Ada Lovelace Day

Leigh Ingham Excerpts

Thursday 16th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Lizzi Collinge]

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Groups such as the Women+ in Engineering group at the University of Strathclyde can do so much to support other women in STEM. I must also put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) for inspiring this debate.

Now, back to Ada—it was her mother, Lady Annabella, who allowed and encouraged Ada to pursue her intellectual passions. Annabella hoped that mathematics would temper whatever dangerous poetical tendencies young Ada might have inherited from her father. Ada was a curious child. At 13 she was designing flying machines. By 15, she had already impressed a man called Augustus De Morgan, a mathematician at the forefront of symbolic logic. He tutored her in maths and logic, exchanging dozens of letters. He even wrote that, had she been a man, she would have had the potential to become

“an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first rate eminence.”

But Ada was a woman and as such, De Morgan believed, like many at the time, that mathematics might simply be too strenuous for her.

Ada had been plagued with health problems—first headaches, then a bout of measles at 13 that left her paralysed. Confined to her bed, she had to relearn to walk at 15, and De Morgan believed that tackling mathematical problems would only exacerbate her frailty. He wrote that

“the very great tension of mind”

that maths problems require is

“beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

Ada, of course, ignored him. At a time when women were not allowed to go to university, her academic development relied on a cobbled together series of tutors and mentors. She burned through one tutor’s entire mathematical knowledge in just a few weeks.

[Leigh Ingham (Stafford) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend for securing this debate on a matter close to my own heart. My first job out of university was supporting women into science, technology, engineering and maths. Today, I would like to pay tribute to Georgina Barnard from my constituency. Last month, we opened the institute of technology in Stafford—the best in the country —and she led that project from start to finish. I called to ask her about this debate and what she thinks is most important to help young women get into STEM and face those challenges. From her perspective, it is about supporting young women, from as early an age as possible, to see themselves in those careers. Does my hon. Friend agree with me and Georgina that making sure we have those visible role models is so important?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and with Georgina that having role models and mentors is really important. One of Ada’s mentors was a woman called Mary Somerville, a scientist and polymath. It was Mary who introduced Ada to Charles Babbage, whose work would capture her interest and provide the inspiration for her most significant contributions.

Babbage was a professor of mathematics and a celebrity in the scientific world. He was a visionary, with countless unfinished plans for clockwork calculating machines. At the time, his fascination was his latest device, the analytical engine, a proposed improvement on his earlier and uncompleted difference engine. The analytical engine, he said, would be able to perform any calculation set before it, but the patience of his parliamentary sponsors had worn thin. Having funded him to the tune of £1.7 million in today’s money, they refused to finance a second machine while the first was unfinished.

Babbage was therefore forced to look abroad. After he gave a lecture at the University of Turin, the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea wrote up his notes and published them in French. Charles Wheatstone then suggested that Ada translate them into English, as she was fluent in French and other languages. She showed the translation to Babbage, who was ecstatic, and he suggested that she add her own notes because as he put it, she understood the machine so well.

Ada’s footnotes tripled the paper’s original length, because she understood Babbage’s device, but she also saw further. She rightly saw it as what we would now call a general purpose computer. For Babbage, these machines were nothing more than calculators, but Ada saw past that. She understood that a machine capable of manipulating numbers—and of representing any value, from letters to musical notes—would have a grip on a world beyond mathematical calculation. Crucially, Ada’s vision for computing recognised that technology must be applied for, in her words, “the purposes of mankind.” Technology must serve humanity, not the other way around.

At the time, Ada’s ideas amounted to little more than a vision. Let us remember that she was working in the 19th century, before there were even any functional computers. Her work was not revisited until nearly a century later, when Alan Turing quoted her in his work.