Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer by Fiona Robinson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer by Fiona Robinson Elizabeth Bush Robinson, Fiona Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer; written and illus. by Fiona Robinson. Abrams, 2016 40p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4197-1872-4 $17.95 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-6131-2913-5 $15.54 R Gr. 2-4 Children who recently became acquainted with nineteenth-century mathematician Ada Lovelace in Wallmark’s Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine (BCCB 12/15) will find complementary information but a startlingly different pictorial approach in Robinson’s picture-book biography. Much of the same ground is covered [End Page 92] here: the absence of her father, Lord Byron; her mother’s influence in Lovelace’s gravitating toward mathematics; complications from measles that brutally interrupted her childhood. Robinson also, however, introduces historical context on the marvels of engineering and industry that distinguished this period and how their development depended on mathematics. As in the Wallmark title, there is relatively little here about Lovelace’s adult personal life, but Robinson does offer a bit more on the collaboration with Babbage, on the Difference Engine that preceded the better known Analytical Engine, and on the Jacquard loom whose punched paper patterns inspired the technology that would drive Babbage’s proposed computers. Colored and cut paper collage, with design elements stacked for depth and then photographed, underscore the theme of creativity expressed through numbers—the melding of Lovelace’s parental legacies. Smokestacks, machinery, and even a lineup of famous personages define Lovelace’s milieu, but hovering numerals, coiling flow charts, and poetry and math symbols floating among the clouds suggest that Lovelace’s mathematical ideas raced above and beyond quotidian concerns. A brief and largely expendable note on Bernoullian numbers, remarks on illustrations, and a list of adult sources are included. Copyright © 2016 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois