The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage by Sydney Padua (2015) merits hyperbolic kudos, methinketh. (The author’s website is sydneypadua.com.) This graphic novel presents a fun and funny account of inventive 19th-century number-crunchers Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, who are considered by some the first computer scientists, and their Promethean attempts — ultimately unsuccessful — to construct a functioning, programmable Difference Engine. They were about a century ahead of their time.
Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, and also inspired the doomed maths prodigy Thomasina Coverly in Sir Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia. She was recently the subject of a symposium at Oxford.
(See http://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/)
The first shortish section of Padua’s tome presents their actual history, while the remainder offers an alternative history of the adventures they might have had, along with fascinating bits of information on them and cameos from eminent Victorians they knew. The whole thing has a clever Pratchettesque, steampunk vibe. And there are footnotes within the footnotes! Lege feliciter!
by Michael A. Winkelman