Ada, aged four.
Ada, aged seventeen.
One of only two photos of Ada. This daguerreotype was by Antoine Claudet and was made about the time she was creating her Notes.
Portrait of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836).
Lovelace's diagram from Note G, the first published computer algorithm.
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Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815, in London, England, and was Byron's only legitimate child. Five weeks after her birth, her mother, Lady Byron, left her abusive husband. On April 24, 1816 a deed of separation was signed and Lord Byron left England for good. Ada never saw her father again for he died eight years later in Greece.
After Lord Byron's departure, Lady Byron took control of her daughter's upbringing. This control included the suppression of any undesirable traits that may have inherited from her father. Lady Byron had insisted on the cultivation of mathematics primarily because its discipline represented for her the direct opposite of everything associated with her depraved husband: dangerous fancy, melancholy moods, evil, even insanity. Mathematics was first for Lady Byron a mode of moral discipline. Accordingly, she arranged a full study schedule for her child, emphasizing music and arithmetic-music to be put to purposes of social service, arithmetic to train the mind.
By Ada's early teenage years, Ada realized she had a true passion for numbers not unlike that of her father's passion for poetry. Lady Byron provided tutors of high distinction for her such as William Frend, a Cambridge mathematician, who instructed Ada in the areas of astronomy, algebra and geometry. Another tutor, Augustus De Morgan, was the first Professor of Mathematics at the newly founded University of London.
This passion for numbers continued throughout the rest of her life. Lovelace first met Babbage when she was 18 at a dinner party hosted by Mary Fairfax Somerville, the 19th century's most prominent woman scientist. Despite the fact that he was 23 years her senior, Babbage became her good friend and intellectual mentor. She was immediately intrigued when she first saw Babbage's Difference Engine and plans for the Analytical Engine in 1834. The perfect opportunity for Lovelace to study the Analytical Engine came after Babbage's 1840 lecture in Turin, Italy. An Italian military engineer by the name of Luigi Federico Menabrea wrote an article on the lecture that was printed in a French publication in 1842. Lovelace's translation of Menabrea's article from French to English and her accompanying notations were published in the prestigious Taylor's Scientific Memoirs the following year.
Lovelace labeled her seven "Notes" with the letters A through G. The word "computer" did not mean in the 19th century what it came to mean in the 20th century. Rather, it referred to a device that only did arithmetic or a person whose job was to add up numbers. Therefore, Lovelace never used the word in her "Notes."
"Note A" distinguished between Babbage's Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine. This note was significant in that it described a general purpose computer that would not be invented for more than 100 years. In "Note B, " Lovelace looked at the concept of computer memory and the ability to insert statements to indicate what is happening to the person looking at the program. This idea is similar to the current practice of using REM or non-executable remark statements in a program.
Lovelace expanded on a method called "backing" in "Note C." This allowed for the operation cards to be put back in the correct order so that they could be used again and again like a loop or subroutine. "Note D" was a very complex explanation of how to write a set of instructions or a program to accomplish a set of operations. "Note E," aptly stated by Baum, clearly "emphasize[d] the versatility of the Analytical Engine and suggests, in its brief description of operation cards which designate cycles, modern-day function keys."
"Note F" explained how the Analytical Engine could solve difficult problems and eliminate error. This would allow for the solving of problems that were prohibitive due to the constraints of time, labor and funds. Baum also noted that Lovelace wondered "if the engine might not be set to investigate formulas of no apparent practical interest … as computers are used today, to find problems rather than to solve them."
The last and probably the most mathematically complex and most quoted of Lovelace's notations was "Note G." In this note, she stated what some have referred to as "Lady Lovelace's Objection" or, in the more modern phrasing, "garbage in, garbage out." Basically, she was saying that the computer's output is only as good as the information it is given. "Note G" also included an actual illustration of how the engine could produce a table of Bernoulli numbers.
In 1829, Lovelace suffered an unidentified ailment that left her unable to walk for many months. She was also subject to convulsive fits and there was speculation that they may have been due to a mental rather than a physical condition. None of these conditions, though, caused any permanent disabilities. Only uterine cancer would prove to be insurmountable for her.
She died on the evening of November 27, 1852, of uterine cancer at the age of 36, the same age at which her father had died. At her request, she was buried beside her father in the Byron vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of the Byrons in Nottinghamshire. This last request was prompted by a visit in 1850 to Newstead Abbey where Lovelace finally made peace with her father's memory.
Ada Lovelace is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of a "computing machine" and the first computer programm.
The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980 and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, MIL-STD-1815, was given the number of the year of her birth.
Since 1998 the British Computer Society (BCS) has awarded the Lovelace Medal, and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students. BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference for women undergraduates.
The second Tuesday in October has become Ada Lovelace Day, on which the contributions of women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are honoured. The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.
She is also the inspiration and influence for the Ada Developers Academy in Seattle, Washington. The academy is a non-profit that seeks to increase diversity in tech by training women, trans and non-binary people to be software engineers.
Quotations:
Stein demonstrates in a quote from an 1843 letter Lovelace wrote to Babbage, "I hope another year will make me really something of an Analyst. The more I study, the more irresistible do I feel my genius for it to be. I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst, (& Metaphysician). "
She wrote: "The Analytical Enginemight act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine.. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. "
Lovelace's life was fraught with difficulties of her own making. She not only had a passion for mathematics, she had a passion for men of mathematics. She was known to have had affairs with several men whose attention she initially sought on an intellectual level. Her affair with John Crosse proved to be the most devastating. She pawned the Lovelace diamonds to pay his gambling debts, and it is possible that he was blackmailing her as well. Lovelace, too, fell victim to the vice of gambling and enlisted the help of some of her male friends to place bets for her.
Quotes from others about the person
Augustus De Morgan described Ada as "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence" according to Dorothy Stein in her book, Ada: A Life and a Legacy. "Indeed, it was a desire for mathematical glory, rather than a particular kind of mathematics, that compelled Ada," concluded Baum.
According to the historian of computing and Babbage specialist Doron Swade:
"Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number... What Lovelace saw - what Ada Byron saw - was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation - to general-purpose computation - and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper."
On July 8, 1835, Ada Byron married William King who was then the eighth Baron King. In 1838, he became the 1st Earl of Lovelace and she became the Countess of Lovelace. The following year, Lord Lovelace also became lord lieutenant of Surrey. Her husband was 11 years older than she and considered to be somewhat reserved. He did, however, take pride in his wife's mathematical talents and supported her endeavors. His approval was quite fortunate for Ada Byron Lovelace as few women of her station in Victorian England were encouraged to pursue academic interests of any kind.
(22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824)
(17 May 1792 – 16 May 1860)
(21 February 1805 – 29 December 1893)
(22 September 1837 – 15 December 1917)
(12 May 1836 – 1 September 1862)
(2 July 1839 – 28 August 1906)
