The origin of the name Ada Grace
People have been asking how we came up with the name Ada Grace for our daughter so I thought that I would share where the names came from.
The name Ada comes from Ada Lovelace, known as the “first programmer” back in the early 1800s. You can read more about her here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace. Ada Lovelace was friends with a man named Charles Babbage, who designed a general purpose computer known as the analytical engine. She wrote a series of notes about the machine including a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. Based on those notes, she is widely considered the world’s first computer programmer.
‘Grace’ also comes from a remarkable woman who dealt with computers and programming, Grace Hopper. She was a computer scientist and US naval officer. You can read more about her here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper. She was a true pioneer in computer science, developing the first compiler for a programming language, among other notable accomplishments. The famous quotation “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission” is often attributed to her (hopefully Ada won’t use that against me!). She has a military vessel named after her, the USS Hopper. Very few US military vessels are named after women.
In choosing the names, I wanted to pick women that were pioneers. Both of those women fit the category. Plus, we can now say that Ada Grace is named after the person who wrote the first programming language (Ada Lovelace) and the person who found the first computer bug (Grace Hopper).
