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Perhaps you're right (I don't know), but I note that Lovelace had insight on the usefulness of computers for solving a broader class of problems than previously thought, and this was an important contribution in its own right

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace#Insight_into_pote...

In any case, often the opposite of what you are describing happens: women get disproportionately less credit than male collaborators, even when they made bigger contributions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_effect

edit: Stephen Wolfram has this to say about her contributions:

> In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's main achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine—something which Babbage never did".[91]




If instead of asking a physicist you turn to a historian of science (that is a person deriving authority by virtue of being a subject matter expert instead of from being a rich programmer) you get something like the following story:

> It was attributed to her, but—as Herschel hinted—Babbage may have had an input; it is impossible to know how much. Most famously, one of her additional notes, G, sets out a table for calculating what are called the Bernoulli numbers, which carry great mathematical significance. Even if she was solely responsible for it, the chart is not a program, but shows the stages that would occur in a pre-programmed machine if one existed.

> Heroes are made, not born. If computer scientists feel they need a 19th-century ancestor, then perhaps Herman Hollerith should supplant Babbage? To tabulate the US census, Hollerith invented eponymous punched cards which are still being used 100 years later—and he also founded a company that became the international giant IBM.

> And as a female role model, the American mathematics graduate Grace Hopper seems eminently more suitable than London’s flighty Victorian socialite. A rear admiral in the US Navy during the Second World War, this programming pioneer gave her name to a powerful supercomputer. Hopper revolutionised the digital world by insisting that instead of forcing people to communicate in symbolic code, computers should be taught to speak English. She also made a permanent mark on the English language—the term “debugging” was coined after she removed a moth that had flown inside some circuitry.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/science-and-technology/de...




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