Ada Lovelace | |
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Born | The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron 10 December 1815 London |
Died | 27 November 1852 Marylebone, London |
(aged 36)
Nationality | British |
Title | Countess of Lovelace |
Spouse | William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace |
Children | |
Parents |
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine; thanks to this, she is sometimes considered the world's first computer programmer.[1][2]
She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (with Anne Isabella Milbanke, 11th Baroness Wentworth). She had no relationship with her father, who died when she was nine. As a young adult, she took an interest in mathematics, and in particular Babbage's work on the analytical engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated an article by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, which she supplemented with a set of notes of her own. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program — that is, an algorithm encoded for processing by a machine. Though Babbage's engine has never been built, Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.[3]
Contents |
Biography
Ada Augusta Byron was born on 10 December 1815, the child of the poet Lord Byron, 6th Baron Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella "Annabella" Milbanke, Baroness Wentworth.[4] Byron, and many of those who knew Byron, expected that the baby would be "the glorious boy", and there was some disappointment at the contrary news.[5] She was named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was called "Ada" by Byron himself.[6]
On 16 January 1816, Annabella, at Byron's behest, left for her parents' home at Kirkby Mallory taking one-month-old Lovelace with her.[5] Although English law gave fathers full custody of their children in cases of separation, Byron made no attempt to claim his parental rights.[7] On 21 April, Byron signed the Deed of Separation, although very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later.[8] Byron did not have a relationship with his daughter and he died in 1824 when she was nine; her mother was the only significant parental figure in her life.[9] Her mother, Annabella, became Baroness Wentworth in her own right in 1856, being then the sole remaining representative of the Wentworth Viscounts.
Lovelace was often ill, dating from her early childhood. At the age of eight, she experienced headaches that obscured her vision.[6] In June 1829, she was paralysed after a bout of the measles. She was subjected to continuous bed rest for nearly a year, which may have extended her period of disability. By 1831 she was able to walk with crutches.
Throughout her illnesses, she continued her education.[10] Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Lord Byron was one of the reasons that she was taught mathematics from an early age. Lovelace was privately schooled in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King and Mary Somerville.[11] One of her later tutors was the noted mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan. From 1832, when she was seventeen, her remarkable mathematical abilities began to emerge,[9] and her interest in mathematics dominated the majority of her adult life. In a letter to Lovelace's mother, De Morgan suggested that Lovelace's skill in mathematics could lead her to become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence".[12]
Lovelace never met her younger half-sister, Allegra Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, who died in 1822 at the age of five. She did, however, have some contact with Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh. Augusta Leigh purposely avoided Lovelace as much as possible when she was introduced at Court.[13]
Adult years
Lovelace knew Mary Somerville, noted researcher and scientific author of the 19th century, who introduced her to Charles Babbage on 5 June 1833. Other acquaintances were Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.
By 1834, Ada was a regular at Court and started attending various events. She danced often and was able to charm many people and was described by most people as being dainty. However, John Hobhouse, Lord Byron's friend, was the exception and he described her as "a large, coarse-skinned young woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the mouth".[14] This description followed their meeting on 24 February 1834 in which Lovelace made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like him, probably due to the influence of her mother, which led her to dislike all of her father's friends. This first impression was not to last, and they later became friends.[15]
On 8 July 1835 she married William King, 8th Baron King, later 1st Earl of Lovelace in 1838. Her full title for most of her married life was "The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace". Their residence was a large estate at Ockham Park, in Ockham, Surrey, along with another estate on Loch Torridon and a home in London. They spent their honeymoon at Worthy Manor in Ashley Combe near Porlock Weir, Somerset. The Manor had been built as a hunting lodge in 1799 and was improved by King in preparation for their honeymoon. It later became their summer retreat and was further improved during this time. The house was built on a small plateau in woodland overlooking the Bristol Channel and surrounded by terraced gardens in the Italian style.
