Celebrating the first coder in history with coding, science and music

To celebrate Ada Lovelace’s life, work and legacy, we have joined the annual international Ada Lovelace Day celebrations since 2019.

In 2020 we organised a presentation and a coding session offered to pupils from a variety schools as well as to undergraduate students. This included an artistic competition open to all to submit a piece inspired by Ada Lovelace. The winner piece is presented below:

In 2019 we organised an evening event with three sessions, the first of which was an Introduction to Python session facilitated by the  HiPy team in which participants were introduced to coding in Python and competed to complete tasks against the clock to win prizes. The challenges in Python were a little different to the usual HiPy sessions, seeing the participants play with Bernoulli Numbers – the output of Ada’s first computer program.

The second part of the evening saw a live musical performance of ‘Ada sketches’, a work by composer Emily Howard who was Artist in Residence in the Department of Mathematical Sciences here at the university in 2015. The musicians were a mixture of students and professionals hailing from the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Following the performance, Emily, in conversation with Professor Lasse Rempe-Gillen, discussed the work and some other highlights from her career, as well as the influence and legacy of Lovelace herself.

The evening closed with a panel discussion involving academics from the departments of Music and Mathematics here at the university, as well as Emily and other colleagues from PRiSM (RNCM Research Centre for Practice and Research in Science and Music). The session, chaired by Pro Vice-Chancellor Dinah Birch, focused on interdisciplinary collaboration between the sciences and the arts and the benefits and challenges this collaboration presents.

Women in Data Science

In March 2019 we organised a round table event to showcase our profession and highlight the contributions of relevant women to the field. We had a wide range of representation of women at different stages of their career that talked about their ambitions, issues and how exciting is the research they have produced. We plan to resume these events when it is safe to meet face to face.

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