Early on in her studies, for example, Ada began to contemplate the math behind the prismatic light seen to shine through a rainbow. Musing on this subject in the spring of 1834, Ada wrote to her math tutor with the following intriguing statement, “I cannot make out one thing at all—why a rainbow always appears to the spectator to be an arc of a circle. Why is it a curve at all, and why a circle rather than any other curve?”
