Ada Lovelace

For more information on Ada King countess of Lovelace, visit Britannica.com.

Ada Lovelace (a.k.a. Augusta Ada Byron, or Lady Lovelace)

Library of Congress

[b. London, December 10, 1815, d. London, November 27, 1852]

Lovelace was fascinated by Charles Babbage's idea for a new mechanical calculating machine, the Difference Engine. In 1842 Luigi F. Menabrea [b. Chambéry, Savoy, France, September 4, 1809, d. St Cassin, France, May 24, 1896] summarized the concept behind Babbage's more advanced calculating machine, the Analytical Engine. Lovelace translated Menabrea's article into English and added her own notes as well as diagrams and other information. She predicted that such a machine, which Babbage never built, would have many applications beyond arithmetic calculations, from scientific research to composing music and producing graphics. She explained how the machine might be instructed to perform a series of calculations. The programming language ADA is named for her, although the countess has only a slender claim to the frequently used label of "first programmer." But she really did write a program, one for calculating Bernoulli numbers--not a mean feat.

British computer pioneer (1815–1852)

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Annabella Millbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Ada's mother left her husband after a month of marriage and Ada never saw her father. Born in London, she was educated privately, studying mathematics and astronomy in addition to the more traditional topics. She seems to have developed an early ambition to be a famous scientist. Her correspondence, however, with Mary Somerville and Augustus De Morgan, two of her informal teachers, show that her formal skills were very limited. De Morgan saw her as a talented beginner who could have become an original mathematician if given the chance to receive a rigorous formal Cambridge-style training. Such routes were not open to young Victorian women.

In 1834 she heard Charles Babbage lecture on his famous ‘difference engine’. She offered Babbage her support and they became good friends. In 1842 she translated from French an account of Babbage's analytical engine by the Italian engineer, L. F. Manabrea. At Babbage's suggestion she added some explanatory notes. They constitute one of the primary sources of his work.

Other plans, such as a Calculus of the Nervous System, failed to mature – the obstacles in her way were simply too great. As a woman, for example, she was denied access to the Royal Society Library. Nor did her private life flourish. Her marriage in 1835 to Lord King, created the Earl of Lovelace in 1838, seemed merely to replace the guardianship of her mother with that of her husband. She began an affair in the 1840s with John Crosse, a gentleman who seemed to be as interested in her money as herself. She also took in later life to heavy gambling on horses and by Derby day 1851 she had run up losses of over £3000. Worse was to come, however, as cancer of the uterus had been diagnosed. She was buried beside her father's remains at Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire, having died, like him, at the age of 36. Ada Lovelace has been commemorated in the name of the high-level computer language ADA.

In her 1843 translation of an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada Byron Lovelace (1815-1852) added notations three times the length of the original text. The "Notes" earned her a place in computer history when they were later recognized as the first detailed description of a computer, including what is now considered a software program. In recognition of her enlightened ideas that were over 100 years before their time, the United States Department of Defense named its Ada programming language after her in 1980.

Though she was born the daughter of the notorious English Romantic poet, Lord Byron, Ada Byron Lovelace chose to pursue the more objective field of mathematics. She proved to be her father's daughter, though, for her sense of passion was arguably as strong as her father's, despite her mother's attempts to suppress any "Byronic" tendencies in her. She went against traditional Victorian society by studying mathematics which was a discipline few women attempted. The height of her passion for mathematics can be seen in her "Notes" on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a calculating device that was never actually built. She wrote with tremendous insight and her ideas about the capabilities of an analytical engine became reality in 20th century computers which earned her a place in the history of mathematics and computer science.

Lord Byron's Legitimate Daughter

Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815 in London, England, and was Byron's only legitimate child. Five weeks after her birth, her mother, Lady Byron, left her abusive husband. On April 24, 1816 a deed of separation was signed and Lord Byron left England for good. Ada never saw her father again for he died eight years later in Greece. However, he did correspond with Lady Byron regarding her well-being and her studies. He also wrote of her in his poetry. The line, "ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart, " can be found in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III.

After Lord Byron's departure, Lady Byron took control of her daughter's upbringing. This control included the suppression of any undesirable traits that may have inherited from her father. In her book, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron, Joan Baum notes, "Lady Byron had insisted on the cultivation of mathematics primarily because its discipline represented for her the direct opposite of everything associated with her depraved husband: dangerous fancy, melancholy moods, evil, even insanity." Baum also stated that "Mathematics was first for Lady Byron a mode of moral discipline. Accordingly, she arranged a full study schedule for her child, emphasizing music and arithmetic-music to be put to purposes of social service, arithmetic to train the mind."

A Passion for Numbers

By her early teenage years, Ada realized she had a true passion for numbers not unlike that of her father's passion for poetry. Lady Byron provided tutors of high distinction for her such as William Frend, a Cambridge mathematician, who instructed Ada in the areas of astronomy, algebra and geometry. Another tutor, Augustus De Morgan, was the first Professor of Mathematics at the newly founded University of London. He described Ada as "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence" according to Dorothy Stein in her book, Ada: A Life and a Legacy. "Indeed, it was a desire for mathematical glory, rather than a particular kind of mathematics, that compelled Ada, " concluded Baum.

This passion continued throughout the rest of her life as Stein demonstrates in a quote from an 1843 letter Lovelace wrote to Babbage, "I hope another year will make me really something of an Analyst. The more I study, the more irresistible do I feel my genius for it to be. I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst, (& Metaphysician)."

