Sydney Padua

Graphic artist and animator Sydney Padua talks about the collage of text and image, fact and fiction, research and imagination, in her graphic novel The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

The novel re-imagines the collaboration between Victorians Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage in a series of comic adventures. Lovelace was a mathematician whose work is seen as a precursor of the first computers, while Babbage was an eccentric inventor of the Difference Engine, a huge clockwork calculating machine that would have been the first computer if he had finished it. Padua imagines what would have happened if the two had built the Difference Engine.

Padua is a graphic artist and animator whose work appears in several popular Hollywood films, including The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and The Jungle Book. She won the biennial Neumann Prize of the British Society for the History of Mathematics for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage.

The talk is free but tickets must be booked through the usual channels.

This event is presented by the Bodleian Libraries.