Helloooooooooo

Trees in a mug. A fantastic image of the fractal patterns forming between two liquids of different densities. It was formed from adding to icing sugar to food colouring. This looks like a classic example of the Saffman-Taylor instability, which occurs when a less dense fluid is moving towards a more dense one, although I’m not sure the respective densities of icing sugar and food colouring.

“Prime Numbers in Nature”

It has always been a curiosity and delight when elements of nature, like a snake winding along its path, leaves a trail of rippling and intersecting circles that speaks the precise language of Prime Numbers. Rather than being bizarre, such Naturalness is one of the many Laws of Mathematics that underpin and define the mystery of Nature and of our Lives.

It would be really helpful to us to have your input!

English mathematician and writer Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815–November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron as the only legitimate child to the poet Lord Byron and better-known as Ada Lovelace, is commonly considered the world’s first computer programmer — a title she earned by writing the very first algorithm designed to be processed by a machine during her work on Charles Babbage’s seminal Analytical Engine, the early theoretical general-purpose computer that laid the foundation of modern computing.

Abandoned by her father when she was barely a few months old and half-orphaned by Lord Byron’s death when Ada was only eight, Lovelace was led to mathematics and logic by her mother, who saw these strictly rational disciplines as an antidote to the madness she feared Ada had inherited from her father. But even as Lovelace came to indulge her mathematical mind, she insisted on referring to herself as a “poetical scientist.”

Still in her twenties, she was enlisted by Babbage in translating Italian mathematician Louis Menebrea’s memoir of the Analytical Engine, originally published in French. It was in the elaborate notes on the book, which she penned during a nine-month period in 1842-1843, that Lovelace wrote the algorithm which staked out her corner of history.

Lovelace was in many ways a rebel of her era: Though she and her mother inhabited the upper echelons of London society, women’s participation in intellectual affairs was both uncommon and discouraged. Even among the gentlemen who pursued such disciplines as geology, astronomy, and botany, there were no professional scientists per se — in fact, the very word “scientist” didn’t exist until William Whewell coined it in 1836. And yet Lovelace, a woman, was very much a scientist — in addition to being the mother of three children — and an intellectual peer of Babbage’s.

But besides a pioneer of computer science, Lovelace, whose eclectic interests spanned from music to mesmerism, was also in a way one of the world’s first neuroscientists — at least a theoretical one. In 1844, she grew intensely interested in creating “a calculus of the nervous system,” confiding in her friend Woronzow Greig a desire to develop a mathematical model for consciousness that would explain how nerve signals give rise to thoughts and feelings in the brain. But, largely due to her mother’s instilled admonitions about Ada’s inherited capacity for madness, she eventually abandoned the quest.

Lovelace died of uterine cancer, after a short battle terribly managed by her physicians, two weeks short of her thirty-seventh birthday. She is commemorated with one of London’s famous blue plates, located at St. James’s Square and inscribed “Ada Countess of Lovelace 1815-1852 Pioneer of Computing lived here.” Her contribution to modern life is imprinted on every interaction we have with a machine on any given day.

We need more voices in science to step up in defiance for those characters  that get erased from our stories; accolades and glories granted to counterparts  as though we didn’t have the smarts to achieve  the impossible, believe in the improbable  and create the unthinkable.  It’s unthinkable to me that our hindsight is so blinded.  Turning the cheek too many times makes me think you’re shaking your head: no, no, no. 

"Hey - you look good in that dress today."  Pay no mind to the mess that comment made  of my self-confidence. It seems pretty obvious  the words they think are innocuous are noxious,  breeding doubt and insecurity, feeding bouts of fury in me as I hear the same phrases repeated to the women in my classes, our lab mates and the masses of budding genius minds that yearn to focus on their hypotheses and methods  but instead they’re distracted by those words left unretracted:  "you look good in that dress today."

If you tell her that she’s pretty before you tell her that she’s smart, don’t be startled when she starts to parcel out and pull apart  her individuality. Trading physics books for glossy magazines.  Instead of figuring fifty ways to solve differentials she’s counting up  fifty ways to potentially please her partner,  wondering - is this what is appealing? this feeling of cheapening my intelligence because we’re terrified to be marginalized for tying to have it all, all the while face burning, yearning tears not to drip drop while your stomach flip flops at being called out for a love of learning. 

Just between us, from one woman to another  it’ll take a while to recover while we wonder without ignorance why there are so many instances of being told to be a mother before we’re told to be discoverers.  And I hope in twenty years or maybe less  we’ll be blessed with plenty of reassurances that our work is recognized for its significance, and the difference is  we’ll be standing up for our accomplishments - not alone but with accomplices within our fields.  Our fields.  And it won’t be such a novelty to be so proudly standing up for our beliefs and our discoveries.  We need more voices in science, and not those that just say, hey-  You look good in that dress today. 

Found these cards.

Frowned.

Fixed them.

Smiled.