Ada's Ideas

October 1, 2016

Gr 1-3-This latest picture book biography of Ada Lovelace is sure to captive a variety of readers. For visual learners, the illustrations (watercolors cut, arranged, and then photographed) lend the story a rhythmic movement that allows readers to better imagine the chugging of Lovelace's Analytical Engine. The paper-doll appearance of the cast of characters evokes a sense of play around an otherwise dense subject. The text's lilting quality will stick with aural learners long after the book is over. For example, Robinson's citation of Lord Byron's alliterative diminutive for his daughter-the Princess of Parallelograms-intensifies the sing-song, playful pace of the work. Despite the easy tone, Robinson celebrates Lovelace for her powerful analytical mind in spite of an overbearing mother, an absent father, and a restrictive social position. The author adeptly portrays how Lovelace's mathematical reasoning was largely unmatched during her time, as well as how her hopeful, expansive imagining of future incarnations of the Analytical Engine led directly to modern computers. The only drawback of this work is its lack of page numbers or index, hindering classroom or homework use. VERDICT A fascinating and uplifting STEAM selection, highly recommended for biography collections.-Chelsea Woods, New Brunswick Free Public Library, NJ

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2017
Whisked away as a newborn by Anne Milbanke, her strait-laced mathematician mother, Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) never knew her father, the impetuous Romantic poet Lord Byron. Determined to suppress Ada's imagination (and any other of Byron's "reckless" traits), Milbanke banned poetry, urging her daughter to explore numbers instead. Yet Ada still "[found] her own sort of poetical expressionthrough math!" Inspired by the Industrial Revolution's new steam-powered machinery, young Ada envisioned a fanciful contraption: a flying mechanical horse. A serious bout of measles sidelined her "Flyology" work, but her ingenuity soon whirred again when she met inventor Charles Babbage. Writing a complex algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine (an early computer prototype) to calculate Bernoulli numbers, Ada became the first computer programmer--and a visionary one at that, foreseeing programs for "pictures, music, and words" more than one hundred years before the first functional computers were built. Robinson's writing is direct and deft (if exclamation point-heavy) and mostly accessible to younger readers. But what really steal the show are her whimsical illustrations: paper cutouts arranged in layers and photographed for a striking collage effect. Robinson's eye-catching images feature equations, geometric diagrams, and math instruments, artfully emphasizing the picture-book biography's conclusion that for Ada Lovelace, "a great imagination proved just as important as mathematical skill." A bibliography and brief notes about Bernoulli numbers and the book's illustrations are appended. [See also Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science, reviewed below.] tanya d. auger

(Copyright 2017 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)