Indeed, it is difficult (although of course that’s a sword that cuts both ways: since AFAIK Lovelace’s work lead to zero practical work, zero people building on it, and had zero influence on later mathematicians or engineers or logicians like Turing, and her claim to fame is solely our judgment of her genius and historical priority), but let’s not exaggerate the difficulty: she wrote her program in 1843, and the AP exams began in 1955 or so (hard to find dates), so that’s 112 years. Was the teaching of calculus so revolutionized during that span that Ada’s “frequent proclamations of her own extraordinary mathematical genius” (taking Stein at face value that Ada was something of a braggart) are consistent with her difficulty?
the AP exams began in 1955 or so (hard to find dates), so that’s 112 years.
Except the quote was:
that would be standard fare in a modern high school course in AP calculus.
So that’s some more years, but I don’t think it’s really germane. I’m not saying that the time gap proves she’s a genius; rather, the time gap makes it harder to ascertain.
On another not-imo-germane-to-the-discussion-note, mathematics education was more or less overhauled during the post-war period in many countries. Mathematics education as an academic discipline, I believe, was an innovation of Klein’s that fell out of his work in geometry.
Indeed, it is difficult (although of course that’s a sword that cuts both ways: since AFAIK Lovelace’s work lead to zero practical work, zero people building on it, and had zero influence on later mathematicians or engineers or logicians like Turing, and her claim to fame is solely our judgment of her genius and historical priority), but let’s not exaggerate the difficulty: she wrote her program in 1843, and the AP exams began in 1955 or so (hard to find dates), so that’s 112 years. Was the teaching of calculus so revolutionized during that span that Ada’s “frequent proclamations of her own extraordinary mathematical genius” (taking Stein at face value that Ada was something of a braggart) are consistent with her difficulty?
Except the quote was:
So that’s some more years, but I don’t think it’s really germane. I’m not saying that the time gap proves she’s a genius; rather, the time gap makes it harder to ascertain.
On another not-imo-germane-to-the-discussion-note, mathematics education was more or less overhauled during the post-war period in many countries. Mathematics education as an academic discipline, I believe, was an innovation of Klein’s that fell out of his work in geometry.