Ada Lovelace Day 2021

 So this is the 10th anniversary of me doing Ada Lovelace Day posting, as I started in 2011 with Christine Ladd-Franklin.  From Algebraic Logic to Optics and Psychology this honoree is very fashionable nowadays.

Ok, quite a few times I was late with the goods, but this is OK, I reckon. I also varied quite a lot my own criteria for choosing honorees: I started with a deceased female mathematician thinking that there would be more consensus on them, but then moved on to living people, as consensus is overrated (systemic sexism, anyone?) and other criteria maybe should play a role. So interdisciplinarity has been a favorite criterion. My list so far consists of

Christine Ladd-Franklin(2011), Karen Sparck-Jones(2012), Marta Bunge(2013), Helena Rasiowa(2014),  Nyedja Nascimento(2015), Manuela Sobral(2016), Maryam Mirzakhani(2016), Christine Paulin-Mohring(2017), Angela Olinto(2018), Andrea Loparic(2020).

  This list is very personal and idiosyncratic, of course. It has three Brazilians, five friends, two category theorists. It's not representativie of anything, but my own "on the spur of the moment" decisions. But it reflects more than ten years thinking about the issues that make Ada Lovelace Day necessary. As necessary now, as it was ten years ago, despite big social movements like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. 

One thing I've written a lot about, but that the list does not reflect, is the danger of losing the memory of the fights. Forgetting the plight of the suffragists, forgetting all the sisters that could not get degrees, that worked for free to show women could do the work, the ones that could not stay in academia because the pressure to leave was too huge.

 Now recently, reading the lovely interview of Hélène Langevin Joliot reminded me that this fight is not so old.

She's the real granddaughter of Marie Curie and in this interview she says "It's a myth that the Curies sacrificed their lives for Science".

Hélène is 94 years old, but she still debating, giving interviews, a living link to a past where things were indeed much worse. Like me, like many others much younger, she thought that discussing gender equality was not necessary, had been done before. Like us, she discovered that this fight needs to happen every day, all the days. That things will only be good, when everyone is treated fairly, when inclusivity prevails. So

Hélène is my Ada Lovelace Day heroine for 2021!

oh, if you don't read Spanish you might need to use translation software as Helene Joliot's interview above is only in Spanish, so far. Thanks to Women with Science for making it available.

(I promise to put a version in English here pretty soon!)