I listened, read, googled, absorbed anything I could find about her. They pinged over old radio shows with mathematicians singing her praises and explaining her life story.įrom then on, I was obsessed. I told my tutor about her, and he suggested I get in touch with the BBC archives. The internet informed me she was the first computer programmer, and she was from the 1800s, but I couldn’t find much else. And there were beautiful quotes about her from her friends, calling her a 'lady fairy' and an 'enchantress of numbers'. There was a painting of her in a purple dress with fancy hair. I hadn’t heard of her before, but she was one of the few female mathematicians among hordes of men, so she stuck out. My love of maths flooded back, and I ran home to frantically google mathematicians for hours. It’s a film about Alan Turing and how he built the first-ever computer. Then, The Imitation Game hit the cinemas. I decided to go to art college because art was also my hobby, and who wouldn’t want a career of your hobby? So maths went on the backburner for a while. But these two subjects were always very separate, so as I grew up, I had to pick one over the other.  When I was at school, I had two favourite subjects: maths and art.  I’ve been obsessed with Ada Lovelace for a long time. It's no wonder that there's even an Ada Lovelace Day to celebrate her legacy! Anna Doherty tells all. Rebel, rule-breaker and number whizz: there are so many reasons to love Ada Lovelace. Why you should be obsessed with Ada Lovelace (just like me)

The Brontes by Anna  Doherty

I'd be sitting behind the issue desk in my cardigan, swiping library cards, and imagining that the swiping action made each customer in front of me explode. In fact, yes, that's the most likely option. Or perhaps I might have ended up as an embittered, passive-aggressive librarian. But (more likely), I'd still be teaching English as a Foreign Language somewhere. JH: I'd have been a supermodel or a porn star. JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer? I'm actually still amazed that I finished it and that I seem to have got away with it. This was difficult to achieve and, at times, I just didn't feel capable of it. There was a sort of balancing act or magic trick that had to be accomplished. I can't say too much here about the story, because there is a mystery at the heart of this book and I don't want to spoil anything for potential readers, but there are certain elements of the narrative that made it a technically complicated book to write.  I suppose the most surprising thing about this novel is that I ever managed to finish it. And so I began to work on a different kind of story, one that, ultimately, became more of a psychological mystery than a character study of a female artist. Befriending the Gillespie family, Harriet soon. I realised that there was no reason why this crime, (which happened in about 2004), couldn't have taken place over a century earlier. In 1888, young, art-loving Harriet Baxter arrives in Glasgow at the time of the International Exhibition. The crime was so bizarre, and involved such incomprehensible cruelty, that it haunted me. The piece in the newspaper was very short and gave only the most tantalising details about the case, which concerned a family, their daughter and a neighbour. The article gave the details of a court case that had just taken place in a seaside town in Britain. However, very soon after I began researching this idea, I came across an article in a newspaper.  Originally, I had thought that the novel might feature a female painter and her struggles to be accepted as a serious artist alongside her male contemporaries. Jane Harris: I had known for a long time that I wanted to write something about an artist in Glasgow at the end of the 19th century. Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

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