Ada Lovelace Day 2015

[Flymetothemun]

If you use a computer, and I hope you do, there are certain people attached to it. Not just you with a USB cable soldered to electrodes in your brain, but also people like Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Bill Gates. But, there is one person you may not have heard of. Her name is Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, or Ada Lovelace, as she's known nowadays.

Born on December 10th, 1815, she was the only legitimate child of the famed poet Lord Byron, and had a better life than most in England during the 1800s. From a very young age she was interested in science, or at least applied scientific processes when she set the task of flight before herself. She researched various materials to use and studied birds to obtain proportions for a flying apparatus. In her adult life she made acquaintance with such people as Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. In 1835, she married William King, the 1st Earl of Lovelace, and had three children with him. She sadly died in 1853 at the age of only 36 due to uterine cancer.

In 1833 she met Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, which is considered to be one of the first computers. She remarked that the Engine, while it could calculate anything it was told, didn't have the ability to decide for itself what to calculate. She also remarked that:

"[The Analytical Engine] might 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."

In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar on his Engine at the University of Turin in Italy. An attendee of the seminar transcribed his speech in French and the transcription was subsequently published in an academic journal by the University of Geneva. It was then translated into English by a friend of Babbage's. Ada then added many notes to the paper, which were added to the translation as well.

In these notes she describes an algorithm for the Engine so that it could be made to compute Bernoulli numbers. Because of this algorithm, she is considered by most to be the first Computer Programmer.

We've come a long way since Lovelace, Babbage, and the Analytical Engine. We have countless programming languages, computers that would be considered wizardry in her time, and we do more with computation than Babbage could have dreamed of. Her writings influenced Alan Turing in his work with computers and the cracking of the ENIGMA machine. Her influence is in every computer, cell phone, and pretty much anything with a microchip inside.

So, on Ada Lovelace Day on Oct. 13th, please celebrate or at least take some time to remember Ada Lovelace, one of the most influential people of modern times, a pioneer in computing, and one of my personal heroes.

Below is one of the several portraits of her:

[Azimech]

Nice! Thanks for posting!

[benzman]

The ADA programming language is named after her:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_(programming_language)