Ada Lovelace: The Enchantress of Number and the greenhouse we owe

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to write something for Ada Lovelace Day, and I felt that bright, unmistakable jolt—thrilled, grateful, a little awed. I would take any chance to honour this woman. But I want to honour her properly—not with a polite nod to a portrait on the wall, but by letting her story do what good stories do: slip a hand into yours and say, “Come on—let’s make a difference.” Ada didn’t just belong to history; she belongs to anyone who’s ever felt an idea tap on the shoulder and ask to be taken seriously. That’s why I’m here: to pass on the nudge she gave me, and to invite whoever needs it to answer back.

A little bit of context. Ada (1815–1852) was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Her parents separated when she was a baby, and her mother—determined to steady the Byron drama—steered Ada towards mathematics and logic. As a young woman she grew close to Mary Somerville, who opened doors and introduced her to Charles Babbage. He showed Ada his designs for a mechanical computer and she was hooked. He admired her fiercely and nicknamed her the Enchantress of Number. Tell me that isn’t an invitation to be bold. In 1843 she translated Luigi Menabrea’s paper about that machine and—and this is the important bit—added her own long Notes. Those Notes explained how such a machine could be programmed, including a step-by-step example for Bernoulli numbers. Think of it this way: Babbage invented it, Menabrea wrote the guide, Ada translated the guide and then wrote the first hands-on tutorial. Yes—this is exactly why she’s so often hailed as the world’s first computer programmer. If you’d like to dive deeper, Zoe Philpott tells Ada’s story (and those of other brilliant women) beautifully.

But the thing that makes Ada burn bright for me is her creative discipline. She didn’t just see a clever calculator; she imagined a general machine that could manipulate symbols—even music—if you fed it the right rules. She called her approach “poetical science”: let imagination open the door, then pin it down with a method. That’s my north star as a cross-disciplinary scientist, and that’s why I find Ada so inspiring. Creativity is not garnish; it’s the engine. And yet access to that engine isn’t handed out fairly—particularly to women.

People sometimes say, “Creativity is genderless; anyone can be creative. Look at Ada.” I agree in theory. In practice, creativity needs conditions. It needs a little greenhouse around the fragile beginning of an idea. Elizabeth Gilbert, in Big Magic [1], says ideas behave like living things—restless, opportunistic, looking for a committed human to collaborate with. If you’re open and faithful to the work, the idea will stay and grow. If not, it will fly on to someone else. I love that image. It dignifies the spark and also the labour. It says: your commitment is the invitation.

And this is where the real world walks in with mud on its boots. Because commitment needs space and time. Not just the calendar kind, but the inner kind—the kind where the voices in your head quieten and a thought has room to take its first breath. John Cleese once described creativity as needing five deceptively simple conditions: space, time, time (yes, twice), confidence, and humour. He’s right. I didn’t learn them from a seminar; I learned them by noticing when my work actually worked.

Here’s how that looks for me:

Space is a door that shuts—and, more importantly, a culture that respects the door is shut. It’s the choice to sit with a hard problem without apologising for the silence it requires.

Time (the first kind) is the patience to let the noise drain from your head. The first twenty or thirty minutes are full of chatter about shopping lists, unread emails, heroic plans to sort paperclips. Because, as we all know, it’s easier to do trivial things that are urgent than important things that are not; easier to do what we can already do than to start the big uncertain thing. I don’t fight those voices; I outlast them. Then the mind changes gear—almost audibly.

Time (the second kind) is what happens after the quiet arrives. A spark lands. You don’t yank yourself back to the inbox; you protect the next hour so the spark can be shaped into something testable. The longer you play with a problem, the more original your solution becomes. Thirty minutes won’t do it. An hour and a half might.

Confidence is permission to be gloriously wrong for a while. It’s the faith that a wonky prototype is not an embarrassment but a bridge. At this stage I grant myself amnesty from perfection: nothing is a mistake while I’m discovering.

Humour is lightness—the oxygen in the greenhouse. If we can laugh, we can try. And if we can try, we can make.

Now, if you’ve spent time in academia, you can see the trap forming, right? Many women have less protected time and less empty space. We carry more “invisible” service and admin which pulls time away from research [2,3]. Parenthood penalises women’s time and energy far more than men’s [4]. Credit gaps mean we often work harder for the same recognition [5], which erodes confidence—the very fuel creativity feeds on. And yes, on average, women report higher impostor feelings [6]. When you’re busy proving you deserve to be in the room, it’s hard to relax enough to make something new in it. That’s the quiet, costly disadvantage no one puts on a slide.

I don’t say this to make anyone defensive. I say it because science needs more Ada energy—more poetical science—and that means building the greenhouse on purpose. We can do this. In fact, we must.

So how? Not with slogans, but with everyday architecture. Shall we brainstorm together? We could start projects with a clear credit plan—who is doing what, how authorship will be decided, when decisions are revisited—so no one has to over-perform for visibility. We could rotate admin and teaching fairly and write the rota down, so generosity doesn’t become a trap. We could defend no-meeting deep-work blocks as research time, not “nice to have”, and keep those blocks for everyone, not just the loudest. We could pair mentoring with sponsorship—not only advice, but saying women’s names in rooms they’re not in and attaching our reputations to their opportunities. In talks and figure captions, we can name the people who made the work possible—technicians, data stewards, early-career scientists—because accuracy is justice and justice is culture. And on the human level, we can practise the small disciplines that keep confidence intact: an evidence list of what we built or learned this month; a tiny peer quorum to rehearse with; the safety to ask the so-called naïve question out loud; recovery scheduled with the same seriousness as experiments. None of this is grand. All of it is powerful.

Ada didn’t do it alone, either. Somerville widened the doorway. Babbage treated her as an intellectual partner and amplifier. Mentorship and advocacy created the conditions; Ada’s imagination and method filled them. That’s the equation I believe in: community enables; courage executes.

If you’re reading this and feel overwhelmed, begin smaller than small. Borrow a corner of quiet—a seminar room between bookings, a library desk, even noise-cancelling headphones and a do-not-disturb note. Claim some time on your calendar that you will protect like an experiment. Pick one playful thread to tug—write a messy first page, sketch the outline, run the simplest test. And if “one person who will back your name” feels impossible, ask for a micro-favour: “Could we swap an hour so I can focus?” or “Would you glance at this draft?” The ally often appears after the ask. Start there. It won’t solve everything, but it’s enough to invite an idea to stay.

Ada was brilliant, yes—but look closely and you’ll see what kept that light burning: a circle that made room for her to build her greenhouse, and her brave decision to step into it. If we want to honour her, let’s do it in the present tense—make room, hold it open, and help the women around us build the greenhouse their ideas deserve. More poetical science is possible, and it’s ours to grow—together.

References

[1] Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big magic: Creative living beyond fear. Penguin, 2016.

[2] O’Meara, KerryAnn, et al. “Asked more often: Gender differences in faculty workload in research universities and the work interactions that shape them.” American Educational Research Journal 54.6 (2017): 1154-1186. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831217716767

[3] Misra, Joya, et al. “Gendered and racialized perceptions of faculty workloads.” Gender & Society 35.3 (2021): 358-394. https://doi.org/10.1177/08912432211001387

[4] Morgan, Allison C., et al. “The unequal impact of parenthood in academia.” Science advances 7.9 (2021): eabd1996. https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abd1996

[5] Ross, M.B, et al. Women are credited less in science than men. Nature 608, 135–145 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04966-w

[6] Price, Paul C., et al. “Gender differences in impostor phenomenon: A meta-analytic review.” Current Research in Behavioral Sciences 7 (2024): 100155. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.crbeha.2024.100155