Ángela Ruiz Robles

Ángela Ruiz Robles invented and, in 1948, patented the la Enciclopedia Mecánica, or Mechanical Encyclopaedia, which is considered to be an early version of an ebook. She couldn’t build a prototype until 1962; it is now exhibited in the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña, Spain.

The mechanical book displayed content on three scroll-like reels that could be wound forwards or backwards across a central ‘page’. The reels were interchangeable, so content was customisable. The book came with a built-in light to facilitate reading in the dark, and it also supported sounds. The size of an ordinary book, it was enclosed by two box-like covers.

Ruiz Robles developed the Mechanical Encyclopaedia for her students so that they would not have to carry heavy books around. She believed her device would make learning more attractive by allowing her to adapt the learning materials to the specific needs of the individual student. The content reels could be produced in any language, and about any subject at any level, and teachers could produce their own content for it.

Ultimately, despite several trips to Madrid to try to find backing, she was unable to fund production or find a production partner.

In 1947, she received the Cross of Alfonso X the Wise for her innovations in education and social work, and in 1952 she was awarded a Gold Medal at an exhibition for Spanish inventors.

Further reading

• Ángela Ruiz Robles, Wikipedia
• Angela Ruiz Robles – Complete Biography, History and Inventions, History Computer
• Ángela Ruiz Robles, a life worth three | Timeless Women 4, Fascinating Spain
• Is This 1949 Device the World’s First E-Reader?, Marc Lallanilla, Live Science, 30 January 2013
• Ángela Ruiz Robles’s 121st Birthday, Google Doodle, 28 March 2016
• Madrid names street after female inventor of mechanical ‘ebook’, Sam Jones, The Guardian, 25 February 2018
• Biography of Angela Ruiz, Spanish inventor, Salient Women, 1 June 2020

The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Science, like most fields, is set up for men to succeed, and is rife with racism, sexism, and shortsightedness as a result. But as Dr Chanda Prescod-Weinstein makes brilliantly clear, we all have a right to know the night sky. One of the leading physicists of her generation, she is also one of the fewer than one hundred Black women to earn a PhD in physics.

You will enjoy – and share – her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter — all with a new spin and rhythm informed by pop culture, hip hop, politics, and Star Trek. This vision of the cosmos is vibrant, inclusive and buoyantly non-traditional.

By welcoming the insights of those who have been left out for too long, we expand our understanding of the universe and our place in it. The Disordered Cosmos is a vision for a world without prejudice that allows everyone to view the wonders of the universe through the same starry eyes.

Order the book on Bookshop.org.uk here and your purchase will support a local independent bookshop of your choice!

You can follow her work here:

Twitter: @IBJIYONGI
Facebook: facebook.com/chandapw
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chandaprescodweinstein
Website: www.cprescodweinstein.com

Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy

Professor Sylvia Ratnasamy is a computer scientist specializing in networking who invented the distributed hash table, a way of efficiently storing data without requiring a central registry.

In her 2001 paper, “A Scalable, Content-Addressable Network”, Ratnasamy became the first person to define a scalable design for distributed hash tables (DHT), an essential element in large-scale distributed and peer-to-peer computing systems. Her paper is currently one of the most cited in the recent history of computer science.

DHTs optimise data storage across several locations or even geographies by splitting data into objects, and they are now used in many distributed datacenters and by cloud service providers. DHTs enables large enterprises, including big tech companies like Apple, Google and Facebook, to efficiently manage and distribute data in storage systems across the globe, while making it rapidly accessible wherever necessary. Without DHTs, today’s cloud services, file sharing services and social networks would be much more complex.

Ratnasamy’s later work improved scalability for peer-to-peer applications such as file-sharing and developed more effective connection topologies for DHTs. She also introduced OpenDHT, a public DHT service that makes it possible for any organisation to easily and quickly build their own distributed systems.

Ratnasamy is a professor at Berkeley University, where her research is in operating systems & networking. She was named one of IEEE’s N² Women: Star in Computer Networking and Communications in 2019, and was given ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 2014.

You can follow her work here:

Website: eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/ratnasamy.html

Further reading

• Sylvia Ratnasamy, Wikipedia
• Sylvia Ratnasamy, Association for Computing Machinery, 2014
• 2019 stars in computer networking and communications, N2Women

Can maths predict the future? – Professor Hannah Fry, 2014

Hannah Fry shows how maths can explain real world events. From crimes to relationships, patterns in numbers such as Benford’s law on the prevalence of numbers starting with 1′, help us predict the future.

Dr Hannah Fry is a Professor in the Mathematics of Cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at UCL, whose TEDx talk on the mathematics of love has been viewed over half a million times. She is the author of several books: The Mathematics of Love (2015), The Indisputable Existence of Santa Claus (2017), Hello World (2019) and the recently released Rutherford & Fry’s Complete Guide to Absolutely Everything (Abridged). She has presented numerous science TV shows for the BBC, and has hosted the BBC Radio Four show “The Curious Cases of Rutherford and Fry” with geneticist Dr Adam Rutherford since 2016.

You can follow her work here:

Website: https://hannahfry.co.uk/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fryrsquared
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FryRSquared/
LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/hannah-fry-9919361a2 

Recorded at, and sponsored by, The Royal Institution, you can watch the rest of the Ada Lovelace Day Live 2014 playlist here.

Dope Labs, Titi Shodiya & Zakiya Whatley

Hosted by best friends (and two of the dopest scientists you will ever meet), Titi Shodiya and Zakiya Whatley, Dope Labs is a podcast serving up scientific principles with a healthy dose of tea. From cuffing season to Cardi B, they take what’s trending and put it under the microscope with the help of some very smart (and cool) scientific friends. At Dope Labs, they believe science is “for errrrbody” and their mission is to bring out the inner scientist in YOU. 

Recent episodes include: 

• The sociology of celebration. Dope Labs explores the work of Mihai Stelian Rusu and Ismo Kantola and their three coordinates of celebration: temporality, spatiality, and sociality.
• Afrofuturism, science fiction, and horror with Dr Kinitra Brooks.
• Dr Marie Spiker talks about the US food system, from farm to fork to flush. Dope Labs talks about the various ways the food industry has to adjust when the demand changes.

You can follow their work here:

Twitter: @Dr_TSho, @Zsaidso and @dopelabspodcast
Website: www.titishodiya.com, zakiyawhatley.com