They had three children; Byron born 12 May 1836, Anne Isabella (called Annabella, later Lady Anne Blunt) born 22 September 1837 and Ralph Gordon born 2 July 1839. Immediately after the birth of Annabella, Lovelace experienced "a tedious and suffering illness, which took months to cure".[15]
In 1841, Lovelace and Medora Leigh (daughter of Lord Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told by Lovelace's mother that Byron, her father, was also Medora's father.[16] On 27 February 1841, Lovelace wrote to her mother: "I am not in the least astonished. In fact you merely confirm what I have for years and years felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected".[17] Lovelace did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead blamed Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was".[18] This did not prevent Lovelace's mother from attempting to destroy her daughter's image of her father, but instead drove her to attack Byron's image with greater intensity.[19]
Charles Babbage
Ada Lovelace met and corresponded with Charles Babbage on many occasions, including socially and in relation to Babbage's Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and writing skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Numbers". In 1843 he wrote of her:
Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans – every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.[20]
During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace 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.[21] The notes are longer than the memoir itself and include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical Engine been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer[1] and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.[22]
Part of the terrace at Worthy Manor was known as "Philosopher's Walk", as it was there that Lovelace and Babbage were reputed to have walked discussing mathematical principles.
Death
Lovelace died at the age of thirty-six, on 27 November 1852,[23] from uterine cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.[24] She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham.
First computer program
In 1842 Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his analytical engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and future prime minister of Italy, wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève in October 1842.
Babbage asked the Countess of Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English, subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the translation. Lady Lovelace spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in The Ladies' Diary and Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism "AAL".
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lady Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and Lady Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.[25]
Her notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, the Countess describes an algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is often cited as the first computer programmer.[26] However the engine was not completed during Lovelace's lifetime.
Controversy over extent of contributions
Though Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, there is disagreement over the extent of her contributions, and whether she deserves to have been called a programmer. Allan G. Bromley, in the 1990 essay "Difference and Analytical Engines", wrote, "All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a "bug" in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada Lovelace ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so."[27] Curator and author Doron Swade, in his 2001 book The Difference Engine, wrote, "The first algorithms or stepwise operations leading to a solution—what we would now recognise as a 'program', though the word was not used by her or by Babbage—were certainly published under her name. But the work had been completed by Babbage much earlier."[28]
Historian Bruce Collier went further in his 1990 book The Little Engine That Could’ve, calling Lovelace not only irrelevant, but delusional:
It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Babbage wrote the 'Notes' to Menabrea's paper, but for reasons of his own encouraged the illusion in the minds of Ada and the public that they were authored by her. It is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of both Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine... To me, this familiar material [Ada's correspondence with Babbage] seems to make obvious once again that Ada was as mad as a hatter, and contributed little more to the 'Notes' than trouble... I hope nobody feels compelled to write another book on the subject. But, then, I guess someone has to be the most overrated figure in the history of computing."[29]
Babbage published the following on Lovelace's contribution, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864).[30]
I 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.
The "algebraic working out" Babbage describes is the derivation of the mathematical equations 1 through 9 in Note G, not the Table & Diagram in Note G showing punch card flow. The table, not the equations, is considered the first computer program. In Lovelace's and Babbage's letters to each other in 1843, the only contemporary documentation, Lovelace mentions finding and correcting errors in "our first edition of a Table & Diagram" (Lovelace frequently used "our" when discussing the Notes in letters with Babbage).[31]
Cultural references
Lady Lovelace has been portrayed in the film Conceiving Ada, the steam punk novel The Difference Engine, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and Sydney Padua's webcomic 2D Goggles.[32][33] In John Crowley's novel Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, Ada is featured as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel.
Named after Ada Lovelace
The computer language Ada, created on behalf of the United States Department of Defense, was named after Lovelace. The reference manual for the language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard for the language, "MIL-STD-1815", was given the number of the year of her birth. Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name[34] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science.[35]
Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event whose goal is to "raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths". The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.[citation needed]
In the UK, the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium, the annual conference for women undergraduates is named after Ada Lovelace.[36]
The village computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after her.[citation needed]
There is a building in the small town of Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire named "Ada Lovelace House".[citation needed]
Titles and styles
- 10 December 1815 – 8 July 1835: The Honourable Ada Augusta Byron
- 8 July 1835 – 1838: The Right Honourable The Lady King
- 1838 – 27 November 1852: The Right Honourable The Countess of Lovelace
Ancestry
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Publications
- Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. with notes by trans. Ada Lovelace, in Scientific Memoirs, Vol 3 (1842)
See also
Notes
- ^ a b J. Fuegi and J. Francis, "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25 No. 4 (October–December 2003): 16–26. Digital Object Identifier
- ^ "Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace". Archived from the original on 21 July 2010. http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-bio.html. Retrieved 11 July 2010.
- ^ Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 19, 25.
