during student phone interview [9]