Mary Somerville, the "Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science"

Mary Fairfax Somerville, Writer, Mathematician, and Astronmer (born 26 December 1790)

I have spent a great deal of time in many posts on this blog bitching about the Encyclopedia Britannica and its woeful lack of inclusion when it comes to women. So I do have to begin by saying that the Britannica in its new online form has an extended entry on Mary Somerville. 

Thomas Phillips's 1834 portait
of Mary Somerville

However (you knew there had to be a "however," didn't you?), the entry fails to mention the name of Somerville's mother, Margaret Charters. (To be fair, it also fails to mention her father's name.) 

The daughter of William George Fairfax and Margaret Charters, his second wife, Mary Fairfax failed to receive much in the way of an education during her earliest years. While her brothers were of course given the kind academic preparation deemed necessary for boys, the young Mary was taught to read, by her mother, but not to write. She also learned to say her prayers. As Mary would later write, she was "allowed to grow up a wild creature."

After her father, a vice admiral, returned from sea and decided his daughter was something of a "savage" (which seems fair, given her own description of herself), the ten-year-old Mary was sent to Miss Primrose's Academy for Girls in Musselburgh.

After a year at this expensive school, she returned home, able to read and write, though still not very well, capable of simple arithmetic, and knowing some French. She would describe her experience of leaving the school as feeling "like a wild animal escaped out of a cage."

But, once back home, she began her real education--at first on her own, reading every book she could lay her hands on in her family's library. Her maternal uncle, Thomas Somerville, also began instructing her in Latin, and she was able to learn mathematics, geography, and astronomy second-hand--like so many of the women I've written about, the young Mary Fairfax learned from her brothers and their tutors. (For only two examples of young women educated by their brothers' leftovers, click here and here.)  

Unfortunately her efforts at educating herself were not encouraged--such occupations were not ladylike. To direct her energies more appropriately, she was sent to a school in Burntisland where she she could improve her needlework. 

The family began spending winters in Edinburgh when Mary was thirteen, and she participated fully in the social life of the city; as she described this period of her life, she enjoyed the "parties, visits, balls, theatres, concerts, and innocent flirtations." But she also took instruction in writing and painting. And having encountered some mysterious-looking symbols in a woman's magazine, she began studying algebra--although, as she also noted, her father was afraid that "the strain of abstract thought would injure the tender female frame." 

In 1804, when she was twenty-four, Mary Fairfax married a cousin, Samuel Grieg. She quickly gave birth to two children. Her husband was not a supporter of his wife's less "natural" activities--as she described him, he "possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at that time."

After Grieg's early death in 1807, Mary Fairfax Grieg returned to Scotland. With the financial inheritance she received as Grieg's widow, she was able to dedicate herself to her studies, this time with the support of several significant intellectuals, including John Playfair, a geologist and mathematician at the University of Edinburgh, and William Wallace (Playfair's former pupil), another noted mathematician. In their correspondence, they discussed the mathematical problems set in Thomas Leybourn's philosophical journal, Mathematical Repository. For her solution to one of these problems, she received a silver medal from the editors of the journal. 

During this period and with Wallace's encouragement, she read Isaac Newton's Principia and the Traité de mécanique céleste (Celestial Mechanics) by the French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1812, she married again, to another cousin, William Somerville, who proved to be much more supportive of his wife's intellectual career. 

The couple moved to London in 1816, where Mary Somerville attended lectures at the Royal Institute. There she met Caroline Herschel, Annabella Milbanke, lady Byron, and Lady Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace.

In addition to giving birth to four children, she also began her remarkable scientific career. In 1825, she experimented with magnetism, presenting a paper on her experiments the next year, in 1826, to the Royal Society. Her work, "The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum," was then published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions. 

In 1827, she was encouraged to produce versions of Newton's Principia and Laplace's Mecanique for the general reading audience. The result, The Mechanism of the Heavens, published in 1831, proved to be very successful--and resulted in a portrait bust of her being commissioned for and displayed by the Royal Society. 