- ^ Stein, Ada, p. 14
- ^ a b Turney 1972 p. 35
- ^ a b Stein, Ada p. 17
- ^ Stein, Ada, p. 16
- ^ Turney 1972 pp. 36–38
- ^ a b Turney 1972 p. 138
- ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 28–30
- ^ Woolley, Benjamin (February 2002). The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter. ISBN 0-333-72436-4. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071388605/. Retrieved 20 January 2009.
- ^ Stein, Ada, p. 82.
- ^ Turney 1972 p. 155
- ^ Turney 1972 pp. 138–139
- ^ a b Turney 1972 p. 139
- ^ Turney 1972 p. 159
- ^ Turney 1972 p. 160
- ^ Moore 1961 p. 431
- ^ Turney 1972 p. 161
- ^ Toole 1998, Acknowledgments.
- ^ Menabrea 1843.
- ^ Gleick, J. (2011), The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood, London, Fourth Estate, pp. 116–118
- ^ GRO Register of Deaths: December 1852 1a * MARYLEBONE – Augusta Ada Lovelace
- ^ Baum 1986 pp. 99–100
- ^ Fuegi; Francis (2003). pp. 16–26.
- ^ Simonite, Tom (24 March 2009). "Short Sharp Science: Celebrating Ada Lovelace: the 'world's first programmer'". New Scientist. http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/03/ada-lovelace-day.html. Retrieved 14 April 2012.
- ^ Bromley, Allan G. "Difference and Analytical Engines", from Computing Before Computers (ed. William Aspray). Iowa State Press, 1990
- ^ Swade, Doron. The Difference Engine. Penguin, 2001
- ^ Collier, Bruce. The Little Engines That Could've. Garland Science, 1990
- ^ Babbage, Charles (1864). Passages from the life of a philosopher. p. 136. ISBN 0-8135-2066-5.
- ^ Toole 1998, p. 198.
- ^ "2D Goggles or The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage". 2DGoggles.com. http://2dgoggles.com/. Retrieved 14 April 2012.
- ^ Goh, Jaymee (26 October 2009). "Experiments in Comics with Sydney Padua". Tor.com. http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=blog&id=58111. Retrieved 14 April 2012.
- ^ Lovelace Lecture & Medal. BCS. http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.5822. Retrieved 2 March 2008.
- ^ Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium, BCSWomen. Leeds. http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/bcswomen. Retrieved 6 March 2008.
- ^ "Bath to host 2012 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium". http://www.bath.ac.uk/comp-sci/news/news_0004.html.
References
- Baum, Joan. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron. Archon Books, 1986. ISBN 0-208-02119-1
- Fuegi, J. and Francis, J. "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 25 No. 4 (October–December 2003): Digital Object Identifier
- Kim, Eugene and Toole, Betty Alexandra T, "Ada and the First Computer", Scientific American, May 1999
- Menabrea, Luigi Federico (1843). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage". Scientific Memoirs 3. Archived from the original on 15 September 2008. http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html. Retrieved 29 August 2008. With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator
- Moore, Doris Langley (1961). The Late Lord Byron. Philadelphia: Lippincott. ISBN 0-06-013013-X. OCLC 358063.
- Stein, Dorothy (1985). Ada: A Life and a Legacy. MIT Press Series in the History of Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-19242-X.
- Toole, Betty Alexandra Toole Ed.D, Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers, A Selection from the Letters of Ada Lovelace, and her Description of the First Computer (1992)
- Toole, Betty Alexandra Toole Ed.D., Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers: Poetical Science, 2010
- Turney, Catherine (1972). Byron's Daughter. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-684-12753-9.
- Woolley, Benjamin (February 2002). The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter. ISBN 0-333-72436-4. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071388605/. Retrieved 29 August 2008.
External links
- Ada Lovelace: Founder of Scientific Computing (SDSC Women in Science)
- "Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
- Papers of the Noel, Byron and Lovelace families
- O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Ada Lovelace", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, University of St Andrews, http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Lovelace.html.
- Ada Lovelace & The Analytical Engine
- Ada & the Analytical Engine
- Ada Lovelace, Countess of Controversy (g4tv.com)
- "Repurposing Ada" at Salon.com
- BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time – Ada Lovelace – streaming audio
- Biography of Ada Lovelace at L'Oreal: Women in Science
- Sketch of The Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage by L. F. Menabrea with notes upon the Memoir by the translator Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
- Ada Lovelace's Notes and The Ladies Diary