Talk:Ada Lovelace/2010/August

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Biographers noted?[edit]

"Biographers have noted that Lovelace struggled with mathematics..."

Surely this should either:

be "biographers have claimed"
or provide mention of the primary sources which they have noted. If biographers have made this claim, they presumably have some reason to, and that should be mentioned in the article.

Comment: The documentation is provided in Dorothy Stein's thorough biography, especially pp.72-84. Surely every contributor to this article has read Stein? All the evidence suggests that Lovelace was very interested in mathematics but had no great gift for it.86.163.241.57 (talk) 13:25, 6 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've fixed the section to specify that the contention is specifically Dorothy Stein's. FWIW, Stein's biography comes across as something of a hatchet job to me. She continually insists that Lovelace had no great skills in mathematics, and to prove this she cites several letters between her and De Morgan. The letters are basically a correspondence course in Calculus (which was still being actively developed at the time). The fact that Lovelace stumbled through some concepts in calculus while she was learning it doesn't seem very surprising to me. Add to this the fact that women at the time were generally not allowed to attend lectures or classes on higher mathematics (or even purchase math textbooks) and you can understand Lovelace's difficulties. If I had to learn 19th century calculus solely through exchanging letters with a mathematician (who was unpaid for his efforts) I would probably stumble occasionally as well. Kaldari (talk) 17:35, 16 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The fact that Lovelace 'stumbled' when learning the most elementary calculus (nothing at all advanced) does support the view that she was not 'gifted' in mathematics. But I think Stein's most damaging point is that when Lovelace translated Menabrea's paper on Babbage's work, she failed to notice and correct a very glaring printing error in an equation: almost as obviously an error (to a mathematician) as 2 + 2 = 5. 86.181.14.170 (talk) 12:06, 22 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]