During the years 1832 and 1833, while traveling in Europe, she completed The Connection of the Physical Sciences, published in 1834. The next year, along with Caroline Herschel, she was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society, the first women to receive such an honor. 

She garnered many such recognitions: in 1834, she was elected to honorary membership in the Société de Physique et d'Histoire Naturelle de Genève and, in the same year, to the Royal Irish Academy. She was awarded a civil pension of £200 per annum, increased to £300 in 1837. 

In an effort to improve William Somerville's health, the family relocated to Italy in 1832, where Mary Somerville completed her two-volume Physical Geography, published in 1848. Its publication produced another round of honors: she was elected to the American Geographical and Statistical Society in 1857, the Italian Geographical Society in 1870, and, in the same year, she received the Victoria Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society.

After the death of her husband, Somerville remained in Italy, completing two more works, her last scientific book, Molecular and Microscopic Science (1869) and her autobiography, Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, edited and published after her death by her daughter in 1873.

Mary Somerville died in Naples at the age of ninety two, on 29 November 1872. Noting her death, The London Post proclaimed her the "queen of nineteenth-century science."

One of the most recognizable honors paid to Mary Somerville was in 1879, years after her death. In that year, and in recognition of Mary Somerville's support for women's education, Somerville College in Oxford was named after her. 

Brigade Piron's photograph of
Somerville College,
Oxford

Today you can access all of Mary Somerville's work through the Internet Archive or Project Gutenberg. You might also enjoy Robyn Arianrhod's Seduced by Logic: Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution, which will also introduce you to another important female intellectual, Émilie Du Châtelet (1706-49).

Update, 3 December 2021: You may be interested in listening to the new episode on Mary Somerville that is part of the BBC's podcast series, The Forum--if so, click here and enjoy!

Ada Lovelace, "The Enchantress of Numbers"

Augusta Ada Gordon King, countess of Lovelace (born 10 December 1815)

Ada Lovelace, as she is now most commonly remembered, was the daughter of George Gordon, lord Byron, and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke. The poet and his new bride were famously ill-matched, their marriage nothing short of a disaster. After a year, the pair separated in January 1816, just a month after their daughter's birth (Byron seems to have been positive the baby would be a boy). Byron left England four months later and never saw his daughter again.

An 1836 painting of
Augusta Ada Gordon King,
by Margaret Sarah Carpenter

Ada's upbringing was shaped--or perhaps marred--by her mother's intense fear that her daughter would in any way resemble her father. Convinced that Byron was not only immoral but insane, Annabella Milbanke devised a plan of education for her Ada that would eliminate the dangerous effects of poetry and focus, instead, on mathematics, logic, and science.

Ada proved an apt pupil. (One of her correspondents and mentors was the mathematician and scientist Mary Fairfax Somerville--who was nominated to the Royal Academy of Science at the same time as Caroline Herschel and for whom Somerville College [Oxford] is named).

Ada also developed an ongoing partnership with the mathematician Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and inventor of the difference machine, a complex calculating device. They had begun their correspondence in 1833, when she was just seventeen. 

On 8 July 1835, when she was nineteen years old, Ada married William King, 8th Baron King (he later inherited the Lovelace title). She gave birth to three children, but in addition to her domestic life, she continued with her mathematical studies. Her working relationship with Babbage continued and developed after her marriage and the birth of her children. It is her work with Babbage and his later and more complex calculator, the Analytical Engine. that has drawn the most attention to Ada Lovelace. (It was Babbage who called Ada the "enchantress of numbers.")

At Babbage's request, Ada Lovelace translated an article on the Analytical Engine by the Italian engineer and mathematician Federico Luigi Menabrea, with the aim of publishing Menabrea's description in England. (Although Menabrea was Italian and his article was in large part based on a lecture Babbage had delivered in Turin, the piece was written in French.)

To her translation, Lovelace appended a series of notes, A through G, her notes three times as long as the Menabrea article she translated. These notes represent her contributions to mathematics in general and to computers and computing in particular.

