Today Is Ada Lovelace Day

Introduction

While I knew of Ada Lovelace, I was unaware that there was a day to celebrate her and all women in STEM and their incredible achievements. You can find out about the day here, and why it came into being:

In the past, and still today, many women have had their achievements airbrushed out of existence and credited to men.

I follow "A Mighty Girl" on Facebook, which often throws up information on the achievements of women throughout time and around the world.

So here we go with a few important women on Ada Lovelace Day 2025. A lot of this will be taken from other sites, but sources will be credited, and you will have a lot of rabbit holes to fall down and get lost in.

Ada met Charles Babbage at a party in 1833 when she was seventeen and was entranced when Babbage demonstrated the small working section of his Analytical Engine to her.

In 1843, she published a translation from the French of an article on the Analytical Engine by an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, to which Ada added extensive notes of her own.

The Notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems, and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer'.

Source:

Hedy Lamarr

I knew Hedy Lamarr as a glamorous actress, born Hedwig Eva Kiesler, born in Vienna, Austria, on November 9th, 1914, and that was it. In recent years, I found out that she was an amazing inventor responsible for pioneering the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems.

An incredibly talented individual who shaped today's world.

Find out more about her here.

Mae Jemison

In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African American woman to travel in space. That is just one amazing thing this incredible woman has done. She has written books, appeared on TV, including Star Trek and is also a doctor and an engineer.

You can find out more about this incredibly talented woman here.

Mary Anning

I wrote a poem about Mary Anning after seeing this article about her appear in my Facebook feed, which inspired the villanelle above by me.

British palaeontologist and fossil hunter Mary Anning was only twelve years old when she discovered the first ichthyosaur skeleton. Born on this day in 1799, Anning began searching for fossils with her father as a young girl on seaside cliffs in Dorset, England. Originally a means for extra income, the practice led to unheard of discoveries, and even a tongue-twisting poem in her honour: "She sells seashells by the seashore."

Source:

Grace Hopper

Grace Brewster Hopper was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.

She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator."

Source:

COBOL was the first computer language that I learned when I wangled my way onto a programming course and a job at Littlewoods in Liverpool. There were thirty people on the course, three of us did not have degrees, two because they were too young to have gone to university, and me.

Conclusion

Thank you for reading. There are thousands of women who have made our world what it is, and without Ada Lovelace, you might not be reading this today.