Comedy meets mathematics in a new opera at MIT

Senior music lecturer Elena Ruehr turns Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, groundbreaking thinkers of modern computing, into crime fighters. Close Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds. She has, for example, set poems by Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes to music. Her latest project, " The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage ," recently premiered at MIT and marks another stylistic turn. And as with many artistic projects, the initial spark was serendipitous. Victorian scientific mavens Ruehr, a senior lecturer in MIT Music and Theater Arts and a celebrated, versatile composer, was listening to National Public Radio while making dinner when she heard an interview with Sydney Padua , the author of a graphic novel imagining the 19th-century English prodigies Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage as crime-fighting sleuths - the book is subtitled "The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer." Ruehr's ears immediately pricked up. One reason is that Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and Ruehr has a particular interest in the famous Romantic poet.