Ada Lovelace, Diagram for the computation of Bernoulli numbers from note G –
The first published computer algorithm (1842)

In the last of these notes, G, Lovelace described a set of operations for Babbage's Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. (I have no idea what Bernoulli numbers are, and even after reading about them I am stumped, so I won't attempt to explain them.) What is important, however, is that Lovelace's note is regarded as the first algorithm designed to be used on a "computer." As the entry for Ada Lovelace at the Computer History Museum describes Lovelace's contribution, it represents the "first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer.'" (The United States Department of Defense named its computer language Ada in her honor, its standard document acronym MIL-STD-1815 referring to the year of her birth.)

More important, however, are Lovelace's recognitions of the possibilities for the Analytic Engine beyond the purely computational. Again, quoting the Computer History Museum assessment, her reflections are "visionary":

She speculated that the Engine "might act upon other things besides number. . . . [T]the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. She has been referred to as "prophet of the computer age." Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. 

Ada Lovelace is today widely recognized and appreciated--there are many biographies, websites (I like Finding Ada: Celebrating the Achievements of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths and the Ada Initiative: Supporting Women in Open Technology and Culture--although this site, unfortunately, shut down in October 2015, while keeping the archive available), stickers, necklaces, coffee mugs, and even a graphic novel, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

And there is an Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women's achievements in science, technology, and mathematics. (My post for Ada Lovelace Day 2015 is here.)

But there is also more than a little resistance to crediting Ada Lovelace with contributing to the development of computers and computing. (That's why I've linked to the Computer History Museum here--nothing like recognition for Ada Lovelace coming straight from Mountain View, CA, with video promos for the museum and its exhibits featuring Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak.) For an interesting essay on the resistance, check out the Ada Initiative's exploration of the issue, "Deleting Ada Lovelace from the History of Computing," by clicking here. (The original post has been deleted—here’s a link to the essay as preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.)

Ada Lovelace died on 27 November 1852, just days before her thirty-seventh birthday.

Marie-Sophie Germain: Mathematician, Physicist, and Philosopher

Marie-Sophie Germain (born 1 April 1776)

A coin bearing Sophie Germain's profile

Despite the "handicap" of her sex and the opposition of her parents--and then, of course, there were the difficulties about what was acceptable for a woman in eighteenth-century Europe--Marie Sophie Germain pursued her interests in mathematics, numbers theory, mathematical physics, and philosophy. She did so, at least initially, by means of a male pseudonym; as Simon Singh writes, 

In 1794, the École Polytechnique opened in Paris. It was founded as an academy of excellence to train mathematicians and scientists for the nation. This would have been an ideal place for Germain to develop her mathematical skills, except for the fact that it was an institution reserved only for men. Her natural shyness prevented her from confronting the academy's governing body, so instead she resorted to covertly studying at the École by assuming the identity of a former student at the academy, Monsieur Antoine-August Le Blanc.

The subterfuge was eventually abandoned, and Germain found an excellent mentor and teacher. Her fields of inquiry include acoustics, number theory, and elasticity--she was also interested in Fermat's Last Theorem, proposing "Sophie Germain's Theorem." Her philosophical works, Pensées diverses (Diverse Thoughts) and Considérations générales sur l'état des sciences et des lettres, aux différentes époques de leur culture (General Considerations on the State of Science and Letters in Different Eras of Their Development), were published posthumously.

There is a very accessible discussion of Sophie Germain by Singh, "Math's Hidden Woman," posted at the PBS Nova website. Singh includes a discussion of Germain in his Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. There's a chapter in Lynne Olsen's Women in Mathematics, a brief biography for young readers, and a work of fiction, a "mathematical novel," for young readers. But there is no full-length, comprehensive biography for adults.

Sophie Germain Street, in Paris

Update, 1 April 2020: Dora Musielak’s Sophie Germain: Revolutionary Mathematician is now available, published as a volume in Springer Biographies.

Hypatia of Alexandria: Mathematician, Philosopher, Martyr

Hypatia of Alexandria (martyred 8 [?] March, 415/16)

Although biographical information about Hypatia of Alexandria is scarce, several sources indicate the date of her death as 8 March. Whether this is entirely accurate is not the point--but this date offers us the chance to juxtapose Hypatia's martyrdom to Perpetua's, which was noted yesterday, 7 March.

