Holt and Woolley 's allegations also run counter to the image held by Ada's legions of fans.
In 1980, the US Department of Defense named its computer language "Ada" in her honor. Ada's accolades for scientific greatness at a time when most women barely knew how to read, as well as her early demise at age 36 due to uterine cancer, have also made her a powerful feminist icon. Each year, the National Association for Women in Computing hands out the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award in recognition of pioneering women in computer science. Previous winners include Esther Dyson, the tech-industry pundit who was founding chair of ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the international body charged with setting policy for the Internet's core infrastructure.
Lord Byron's daughter has also been the star of several works of fiction, including Lynn Hershman Leeson's 1998 film "Conceiving Ada," and William Gibson and Bruce Sterlings' 1992 cyberpunk novel "The Difference Engine," which imagines a Victorian world overtaken by computers.
Cyberfeminists including Sadie Plant, author of "Zeros + Ones: Digital Women + the New Technoculture," have adopted Ada as their standard bearer. Plant goes as far as to refer to "Ada's Analytical Engine," removing Babbage from the equation entirely.
Ada: mathematical dimwit?
However, according to Holt and Woolley, ample evidence of Ada's mathematical ineptitude resides in her correspondence with her tutor Augustus De Morgan, the first professor of mathematics at University College in London.
"For her," Holt writes, "the algebraic expressions in these student exercises were as elusive as "sprites and fairies." Ada, he continues, was struggling with a mere "beginner's course in calculus."
But Stephen Diliberto, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, told TechTV that this image of Ada just doesn't compute. While Toole was writing her book in the mid-1990s, she asked Diliberto to review Ada's letters to De Morgan.
"My impression was that she was a person right at the forefront of things," Diliberto told TechTV. "At the time, I would have said she was a very competent mathematician."
Diliberto notes that "mathematics has changed tremendously since that time," and what might be considered standard math now was cutting-edge in the mid-1800s.
Even De Morgan, a celebrated mathematician in his own right, was impressed with Ada's abilities, Toole notes, referring to a letter in which he writes, "Ada's power of thinking from the beginning of the correspondence with her, has been utterly out of common way for any beginner, man or woman."
