We at Spirit & Glitch have a soft spot for Ada Lovelace. Per Mental Floss:

"Lovelace's notes made it clear that she understood the Analytical Engine as well as [Charles] Babbage himself, and furthermore, she understood how to make it do the things computers do. She suggested the data input that would program the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, which is now considered the first computer program. But more than that, Lovelace was a visionary: she understood that numbers could be used to represent more than just quantities, and a machine that could manipulate numbers could be made to manipulate any data represented by numbers. She predicted that machines like the Analytical Engine could be used to compose music, produce graphics, and be useful to science. Of course, all that came true—in another 100 years. "

We strongly believe in women in science, and that gender should not serve as a sorting hat for talent. Period.

There's also another quality of Ada's that we find particularly compelling - her faith in intuition and the unconscious as a guiding light for discovery. A couple of quotes:

"Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious."

"Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science."

As engineer turned neural network artists, I also deeply appreciate the value of imagination and art and intuition as much as the importance of analytical rigor. Scientific rigor and wild imagination are a potent mixture. STEM is good. STEAM is sublime.

Code, by nature, is structured and rule-based, but it's also art. It has a life of its' own. It lives and dies not just by following formulas and rules, but by respecting intuition and feelings and inspiration, and allowing those forces a guiding role in the process.

"That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show." 

Stats:
+2 Perceived coding skill
+1 Glitchy ghost vibes
+1 Wikipedia catalysis

Photography: Brian Alvarez - Website - Instagram

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