(1815-1852)
Ergon House, Horseferry Road/Dean Ryle Street London SW1
Tricky to find and even trickier to capture on camera. Ada sits high on a building between Dean Ryle Street and Horseferry Road. In an age of perpetually looking down at smartphones it seems counterintuitive to look up, but there she stands, surveying London’s continually changing landscape.
Ada is best known as a mathematician and technology pioneer, at a time when few women entered those fields. She worked closely with Charles Babbage on the analytical engines —mechanical prototypes of the computer — and is sometimes credited as being the world’s first computer programmer.
Did you know??????? She is celebrated on the second Tuesday of every October, which has become known as Ada Lovelace Day.
The punchcards behind her are an early form of computer memory that would have been used with Babbage on the analytical engine had it been built. Apparently the cards contain two coded puzzles contributed by a team of international scientists. Clearly I’d be able to crack them if they weren’t so far away…..
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