Sense & Sensibility, indeed

This just in from a friend, who thought I ought to know about the woman in whose honor March 24th has (apparently) been named the International Day of Blogging (a strange honor, to be sure).

Ada Gordon aka Lady Lovelace, mathematician and inventor of the “Difference Engine”

Raised by her mother to shun the poetry and passions that consumed her father, Lord Byron (and really, if you read the fellow’s life story, you can understand why), her artistic gifts nonetheless combined with her  rigorous educational training to produce, in one biographer’s words, “an enchantress of numbers.”

Here’s the “did you know” sent by my friend (but do also click on the links above for more information about her fascinating life):

Many people consider the first computer program to have been written by Ada Byron Lovelace. Ada — a high-level Pascal-based programming language is named for her. The first scientific programming languages were written in the 1950s; IBM’s FORTRAN was the first major scientific computer language, and is still used in some programs today. Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron, loved mathematics. Her translation of and accompanying notations to an article about Charles Babbage’s analytical engine have been called the first computer program. Lovelace broke ground as a woman in a mostly man’s world of math and science. In her honor, March 24 is known as Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging.