Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace, often regarded as the world's first computer programmer, was a mathematician and writer known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine included an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers, making her a pioneer in the field of computer programming and a significant figure in the history of technology and engineering.
5 Key excerpts on "Ada Lovelace"
eBook - ePubModern Women
52 Pioneers
- Kira Cochrane(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Aurum(Publisher)
...Ada Lovelace Computer scientist, 1815–1852 Portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, by Margaret Sarah Carpenter, oil on canvas, 1835. ‘ That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show ’ I n 1842, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, embarked on a translation project. Her great friend Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor 24 years her senior, had been working for the best part of a decade on his idea for a calculating machine called the Analytical Engine – a leap forward from his earlier invention, the Difference Engine (neither machine had been built). In an attempt to publicise the idea, hopeful his machine might one day whirr to glorious life, he had travelled to Turin, where an engineer called Luigi Federico Menabrea heard him speak, and published a paper about the device in a Swiss journal. Lovelace decided to translate this for publication in Britain, and having done so, she informed Babbage. As he wrote in his autobiography, two decades later, he was surprised. ‘I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted?’ It was so unusual for women to publish scientific papers in this era that even the visionary Lovelace hadn’t considered it, but she responded with characteristic energy to Babbage’s suggestion that she annotate Menabrea’s essay. Her response was eventually more than double the length of the essay itself, and in her Notes A to G she achieved extraordinary feats. In Note A, she compared the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. The first was strictly a calculating machine, while the second had the potential, she saw, to be a general-purpose machine – Lovelace was conceptualising the modern computer for the first time, a century before the computer age began in earnest. Her understanding of the machine’s capabilities went beyond anything Babbage had yet considered...
eBook - ePubImporting STEM
How the United States Can Get More Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math
- Leanna Chester(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- New Degree Press(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 Women’s Roots in Computing The field of computing has been around for a while now, but have you ever wondered when exactly programming became a thing? And who started it? You’re probably thinking of an Einstein or Sir Isaac Newton type to be the world’s first programmer. But in 1833, almost two hundred years ago, the person many consider to be the first computer programmer got her start—Lady Ada Lovelace. 1 Yes, that’s right—the first programmer was indeed a WOMAN! Ada demonstrated an impressive knowledge of mathematics, even coming from a noble family, once saying, “That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.” Ada was rightfully proud of her abilities; she went on the do amazing things in computing that was way ahead of her time. 2 When Ada was seventeen, she met Charles Babbage, who was known for his works in economics and mathematics. He showed her his partially done Difference Engine, which was a primitive calculating machine. Ada was immediately fascinated. In the following years, she closely kept up with the Difference Engine and discussed it often with Babbage. The Difference Engine could do mathematical tables efficiently, but computationally, it was limited to doing addition, subtraction, and solving some polynomial equations. Therefore, Babbage moved on to creating something even more innovative for the time. He outlined to Ada a new machine called the Analytical Engine, which would be considerably more complex than the Difference Engine. For the nineteenth century, this machine was incredibly similar to modern-day computers, complete with a memory, a CPU, and an input device. Ada realized a machine that could store memory and alter its own commands was far more advanced than calculators that only relied on input. To tap into its potential, Ada wrote the algorithm used by the Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli Numbers—regarded as the first computer program in history...
eBook - ePub- Morgen Witzel(Author)
- 2003(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The Countess corrected a number of his calculations, and together they succeeded by 1840 in getting a part of the analytical engine built, but then funds ran out. Babbage and the Countess then devised a scheme for winning large sums of money by gambling on racehorses, using mathematical calculations of bets and odds. Inevitably, this scheme failed and this cost yet more money. Ada Lovelace died in 1852, further souring Babbage, who in his final years devoted much of his energy to a campaign to rid London s streets of organ-grinders and other street musicians, who he claimed were ruining his health. He died in 1871, bitter and alone. In 1872, a committee from the Royal Astronomical Society examined his designs for the analytical engine and concluded that, if the design had been carried out, the result might have been the beginning of a new epoch in mathematics, astronomy and science at large, so great were the possibilities. Nevertheless, no one could be found to provide the money to take the designs forward. In the end, it took a war for Babbage’s dream to be finally realised. In the 1940s, the British scientist Alan Turing and his colleagues, engaged in developing computers for breaking German radio signal codes, realised that Babbage had already effectively invented the programmable computer and consulted his notes and designs. The second half of the twentieth century saw a great upsurge of interest in Babbage’s work, and he is now generally recognised as the ‘father of the computer’. A prolific writer, Babbage wrote more than eighty books and pamphlets. Most concerned scientific and technical subjects, but several were on economics and business. The Exposition of 1851, for example, discusses the links between scientific and technical progress on the one hand and economic prosperity on the other...
eBook - ePubReckoning with Matter
Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage
- Matthew L. Jones(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...268. (Courtesy of Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.) Debates about the originality of machines were in the news. 3 In 1843, Babbage’s collaborator, Ada Lovelace, publically denied the possibility that machinery might be original: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” 4 A century later, in his epochal “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Alan Turing labeled this claim “Lady Lovelace’s Objection” to the possibility of a machine fully capable of creative thinking. Turing avowed that Lovelace and Babbage misunderstood the implications of what they had wrought: “The Analytical Engine was a universal digital computer, so that, if its storage capacity and speed were adequate, it could by suitable programming be made to mimic the machine in question. Probably this argument did not occur to the Countess or to Babbage.” Turing noted that a variant of this claim “states that a machine can ‘never do anything new.’” His response was a brief, but telling, knife twisted in the hubris of originality: “Who can be certain that ‘original work’ that he has done was not simply the growth of the seed planted in him by teaching or the effect of following well-known general principles.” 5 More than overrated, originality might be a figment of human pride. Like much, if not all, reasoning, invention might in fact be mechanical, something entirely understandable within a materialist psychology. In expanding on her claim, Lovelace had explained that the machine “can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us in making available what we are already acquainted with.” 6 At most, machines aid in the putting together of parts; their province is entirely dispositional, not creative. Like the “Patent Novel Writer,” they can produce congeries, not intellectual unities...
eBook - ePubThe Cognitive Sciences
An Interdisciplinary Approach
- Carolyn P. Sobel, Paul Li(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Every set of cards made for any formula will at any future time recalculate that formula with whatever constants may be required. (Babbage, 1864/1968, pp. 118 – 119) (Figure 5.5) Babbage’s formulation remained the principle for a long time. In the much more recent period of punch cards, a typical program deck would consist of cards containing the program code followed by the cards containing the data. If the program didn’t work because of a mistake, the programmer would have to go through the deck card by card to find the error. Figure 5.5 Punch cards for Babbage’s analytical engine. Source: Science and Society Picture Library Image No. 10303273. Babbage was aided in his project by Lady Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852), the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and a competent mathematician in her own right. Lady Lovelace’s contribution included notes interpreting Babbage’s work. Because no other source about his ideas exists today that researchers might study, her notes are particularly valuable. Babbage’s machine “was the first artifact possessing the characteristics necessary for universal computation” (Russell & Norvig, 2010, p. 15). The mechanism he designed for this machine was very complex and required a new sort of notation in which to encode its instructions. Therefore, Babbage invented a mechanical notation for this purpose. He also anticipated the formal programming languages that would be used in the future, when the machinery advanced beyond the mechanical structures he designed for his early machine. Once again Babbage’s design was not executed in his lifetime. And, unlike the case of the Difference Engine, there is no complete set of blueprints to guide the construction of the Analytical Engine...
