Notable Women in History [Chapter 1]
I would like to start this new section of content with one of my most admired female figures in STEM.
Programmer, Mathematician.
Ada Lovelace is considered one of the first computer programmers in history, and the author of the instructions for the first computer program in the mid-1800s.
Ada was born the daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella "Annabella" Milbanke, making her Lord Byron's only legitimate child. From an early age she showed a talent for numbers and language. Encouraged by her mother, Ada Byron developed an affinity for math and science as a child, in fact, her whole education was oriented towards these rigorous subjects by request of her mother, who desired to prevent her daughter from becoming a poet, like her father.
However, Ada did not sublimate her poetical inclinations. She hoped to be "an analyst and a metaphysician". In her 30's she wrote her mother: “If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me "poetical science?"
One of her most remarkable tutors was Mary Sommerville (on the right), one of the first women to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society and also known for translating LaPLace’s works into English. Mary Somerville encouraged Ada in her mathematical studies, and it was thanks to her that Ada met Charles Babbage.
In 1833 Mary introduced Ada to a mathematician called Charles Babbage. Ada was 17 and Babbage was 42. Babbage was then working on a project he called the “Difference Engine”, a calculating machine, and young Ada impressed him with her understanding of it.
Later Babbage developed a more elaborate and complex machine called an “Analytical Engine”, and in 1842 he traveled to Italy to lecture about it at the University of Turin. There, an Italian mathematician and engineer, Luigi Menabrea, wrote a book based on his notes from the lectures, which Babbage asked Byron to translate (some say she was actually asked by Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone). As she did she added her own notes, the length and scope of which more than doubled the original manuscript.
Lovelace’s understanding of Babbage’s Analytical Engine was so deep that in some ways it surpassed that of Babbage himself.
These notes are her programming legacy: in them she predicts the possibility of a general-purpose computer and describes how this machine could be programmed with a code of letters, numbers and symbols to analyze data.
The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with certain programmed rules and that numbers could represent entities other than quantity “mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation.”
Lovelace’s sketches and notes about her understanding of the Analytical Engine were the most elaborate and complete, and they were the first to be published. In her article, published in 1843, Lovelace's accurate comments included her predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. And she was right!
Diagram of an algorithm for the Analytical Engine for the computation of Bernoulli numbers, from Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage by Luigi Menabrea with notes by Ada Lovelace
Ada was the first person to write and publish a full set of instructions that a computing device could use to reach an end result that had not been calculated in advance. Her notes about the Analytical Engine compose what is now regarded as the first "computer program."
Ada Lovelace anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing. The similarities of her work to modern programming show a woman much ahead of her time.
Do you think we should be learning more about Ada Lovelace in school? Because I do.
Consulted sources:
Celebratingada.com
Cs.yale.edu
Findingada.com
Biography.com
Image sources:
Ada Lovelace
Mary Sommerville
Lovelace and Babbage
Analytical Engine
Diagram
Other sources of interest:
Ada Lovelace’s Correspondence with mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan
BBC DOCUMENTARY : Calculating Ada - The Countess of Computing 2015
Ada Lovelace: Great Minds
Thanks for reading.