Meet Ada, and the Adas among us
Every year, on the second Tuesday of October, Ada Lovelace Day celebrates women in science, technology, engineering and maths. It started from a simple idea: when we see women's achievements, more women see themselves in these careers.
In 1843, the 27-year-old mathematician, Ada Lovelace, was asked to translate an article about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. That was a mechanical computer that was designed but never built.
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was an English mathematician and visionary, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Working with Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computer, she recognised that machines could do far more than calculations, imagining possibilities that were decades ahead of her time.
She did much more than translate it. She added her own notes, which ended up three times longer than the original article. In one of them, the famous Note G, she wrote step-by-step instructions for the machine to calculate a sequence of numbers. Today, it's widely recognised as the first published computer program. It was written over a century before modern computers existed!
What makes Ada special isn't only the maths. She saw what others didn't: that a machine working with numbers could one day work with anything that can be represented as symbols, even music. She called her way of thinking “poetical science”: imagination and logic working together.
So...Who are the Adas working at Unit4?
At Unit4, we all know one. The engineer who tracks down the bug that's been blocking a release. The product owner who spots that a small change that would meet what our customers need. The colleague who takes the time to walk a new team member through a messy part of the codebase.
Together we celebrate all of our Adas.