The second Monday in October is Canadian Thanksgiving Day, and the second Tuesday is traditionally Ada Lovelace Day, the celebration of Women in Science and Technology. Thus today — Oct. 11, 2016 — is Ada Lovelace Day.

Lovelace is widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer. Through her friendship with Charles Babbage, aka “the father of computers,” she developed a series of Notes that she published under that name, which contained an algorithm to be carried out on Babbage’s so-called Analytical Machine. This was in 1843.

Lovelace, a mathematician and writer and only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, died 10 years later of uterine cancer at the age of 36.