Major Contribution: Wrote the first computer program and contributed to the work of Charles Babbage.
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Ada lived with her mother, as is apparent in her father's correspondence concerning her. Lady Byron was also highly interested in mathematics (Lord Byron once called her "the princess of parallelograms"), which dominated her life, even after marriage. Her obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Lord Byron was one of the reasons why Annabella taught Ada mathematics at an early age.
Ada was
privately home schooled in mathematics and
science by
William Frend,
William King and
Mary Somerville. One of her later tutors
was
Augustus De
Morgan. An active member of
London society, she was a member of the
Bluestockings in her youth.
In 1835 she married
William King, 8th Baron King, later
1st Earl of Lovelace. They had three
children;
Byron
born
12 May
1836, Annabella (Lady Anne Blunt) born
22 September
1837 and
Ralph Gordon born
2 July
1839. The family lived at Ockham Park, at
Ockham, Surrey. Her full name and title for
most of her married life was The Right Honorable Augusta Ada, Countess of
Lovelace. She is widely known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace, or by her
maiden name, Ada Byron.
She knew and was taught by Mary Somerville, noted researcher and scientific
author of the 19th century, who introduced her in turn to Charles Babbage on
June 5,
1833. Other acquaintances were
Sir David Brewster,
Charles
Wheatstone,
Charles Dickens
and
Michael Faraday.
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 During a nine-month period in 1842–1843, Ada translated Italian mathematician
Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's newest
proposed machine, the
Analytical Engine. With the article, she
appended
a set of notes which specified in complete detail a method for
calculating
Bernoulli numbers
with the Engine, recognized by historians as the world's first
computer program.
Biographers debate the extent of her original contributions, with some holding
that the programs were written by Babbage himself. Babbage wrote the following
on the subject, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher
then suggested that she add some notes to Menabrea's memoir, an idea which was
immediately adopted. "We discussed together the various illustrations that might
be introduced: I suggested several but the selection was entirely her own. So
also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed,
that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save
Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having
detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.
Lovelace's prose also acknowledged some possibilities of the machine which
Babbage never published, such as speculating that "the Engine might compose
elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Had the Analytical Engine ever actually been
built, her program would have been able to calculate a sequence of
Bernoulli numbers. Based on this work,
Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first
computer
programmer. Babbage was impressed by Ada's intellect and writing skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Numbers". In 1843 he wrote of Ada: Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans - everything is short but the Enchantress of Numbers. The level of impact of Ada on Babbage's engines are the subject of debate. The debate is difficult to resolve due to Charles Babbage's tendency to not acknowledge (either verbally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work. Over one hundred years after her death, in 1953, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after being forgotten. The engine has now been recognized as an early model for a computer and Ada Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software. |
