Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully

The work I was given to do was tedious and I had time on my hands so I used it to write graduate school and earned a Master’s degree in art history. After college, I worked at an advertising agency in New York for a while. I was preparing for my later career without knowing it. A play is very much like a picture book: you select a cast, create costumes and set, then arrange the scenes, building to a climax. I began illustrating the programs and my favorite books or stories I made up myself.Īt college I helped write a musical comedy and acted in lots of plays. We often listened to the radio while working (or while drawing). My sister Becky and I also had many chores and worked hard at them.

John Muir was my hero and I decided to be a naturalist when I grew up.

I built a stick village in the dirt, kept a nature notebook and wrote and drew in it all day long as I wandered around, examining the environment. Our neighborhood had a few overgrown vacant lots, one of them with a big fallen tree. My sister was only 16 months younger and a great playmate and coconspirator. (Mar.I loved to read and began thinking of the world in terms of stories. Archival photos and illustrations, appendices, source notes, a glossary, and a bibliography deepen the portrait of this singular figure whose impact on science and technology has long been understated. McCully proceeds with clear explanations of Lovelace’s intellectual activities-in particular, Note G, in which Lovelace proposes an algorithm considered to be the first for a computer-while blending a largely sympathetic view of her personal life: marriage, offspring, gambling and other addictions, and early death from uterine cancer. Her introduction at age 17 to her future mentor and collaborator Charles Babbage, inventor of the earliest computer prototypes, changed her life, offering intellectual food and challenge. Privately tutored in mathematics to ward off any poetical instincts, Lovelace thrived intellectually even as she endured physical ill-health and her mother’s emotional coldness.

Lovelace’s father was the poet Lord Byron, and her childhood was framed by her principled, domineering mother’s determination to eradicate all traces of his paternity. McCully ( She Did It!) dramatically details the life of Augusta Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), the person first credited with understanding a computer’s potential beyond mathematical calculation.

Dreaming in Code by Emily Arnold McCully