The Enchantress of Numbers
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace — was a famous writer and mathematician known mostly for her work with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine. In today’s world of far less complex names, she is more commonly called Ada Lovelace. She has also been dubbed as The Enchantress of Numbers and is considered to be the author of the first computer program.
She was a true visionary and gifted intellectual who played a central role in the development of modern digital computers. As early as the 1840s, she had published detailed descriptions of what we know today as modern computing: all-purpose machines that do many different things such as play music, manipulate graphics, and power heavy machinery. It wasn’t until a century later that her visions would be fully realized.
Early Life
Childhood
Ada Byron was born Ada Byron on the 10 December 1815. She was the only child of Lord and Lady Byron.
As a child she was often ill. This however, did not stop here developing her mathematical and technological skills. Ada had a fascination with machines– designing fanciful boats and steam flying machines, and poring over the diagrams of the new inventions of the Industrial Revolution that filled the scientific magazines of the time
At the age of 19 she was married to an aristocrat, William King; when King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838 his wife became Lady Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She thereafter she was know as Ada Lovelace
Early Life
Birth
Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace)
Education
Description 2
Charles Babbage
Introduced to Babbage and begins lifelong collaboration
Difference Engine Publication
Expanded on a article written on the Difference Engine by the italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea
Education
Ada was privately schooled in mathematics and science by noted 19th-century researcher and scientific authors.
In 1833, Lovelace’s mentor, the scientist and polymath Mary Sommerville, introduced her to Charles Babbage, the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics who had already attained considerable celebrity for his visionary and perpetually unfinished plans for gigantic clockwork calculating machines. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace both had somewhat unconventional personalities and became close and lifelong friends. Babbage described her as “that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it,” or an another occasion, as “The Enchantress of Numbers”.
Difference Engine
In 1842 Lovelace translated a short article describing the Analytical Engine by the italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, for publication in England. Babbage asked her to expand the article, “as she understood the machine so well”. The final article is over three times the length of the original and contains several early ‘computer programs,’ as well as strikingly prescient observations on the potential uses of the machine, including the manipulation of symbols and creation of music. Although Babbage and his assistants had sketched out programs for his engine before, Lovelace’s are the most elaborate and complete, and the first to be published; so she is often referred to as “the first computer programmer”. Babbage himself “spoke highly of her mathematical powers, and of her peculiar capability — higher he said than of any one he knew, to prepare the descriptions connected with his calculating machine.
Death
Sadly Ada Lovelace died of cancer at 36, a few short years after the publication of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator”.