Lizzi Collinge

I thank my hon. Friend for that intervention. Groups such as the Women+ in Engineering group at the University of Strathclyde can do so much to support other women in STEM. I must also put on record my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) for inspiring this debate. Now, back to Ada—it was her mother, Lady Annabella, who allowed and encouraged Ada to pursue her intellectual passions. Annabella hoped that mathematics would temper whatever dangerous poetical tendencies young Ada might have inherited from her father. Ada was a curious child. At 13 she was designing flying machines. By 15, she had already impressed a man called Augustus De Morgan, a mathematician at the forefront of symbolic logic. He tutored her in maths and logic, exchanging dozens of letters. He even wrote that, had she been a man, she would have had the potential to become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first rate eminence.” But Ada was a woman and as such, De Morgan believed, like many at the time, that mathematics might simply be too strenuous for her. Ada had been plagued with health problems—first headaches, then a bout of measles at 13 that left her paralysed. Confined to her bed, she had to relearn to walk at 15, and De Morgan believed that tackling mathematical problems would only exacerbate her frailty. He wrote that “the very great tension of mind” that maths problems require is “beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.” Ada, of course, ignored him. At a time when women were not allowed to go to university, her academic development relied on a cobbled together series of tutors and mentors. She burned through one tutor’s entire mathematical knowledge in just a few weeks.