White House: Do you know who Ada Lovelace is ?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

2. Lovelace's eminence on lists of great female mathematicians annoys me.

Her achievements were not that significant, but she gets more press than far more important and talented mathematicians like Noether or Kovalevskaya or Germain or Cartwright (have you even heard of any of them? They were all immeasurably better mathematicians than Lovelace, and contributed far more to the development of mathematics) , because computers are The New Hotness, and if you kind of squint and don't look at the details you can present her as the first computer programmer, and possibly also because she was a countess and associated with Babbage, who is also viewed as glamorous for the same reason, rather than an academic who was admired by Weil and Hilbert, who were merely great mathematicians.