Hypatia of Alexandria,
detail from Raphael's
School of Athens

Since beginning a daily blog posting on notable women in January, I have recorded quite a few entries for Christian saints and martyrs--although I am not myself a believer, history has recorded the names and accomplishments of many Christian women, and as a medievalist, I've long been interested in the stories of these women. The "pagan" Hypatia's death--or her "assassination," as one source calls it--offers us a bit of a counternarrative to the focus on Christian saints and martyrs. 

Hypatia of Alexandria was a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer. I've often quoted the Encyclopedia Britannica in these blog posts for its persistent tendency to discount women's achievements, but in Hypatia's case, the assessment of her accomplishments is notable: "She was, in her time, the world’s leading mathematician and astronomer, the only woman for whom such claim can be made. She was also a popular teacher and lecturer on philosophical topics of a less-specialist nature, attracting many loyal students and large audiences."

Hypatia's martyrdom--or assassination or murder--was at the hands of a Christian mob. After a period of relative tolerance, the religious climate changed in fifth-century Alexandria after the accession of Cyril to the bishopric. The new bishop was zealous in his pursuit of orthodoxy, and it was under Cyril that Hypatia was dragged from her carriage one day, beaten to death, her body torn apart by a group of Christians and burned.

There are brief accounts of Hypatia's life and accomplishments in several online sources, but I'm including one from the Smithsonian website here.

There are several good books available on Hypatia, but I recommend Maria Dzielska's Hypatia of Alexandria. For a sense of the influence of Hypatia's story on generations of women, see Linda Lopez McAlister's anthology Hypatia's Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers.

Raphael's The School of Athens,
1509-11, Vatican

The Mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi  (died 9 January 1799)

Born in Milan in 1718, Maria Gaetana Agnesi was recognized as a prodigy when she was still quite young. In writing about the young Agnesi, Lynn Olsen notes that, by the age of five, she had already learned French; by the time she was nine, she had expanded her knowledge of modern languages and "mastered" Greek, Latin, and Hebrew before turning her attention to mathematics.

An eighteenth-century engraving
of Maria Gaetana Agnesi

With her father's encouragement--or, perhaps, at his insistence--she attended his ongoing series of intellectual gatherings, where she was urged to participate in the philosophical and mathematical discussions. 

She contributed to these "seminars" by publishing the Propositiones philosophicae (Propositions of Philosophy), a collection of essays on natural science and philosophy.  The essays were based on the discussions in which she had taken part, including her defense of liberal studies for women, "Oratio qua ostenditur artium liberalium studia femineo sexu neutiquam abhorrere" ("Oration in which it is shown that the study of the liberal arts by the feminine sex is in no way to be despised").

For her part, however, Agnesi Gaetana's preference was for a religious life, a vocation her father opposed, although he eventually allowed her to withdraw from the formal intellectual discussions he promoted and devote herself instead to the study of mathematics and to the education of her siblings. (Married three times, Agnesi's father eventually had twenty-some children, so there were plenty of children for the young woman to instruct.)

Her most significant work, her Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth), published in 1748, seems to have grown out of this experience, but, as Olsen argues, while the work may have been begun as an instructional aid "for her younger brothers," it eventually grew "into a more serious effort," becoming a detailed mathematical study, "the first comprehensive textbook" on the differential and integral calculus. 

Title Page of the first volume of Agnesi's
Analytical Institutions

In 1750, Agnesi was elected to the Bologna Academy of Sciences, was awarded a diploma by the University of Bologna, and was appointed to the mathematics faculty by Pope Benedict XIV, though she did not travel to Bologna and take on teaching responsibilities there. (There is a lovely account of the pope's correspondence with Agnesi in John Augustine Zahm's 1913 Woman in Science, available at Google Books).

