Ada Lovelace Day 2026: Celebrating Women Who Shape the Practice of Operations Research
Posted for Ada Lovelace Day, 13 October 2026
Every year on the second Tuesday of October, people around the world pause to recognise the women who have shaped science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Today, the Operations Research Society of South Africa joins them. We honour the woman whose name the day carries, and the women in our own community who keep operations research moving forward.
Why do we celebrate Ada Lovelace Day?
Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009, founded by the writer and social-media advocate Suw Charman-Anderson. Its premise is simple: women in STEM are often under-recognised, and young women cannot aspire to careers they never see anyone like them pursuing. By sharing stories of women’s achievements, the day aims to raise their profile and offer new role models. It was first held in March 2009, and since 2012 it has been observed on the second Tuesday of October.
Who was Ada Lovelace?
Augusta Ada Byron was born in London on 10 December 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and her father left England and never returned. Her mother, a keen amateur mathematician herself, made sure Ada was schooled in mathematics and science, an unusual path for a girl of her class and era.
In 1833 she met Charles Babbage, the inventor who had designed the Difference Engine and was developing plans for a far more ambitious machine, the Analytical Engine. They began a long correspondence and collaboration. Ada married William King in 1835 and became the Countess of Lovelace in 1838, but she never stopped studying mathematics.
Her best-known work was done in 1843. She translated an article on the Analytical Engine by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea, then added her own extensive notes, labelled A to G, which ended up considerably longer than the article itself. In them she did three remarkable things:
She published an algorithm. Note G describes a step-by-step method for the Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, with loops and the storage of intermediate values. It is widely regarded as the first published computer program.
She saw beyond arithmetic. Where others saw a calculating device, Ada recognised a machine that could manipulate any symbols governed by rules. She speculated that it might one day work with music, a vision of general-purpose computing a century ahead of its time.
She drew a careful line around its limits. She stressed that the Engine could carry out only what humans knew how to instruct it to do. Alan Turing later discussed this idea as “Lady Lovelace’s objection.”
Ada described her own approach as “poetical science,” a blend of imagination and rigorous analysis.
An outlook that speaks to operations research
Ada’s outlook could serve as a description of our profession. She believed that rigorous mathematics and creative imagination belong together, that a procedure should be understood independently of the machine that executes it, and that technology serves human purposes rather than replacing human judgement. Every operations researcher who formulates a model, tests its assumptions and then hands a recommendation to a decision-maker is working in that tradition.
Ada’s story also carries a lesson in humility. Her own published program is thought to contain an error, and her later attempt to model horse-race betting reportedly ended badly. Verification, validation and honest scepticism about our models are as much a part of the craft as elegant formulation.
Carrying Ada’s legacy forward
Honouring Ada is not only about looking back. Here is how each of us can contribute:
Name and thank someone. Tell a woman in OR how her work shaped yours.
Open a door. Mentor a student or early-career colleague, endorse a student member, or invite a newcomer to an ORSSA event.
Make space. When you nominate speakers, review papers, form panels or recommend colleagues for awards and committees, ask who is not yet in the room.
Share the story. Introduce a learner at your own school, university or workplace to what operations research is and what it makes possible.
Ada Lovelace died at 36, long before anyone built the machines she imagined. We can honour her by doing what she did: seeing further than the tools of the day, and opening the path for the next person to follow.
Happy Ada Lovelace Day from all of us at ORSSA.
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