Ada Lovelace Day 2024 at SUNY Geneseo
Celebrate Women in Math and the Sciences!
Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in STEM held each year since 2009 on the second Tuesday in October.
This year, SUNY Geneseo will be marking Ada Lovelace Day with a poster session, a presentation by Dr. Karleen West, Professor and Chair of Political Science and International Relations, on collaborative efforts to support women in STEM at primarily undergraduate institutions in the U.S., and a live stream of the speakers presenting at the Royal Institution, London.
Schedule for Ada Lovelace Day at SUNY Geneseo
Poster Session | 2:00–4:00 p.m. | ISC Atrium
Celebrate Geneseo women in STEM! Students will share posters in the ISC Atrium.
Presentation | 1:45–2:30 p.m. | ISC 137
Learn from Dr. Karleen West, Professor and Chair of Political Science and International Relations, how Geneseo is helping to support women in STEM at primarily undergraduate institutions nationwide through a grant from the National Science Foundation.
World-Wide Watch Party | 2:30–4:30 p.m. | ISC 137 and Atrium
The International Ada Lovelace Day event at the Royal Institution in London, England, will be streamed live in ISC 137 and the ISC Atrium, featuring these presentations:
- Dr Evgenia Ilyinskaya, volcanologist: The Grindavík eruption in Iceland
- Mamta Singhal MBE, design engineer: The science and engineering behind the humble rubber duck
- Takita Bartlett-Lashley, mathematician: Using crafts to introduce mathematical concepts to children
- Dr Samantha Terry, radiobiologist: The use of targeted radionuclide therapy in cancer treatments
- Joysy John MBE, software engineer and education entrepreneur: The role of technology in education
- Dr Sarah Bearchell, science writer, presenter, and trainer will create clouds live on stage!
- Prof Anjali Goswami, paleobiologist: Why cats are evolutionarily perfect
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Born in 1815, Ada August King, Countess of Lovelace, collaborated with inventor Charles Babbage on his general purpose computing machine, the Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace published what we would now call a computer program to generate Bernoulli Numbers. Although Babbage had written fragments of programs before, Lovelace’s was the most complete, most elaborate and the first published.
More important, Lovelace was the first person to foresee the creative potential of the Engine. She explained how it could do so much more than merely calculate numbers, and could potentially create music and art, given the right programming and inputs. Her vision of computing’s possibilities was unmatched by any of her peers and went unrecognised for a century.
Ada Lovelace also saw poetry in numbers—no surprise, perhaps, given that she was the daughter of one of England’s most famous romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron.