![Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daguerrotype portrait circa 1843 Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daguerrotype portrait circa 1843](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1e947cf0-5cae-4da5-8f6f-53ef9f04574b_740x1018.jpeg)
The 13th card of a Tarot suit shows us a teacher, and in computing tarot, that teacher is a person who teaches you about the reflexive, universal nature of computing. For the suit of swords, that teacher is The Mathematician.
Computers are a blunt imitation of mathematics. A lot of the development of Mathematics has been motivated by engineering and mechanism, but for digital computers, this is the reverse: the mathematics preceded the mechanism. Behind and beyond and before computers, motivating them, there is a truth. We learned about hypothetical computers as objects of pure mathematics, and then tried to build them in reality.
There is a human element that is easy to miss in the paragraph above - the “We” in “We learned” and “we tried”. The 13th card is the queen of that suit, a person, with desires and motives and limits. Why does the mathematician care? Why does she work? To what end?