In any case, after her father's death in 1752, Agnesi ended her mathematical work. She devoted the rest of her life to caring for the old and infirm at the Pio Albergo Trulzio in Milan, eventually becoming its director. She died in 1799 at the age of eighty, having dedicated the majority of her life not to the study of mathematics but to her faith and to the service of the poor and the sick.

An asteroid identified by Paul G. Comba in 1996 was named in her honor, 16765 Agnesi.

A Google Doodle from 16 May 2014, celebrating Agnesi's 296th birthday, plays with the mathematical curve she discussed in the Analytical Institutions that later came to be called the "witch of Agnesi":

There is a full-length biography of Agnesi by Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi: Mathematiciam of God, but I also like the excellent--and very accessible--account of Agnesi in Lynn Olsen's 1974 Women in Mathematics, which I have quoted here. 

On Ada Lovelace Day: Trota of Salerno

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day, 14 October 2014: Trota and The Trotula

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, described by its sponsoring organization as "an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM)." As part of the worldwide event, we are all encouraged to write about an inspirational woman and her achievements in one of the STEM fields.

A female medical practitioner, likely Trotula
(MS 544, Miscellanea Medica XVIII,
from Wellcome Collection, London)

To that end, I'd like to contribute the name of Trota of Salerno, a twelfth-century physician and medical writer.

Although her achievements--and even her existence--were disputed for centuries, Trota is now recognized as the most famous of the mulieres Salernitanae ("women of Salerno") known to have practiced medicine in Salerno in the Middle Ages. 

According to Monica H. Green, "Trota and her medical practices are attested by three distinct textual sources." The first of these is Practical Medicine According to Trota (Practica secundum Trotam), "a compendium of seventy-one different remedies for gynecological and obstetric conditions," and includes a wide variety of treatments for other, more general, medical problems, from lice and burns to toothache, hemorrhoids, and fever.

The "second witness" to Trota's medical expertise is On the Treatment of Illnesses (De egritudinum curatione), an anthology that includes the work of seven medical writers, including Trota. The third text associated with Trota is The Treatments for Women (De curis mulierum); Green suggests this volume may well be "a transcript of Trota's cures as she orally recounted them to a scribe, who then added further elements of his/her choosing."

Trota's name ultimately came to be associated with a group of three crucial medical texts devoted to women's healthcare, known collectively as "the Trotula." From the twelfth through the fourteenth centuries, the Trotula circulated widely throughout western Europe; today, nearly two hundred manuscript versions survive. A definitive edition and translation of these texts is Green's The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine. Her introduction includes information about the twelfth-century "school" of Salerno and its role as a center for medical study, information about "pre-Salernitan Gynecology," and a well-detailed discussion of women practicing medicine in Salerno in the twelfth century. 

Justine Siegemund, from the 1723 edition of her handbook

On this day celebrating the achievements of women in science, three other women practicing gynecology and obstetrics might also be mentioned here. 

Jane Sharp, a seventeenth-century English midwife, published The Midwives Book; Or the Whole Art of Midwifery Discovered in London in 1671. 

Some twenty years later, in 1690, the German midwife Justine Siegemund published The Court Midwife. (To view a digital copy of the 1723 edition; click here.)

And, last but not least is Sarah Stone, an English midwife who published A Complete Practice in Midwifery in 1737. You can read her early eighteenth-century handbook, filled with case studies, here.

Update, 28 October 2023: I just ran across Isabella Gagliardi's "How the Middle Ages' Female Doctors Were Consigned to Oblivion," posted earlier this year at The Conversation. It includes a reference to Trota as well as other women who studied at Salerno's Schola Medica Salernitana.

Ada Lovelace, Women in Math and Technology, and Walter Isaacson

"The Women Tech Forgot"???

In today's New York Times, Nick Bilton's brief piece, "The Women Tech Forgot," is inspired by the forthcoming publication of Walter Isaacson's The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. Isaacson seems to have been inspired to write his book, at least in part, by his daughter, through whom he was introduced to the English mathematician, Ada Lovelace.

