Presentation on “Ada Lovelace: the Making of a Computer Scientist” at the Oxford Literary Festival

Miranda Seymour and Ursula Martin will speak on “Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist” on 19 March 2018 at 4:00pm in the Weston Lecture Theatre, University of Oxford.

“Two biographers of Lord Byron’s daughter Ada Lovelace, Miranda Seymour and Professor Ursula Martin, look at the extraordinary life of the woman whose work is seen as a precursor of modern computers and artificial intelligence.

Lovelace was born in 1815 from the union of Annabella Milbanke and the notorious romantic poet. Milbanke fled a year later with their daughter. She was a progressive Victorian reformer and introduced her daughter to mathematics.

Seymour’s In Byron’s Wake is a portrait of both Milbanke and Lovelace and shows how Byron’s spirit governed and haunted their lives. Martin is co-author of Ada Lovelace: the Making of a Computer Scientist, which looks at how Lovelace explored key mathematical principles that lie behind modern computing.

Seymour is a novelist, biographer and critic. She has written biographies of Ottoline Morrell, Robert Graves and Mary Shelley. Martin is a professor at the University of Oxford with interests in mathematics, computer science and the humanities.

Discussions will be chaired by Dr Samuel Fanous, head of publishing, Bodleian Libraries.

Dame Wendy Hall gives the Ada Lovelace Lecture on artificial intelligence after this event in the same venue at 6pm.

Presented by Bodleian Libraries in association with the University of Oxford Department of Computer Science.”

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