Ada Lovelace

(dec. 1815-nov. 1852)

Ada Lovelace understood

that if you could make a machine
that calculated not just individual
numbers but abstract variables
that you could use computers to
weave numbers, musical notes, any
kind of symbolic language and that
it could be applied to really
anything in the way that it is in our
modern world.
Ada Lovelace was the
daughter of the poet Lord Byron.
She was a mathematician in the Victorian Age, the very first computer programmer. Her father
was known as a kind of louche, romantic, you know, a little bit seedy, a little bit crazy, a little bit
wild. When he divorced her mother, she decided that she was going to try to curb out all the
romantic tendencies in her daughter's spirit by teaching her mathematics, rigorously, from a
very young age. So she was instructed in the maths and sciences from childhood, but
unfortunately, she retained some of her father's poetic spirit, so she became fixated with the idea
of mathematics as a form of poetry, and as a metaphysical art in and of itself.
She wrote all of these mathematicians and scientists of her day into corresponding with
her and giving her lessons, but ultimately, yeah, she was an autodidact. She read everything she
could get her hands on, she kept up-to-date with all the scientific publications of her day, she
corresponded with people that she admired, and she organized little scientific salons in her
immediate social circles. So she taught herself everything she knew. And she ended up spending
her life developing mathematical proofs for the earliest computer. In fact, before computers were
even built, she made mathematical proofs that can be characterized as the earliest computer
programs for a machine called the difference engine and then the analytical engine.
So Ada Lovelace's primary contribution to the history of computer science is a set of notes
that she wrote that were footnotes of the translation of a paper written about Charles Babbage's
analytical engine, which was a machine that he was having a really hard time getting funded by
the British government. He traveled around Europe giving talks about the machine. One of the
people that saw one of those talks was a young Italian engineer named L. F. Menabrea, who
ended up becoming the Prime Minister of Italy. He wrote a technical paper about the analytical
engine that was published in a Swiss journal. Ada read it. She thought it was pretty good. But
she thought she could do better.
She showed it to Babbage, and she said, "Couldn't I do better than this?", basically. She
ended up creating a volume of notes that ended up being several times more voluminous than
the original paper. She made a massive jump that wasn't really recognized until the 1950s, the
dawn of the computing age. A number of computer scientists rediscovered her notes and
republished them because they had essentially predicted everything that they were doing in the
early days of computing. We have to actively make sure that we develop our own history and
keep it updated and maintain it and open it up to as many people as possible.

Group discussion:

1) What did Ada invent? How did it work?

2) What was she inspired by?
3) Was she an engineer?

Taking everything into consideration, answer:

1) Do you think Ada knew the magnitude that her contribution would have in modern
society?
2) Can you name and describe another important invention that has changed the world?