Happy Ada Lovelace Day Sydney

Ada Lovelace Day, October 15 2013, is all about raising the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths by encouraging people around the world to talk about the women whose work they admire.

There are many ways to slice identifying inspiring women: Here’s one group of Australian female scientists. Personally, though, I’m going to doff my hat to the seven cool girls in my High School programming group who’ve stood up in the face of peer pressure and tried programming out. That seems to me to be entirely in the spirit of the day.

Sadly, I can’t find any local events celebrating Ada Lovelace Day. Also sadly, around the World many other events include a focus on editing Wikipedia entries in the face of a continuing effort to minimise the contribution of Lovelace and other female computing pioneers.

On a tenuous note of Australian connection, the Powerhouse Museum has a small collection of items relating to Lovelace who was a genuinely interesting person outside of her relationship with Babbage and early computers.