Any focus on women who have been written out of history, their achievements and inventions either forgotten or credited to others, is always welcome. And the diminishing role of women in technical fields is stark. As Bilton notes:

The exclusion of these women has not only reinforced stereotypes about women and technology, but has arguably had a self-fulfilling effect. In 1985, 37 percent of computer science undergraduate degrees were earned by women. By 2010, that number had fallen by half to 18 percent. 

While Isaacson's book will include an account of Ada Lovelace, as well as making some mention of the women who worked Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) program in the mid-twentieth century, there are a couple of problems with Bilton's otherwise welcome piece. 

First, its focus on Isaacson's forthcoming book is a bit problematic--there is no available table of contents to see exactly how much of this book about "hackers," "geniuses," and "geeks" is actually about women. The cover itself is interesting and perhaps illustrative--the images feature four people, only one of them female (Lovelace).

If the purpose of Bilton's piece is to introduce readers to women's roles in science and technology, there are many terrific books out there that are actually about the role of women in science and technology, including Vivian Gornick's Women in Science: Then and Now, Julie des Jardins's The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science, and Emma Ideal and Rhiannon Meharchand's Blazing the Trail: Essays by Leading Women in Science. And that's just for starters. Autumn Stanley's Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology, first published in 1995, is still in print, nearly twenty years later.

(Meanwhile, even Wikipedia has extensive entries for Ada Lovelace and all of the women who worked on the ENIAC program, among them Kathleen McNulty Antonelli, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Adele Katz Goldstine, Betty Snyder Holberton, Marilyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas Spence, and Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum. Bartik told her own story in  Pioneer Programmer, published in 2013. And there is also an excellent new documentary telling the story of these women, The Computers, produced by the ENIAC Programmers Project.)

Again, it's hard to tell exactly how much of Isaacson's book is actually about women in science and technology, but Bilton seems to regard Isaacson's ignorance about Ada Lovelace as indicative of her "lost" status. "While some in tech may know of her," Bilton concludes, Lovelace "is far from a household name." Despite Bilton's unfamiliarity--and Isaacson's--I find it hard to believe any university student studying computer science today wouldn't have heard of Ada Lovelace--according to Bilton's own piece, Isaacson's daughter Betsy was writing her college entrance essay about Lovelace! The US Department of Defense named its computer programming language Ada in her honor--it was first released in 1980. Lovelace is a figure who appears frequently in pop culture, Ada Lovelace Day has been celebrated internationally since 2009, the Ada Initiative, founded in 2011, was named after her, and she was even honored with her own Google Doodle in 2012!

But the bigger problem--and a real howler--is the place this piece occupies in the Times. This article about "the women that tech forgot" is not included in the Technology section or the Science section or even among the book reviews. Bilton's essay about how women in science are either ignored or forgotten is printed in the Fashion and Style section--because, you know, women. Yeesh!

Isaacson's may well be an inclusive book, going far to reintegrate women into the history of "the digital revolution." But if you're interested in reading about women in science, there are many other excellent resources--and you can easily find them with a few tools produced by that digital revolution--with Google and a few clicks of your mouse.

Update: Brendan Koerner's review of Isaacson's The Innovators appears in the Sunday, 5 September NYT Book Review (BR 13). Among the "hackers, geniuses, and geeks," Korner mentions only one woman in his review, Ada Lovelace. And while his review is accompanied by a 1943 photo of ENIAC programmers Bartik and Spence, he mentions only John Mauchly and John Atanasoff's "bitter patent fight" in his discussion of Isaacson's book.

The table of contents of The Innovators is now available via Amazon. The table of contents notes Ada Lovelace in the opening and closing chapters. Under "women" in the index, there are only two entries: "as ENIAC programmers, 95-100, 117" and "math doctorates received by, 88." There is a fair amount of coverage of Grace Hopper, a pioneering computer programmer, 88-95 and 117-18, with a few additional scattered references. And Bill Gates's mom, Mary, gets a shout-out on p. 361. And so it goes . . .

By the way . . . Ada Lovelace day is coming soon--Tuesday, 14 October. You can honor the "women tech forgot" by checking out the events at the website Finding Ada.