A bluestocking hero

It will soon be time for Finding Ada Day 2012. it's on 16 October. Start researching your favourite women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, medicine) now.

Alex Brown, administrative student in the Knowledge Transfer Group at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also studying for the MSc Science Communication at the University of the West of England.

Meanwhile, a splendid chap called Alex Brown has blogged about how much he hates sexism in science. He is the new Bluestockings' hero. Oh yes. The blogpost also includes some rather fabulous pictures and videos of how to paint your fingernails in a sciencey way.

He makes the point that sexism in science is what is driving women away from it, diminishing the diversity (and therefore the creative potential due to different perspectives being applied) of science. His ire was aroused by a sexist comment posted on a photo of some fingernails painted with mathematical symbols in a science group on Facebook.

And I thought I would round up all my Finding Ada blogposts in one place.

• Wendy Hall
• Lisa Barone
• Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
• Hedy Lamarr
• Anita Borg

Alan Turing revisited

There's a fascinating blogpost about Alan Turing by Christopher Pressler, who is descended from another hero of Bluestockings, Charles Babbage - he who encouraged the Enchantress of Numbers, Ada Lovelace Byron.

Do peruse it, gentle readers.

Hedy Lamarr: an unlikely geek

In celebration of Ada Lovelace day 2010, here's a biography of someone you might not think of as a scientist and inventor:

Hedy Lamarr (born 1913)
Radio communications system

The Viennese-born femme fatale of 1930s and 1940s films is a lot more than just a pretty face.

The actress, whose real name is Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, immigrated to the United States during the early years of World War II. She is best known for sultry roles in such movies as "Ecstasy" and "Samson and Delilah," but she also coinvented a remote-controlled, anti-jamming communications system, a major contribution to U.S. defense technology.

According to Bethesda resident Anne Macdonald, author of a book about American women inventors and a patent-holder herself for a knitting machine, Lamarr learned about designs for military technologies while married to a wealthy Austrian arms dealer for three years. Soon after Nazi Germany invaded Austria in 1938, she left her husband and went to London, where Louis B. Mayer of MGM Studios changed her name and signed her up as his company's newest screen sensation.

In 1942, Lamarr and composer George Antheil received a patent for the communications system, which employed a feature known as frequency hopping. A radio signal, such as those used to direct torpedoes, would "hop" from one broadcast frequency to another at certain intervals. Therefore, if a receiver was not synchronized to receive the entire signal, the signal could not be "jammed" nor deciphered.

Lamarr's invention did not fit MGM's image of her as a glamorous movie star, and her creative side was a well-kept secret in Hollywood. Still, Lamarr was so passionate about helping the war effort that she seriously considered abandoning acting to join the National Inventors Council full-time.

Lamarr's system was never used during World War II, but long after her patent expired, the Sylvania Corp. adopted and further developed the idea.

Source: Female inventors: Mothers of invention

The annual German Inventors' Day is held on her birthday, 9th November:

This lady is Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood diva and inventor.
She is the prototype for the everyday life an inventor, not because she was an Edison, but simply because she was someone that tried to realise her idea.
She did not become rich or famous from her idea (as an actress she was already). Her invention however, the frequency hopping process is still in daily use and an integral process in our mobile phones.
Her birthday, 9th November, has been taken to represent all inventors and this Inventors' Day.

My other Finding Ada blogposts:
Lisa Barone
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Happy Ada Day

Ada Lovelace

In celebration of Ada Lovelace, nearly two thousand bloggers have signed up to a pledge to blog about women in technology.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

There is a big list of women computer scientists on Wikipedia, so it was difficult to choose, but I have chosen Wendy Hall, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Southampton, because I have actually seen her give a keynote at a conference, and because I was born in Southampton.

She is also a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative, and is interested in human-computer interaction:

Wendy Hall

Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems.

The UK Fawcett Campaign for equality between men and women named her as an Inspiring Woman in 2005, and the UK Research Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology selected her as one of six world-class Women of Outstanding Achievement in SET in March 2006. In October 2006 she was the first non-US woman to receive the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership.

She is particularly prominent as a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in SET and for the need to ensure that girls are not excluded from participation in science and engineering careers. In her research and her public life she has sought to ensure that women are equal beneficiaries of technological advance, and her example of achievement and dedication has made her a distinguished role model for women.

Happy Ada Day to Wendy and all geeks of whatever gender!

You can read about more women in technology at the Ada Lovelace Day Collection.

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