66 Books Like ADA Lovelace

This was the first biography of Ada. It is opinionated, comprehensive, and entertaining. Ada’s short, tumultuous life is related with little attention to mathematics or proto-computing, but much to her psychology and that of her family and friends. It’s a gothic tale of emotional hypocrisy and cruelty. Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, encouraged the aura of wickedness surrounding Lord Byron and styled herself its victim. Virulently self-righteous, she encouraged her daughter’s mathematical gifts in order to smother her imaginative ones. Despite Victorian piety, superstition, Old Boy network science, drug addiction, the confinement of women - and her overbearing Mother - Ada managed to engage the latest ideas in England and Germany and, working with Babbage, to produce an astonishingly prescient analysis of the “first computer.”

Toole, the first expert in computing to tackle Ada’s story, gathered her letters from British archives and libraries, then arranged their highlights to tell the story of Lovelace’s life in all of its complexity. Her introductions to each decade of life set the context but Ada herself tells the story in her inimitable voice. This book was published before scholars were willing to credit Ada with her achievement. In fact, many dismissed it altogether. It was Toole’s mission to correct the record and she succeeded admirably. This is the essential Lovelace Reader.

A graphic novel about Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage, and their quixotic Victorian escapades designing computers and algorithms nearly a century before their time? As fascinating as that may already sound, it’s only the beginning. This is the only graphic novel I’ve read that has footnotes to the footnotes—immensely amusing footnotes. While reading this book, I feel constantly in the presence of insane genius. (But please read this book on physical paper. It is a work of art.)

This book starts in a similar historical location as Bod’s book but quickly moves through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—settling into the “information theory” era established by Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener, and others in the 1940s-1960s.

I love this book because it situates the intellectual climate leading to our current dystopia of information overload. Gleick’s teasing of chaos theory inevitably pushes the reader to explore his book on the subject from the 1980s: Chaos: Making a New Science (1987).

Picture books are a unique genre because there are really three people who participate in telling the story – the author, the illustrator, and the children who are reading and/or listening. With each page turn, ADA Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine brings us to another time and allows us to become part of that history – a time before computers and other electronic devices proliferated our lives and before women in science were accepted. The lush illustrations and the lyrical text capture my heart each time I read this book, and I love how we get a small peek into the life of the main character’s famous parents, Lord Byron, and Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke.

The daughter of a poet and a scientific mother, Ada is shown growing up in the early 1800s with both imagination and a bent toward math. As a girl, she dreams of building a steam-powered flying horse. She’s fascinated by machines and eager to tour factories. Seeing how cards are used to set patterns for cloth on looms inspires her to create the first computer program. Whimsical illustrations adorn clear explanations of calculations. At the book’s end we see Ada in red-striped stockings and green goggles flying over symbols of some of what her ideas will bring to the world.

Dava Sobel is the unquestionable queen when it comes to writing the history of women in science. You can’t go wrong in choosing anything she’s written, but I particularly enjoyed this group portrait of the women hired as “human computers” at the Harvard Observatory in the late 1800s to interpret astronomical data and observations collected by the male astronomers.

While some of these women were trained scientists, many were simply wives, sisters, or daughters of the Harvard astronomers. Sobel deftly shows how, when given a chance, women were capable of incredible scientific inquiry. I love all of the vivid scenes Sobel recreates and how she is able to bring these women to life so eloquently. 

Many readers fear math, and this action-packed adventure may give you new reasons to fear it. The protagonist’s superpower is super-fast mental calculation that lets her dodge bullets and kick incredible quantities of butt in a fight. Even more devious minds are opposing her. If you’ve ever wondered what use your high school physics and calculus classes were, this novel offers some explanation, although you can appreciate the story without them. This is, and I cannot stress this enough, a fun and exciting tale that treats math like magic and totally gets away with doing so.

This sweet, sexy love story and the two sequels in the series are a win for neurodiverse representation.

Follow the adventures of an autistic woman who struggles with self-confidence until she hires an escort to help her learn the ins and outs of dating and sex—then unexpectedly falls in love with him.

If you thought neurodiversity and sexiness existed in opposition, think again.

I picked this book in part because many kids, including my own daughter, are fascinated by space and will be intrigued by Katherine Johnson calculating the course of moon landings. I also picked it because I very deliberately included a mathematician in Who Is a Scientist?, and I think mathematicians are often neglected in round-ups of books about scientists. My third reason is that this book does a great job of explaining the math that “human computers” like Katherine did, and why this math was important for NASA to send rockets into space.