Please join us for the first WICS/WIM event of the year! Prof. Ursula Martin from Oxford University is visiting Waterloo and, as part of her visit, she will be giving a talk on her work investigating the papers of Ada, Countess of Lovelace. (Did you know that the first programmer was a woman? Did you know that she was a visionary when it comes to the capabilities and limitations of computers?)
We hope you will join us, and stay for refreshments!
Speaker: Prof. Ursula Martin - Department of Computer Science / Mathematics Institute, Oxford University
Title: The Scientific Life of Ada Lovelace
Abstract:
Ada,
Countess
of
Lovelace
(1815-1852)
is
best
known
for
a
remarkable article
about
Babbage’s
unbuilt
computer,
the
Analytical
Engine.
This not
only
presented
the
first
documented
computer
program,
but
also, going
well
beyond
Babbage’s
ideas
of
computers
as
manipulating
numbers, outlined
their
creative
possibilities
and
the
limits
of
what
they
could do.
Lovelace’s
contribution
was
highlighted
in
one
of
Alan
Turing’s most
famous
papers
“Can
a
machine
think?".
The
comprehensive
archive
of
Lovelace’s
papers
preserved
in
Oxford’s Bodleian
Library
displays
Lovelace’s
wide
scientific
interests
in everything
from
geology
to
acoustics
to
chemistry
to
mesmerism
to photography;
her
exchanges
with
leading
scientists
such
as
Faraday, Babbage
and
Somerville;
her
correspondence
course
in
mathematics
with
De Morgan,
a
leading
mathematician
of
the
day
and
pioneer
in
logic
and algebra;
and
her
grasp
of
the
potential
of
mathematics
whether
to
model a
“calculus
of
the
nervous
system”
or
as
a
uniting
link
between
the material
and
symbolic
worlds.
In
this
talk
we
start
to
explore
Lovelace,
her
background,
her scientific
ideas
and
her
contemporary
legacy.
Bio: Ursula Martin joined the University of Oxford as Professor of Computer Science in 2014. She holds an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship. Prior to this she held a chair of Computer Science in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary University of London. At Queen Mary she was Vice-Principal for Science and Engineering (2005-2009), and Director of the impactQM project (2009-2012). She served on the U K Defence Science Advisory Council, on the 2001 and 2008 UK HEFCE RAE panel for Computer Science, and was a SICSA distinguished visitor at the University of Edinburgh for 2012-13. She has previously held appointments at the University of St Andrews (the first female professor in any discipline since its foundation in 1411), Royal Holloway University of London, Manchester and Urbana Champaign. She holds an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge and a PhD in Mathematics from Warwick. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in January 2012. She is involved in many activities for women in science, and currently serves on the Royal Society's Diversity Committee.