The Countess of Lovelace

On July 8, 1835, Ada Byron married William King who was then the eighth Baron King. In 1838, he became the 1st Earl of Lovelace and she became the Countess of Lovelace. The following year, Lord Lovelace also became lord lieutenant of Surrey. Her husband was 11 years older than she and considered to be somewhat reserved. He did, however, take pride in his wife's mathematical talents and supported her endeavors. His approval was quite fortunate for Ada Byron Lovelace as few women of her station in Victorian England were encouraged to pursue academic interests of any kind. In fact, those of the aristocracy considered it to be beneath them to practice a profession. For that reason, Lovelace only signed the initials, "A.A.L." to her "Notes." Consequently, she was limited by her class status as much as by her gender with regard to her passion for mathematics.

Charles Babbage and the "Notes"

Lovelace first met Babbage when she was 18 at a dinner party hosted by Mary Fairfax Somerville, the 19th century's most prominent woman scientist. Despite the fact that he was 23 years her senior, Babbage became her good friend and intellectual mentor. She was immediately intrigued when she first saw Babbage's Difference Engine and plans for the Analytical Engine in 1834. The perfect opportunity for Lovelace to study the Analytical Engine came after Babbage's 1840 lecture in Turin, Italy. An Italian military engineer by the name of Luigi Federico Menabrea wrote an article on the lecture that was printed in a French publication in 1842. Lovelace's translation of Menabrea's article from French to English and her accompanying notations were published in the prestigious Taylor's Scientific Memoirs the following year.

Lovelace labeled her seven "Notes" with the letters A through G. The word "computer" did not mean in the 19th century what it came to mean in the 20th century. Rather, it referred to a device that only did arithmetic or a person whose job was to add up numbers. Therefore, Lovelace never used the word in her "Notes."

"Note A" distinguished between Babbage's Difference Engine and his Analytical Engine. This note was significant in that it described a general purpose computer that would not be invented for more than 100 years. In "Note B, " Lovelace looked at the concept of computer memory and the ability to insert statements to indicate what is happening to the person looking at the program. This idea is similar to the current practice of using REM or non-executable remark statements in a program.

Lovelace expanded on a method called "backing" in "Note C." This allowed for the operation cards to be put back in the correct order so that they could be used again and again like a loop or subroutine. "Note D" was a very complex explanation of how to write a set of instructions or a program to accomplish a set of operations. "Note E, " aptly stated by Baum, clearly "emphasize[d] the versatility of the Analytical Engine and suggests, in its brief description of operation cards which designate cycles, modern-day function keys."

"Note F" explained how the Analytical Engine could solve difficult problems and eliminate error. This would allow for the solving of problems that were prohibitive due to the constraints of time, labor and funds. Baum also noted that Lovelace wondered "if the engine might not be set to investigate formulas of no apparent practical interest … as computers are used today, to find problems rather than to solve them."

The last and probably the most mathematically complex and most quoted of Lovelace's notations was "Note G." In this note, she stated what some have referred to as "Lady Lovelace's Objection" or, in the more modern phrasing, "garbage in, garbage out." Basically, she was saying that the computer's output is only as good as the information it is given. "Note G" also included an actual illustration of how the engine could produce a table of Bernoulli numbers.

Personal Difficulties

Lovelace faced numerous illnesses throughout her life. As a child, she had bouts with both measles and scarlet fever. Byron received a report on Lovelace's health stating that she "had symptoms of fullness of the vessels of the head … varying in degree during different parts of the day, never very severe but never or scarcely ever totally absent" according to Doris Langley Moore in her book, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter. Byron had had the same affliction, possibly migraine headaches which can be hereditary, until he was 14.

In 1829, Lovelace suffered an unidentified ailment that left her unable to walk for many months. She was also subject to convulsive fits and there was speculation that they may have been due to a mental rather than a physical condition. None of these conditions, though, caused any permanent disabilities. In fact, Lovelace was an accomplished dancer, horseback rider and gymnast. Only uterine cancer would prove to be insurmountable for her.

Lovelace's life was also fraught with difficulties of her own making. She not only had a passion for mathematics, she had a passion for men of mathematics. She was known to have had affairs with several men whose attention she initially sought on an intellectual level. Her affair with John Crosse proved to be the most devastating. She pawned the Lovelace diamonds to pay his gambling debts, and it is possible that he was blackmailing her as well. Lovelace, too, fell victim to the vice of gambling and enlisted the help of some of her male friends to place bets for her.

A Place in History

Lovelace's passions far exceeded her body's limits. She died on the evening of November 27, 1852 of uterine cancer at the age of 36, the same age at which her father had died. At her request, she was buried beside her father in the Byron vault at Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey, the ancestral home of the Byrons in Nottinghamshire. This last request was prompted by a visit in 1850 to Newstead Abbey where Lovelace finally made peace with her father's memory.

Though Lovelace's "Notes" were well received by those who knew her, there is no indication of how they were taken by the general public. In fact, she did not obtain widespread recognition until the historian, Lord B.V. Bowden, rediscovered her "Notes" in 1952 and had them reprinted the following year, 110 years after their original publication.

Posthumous mathematical glory was probably not what Lovelace had in mind when she was alive. However, she would have undoubtedly been pleased with a fourth-generation programming language being named after her. In the words of Baum, Lovelace "was the world's first extensive expositor of a computing machine. She was also a fascinating woman, interesting as much for her motives as for her work, illustrating as she does the theme of creative energy in collision with suppressed desire."

Further Reading

Baum, Joan, The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron, Archon Books, 1986.

Moore, Doris Langley, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter, Harper & Row, 1977.

Stein, Dorothy, Ada: A Life and a Legacy, The MIT Press, 1985.

"Ada Byron Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer, " AIMS Education Foundation,http://www.aimsedu.org (March 15, 1998).

"Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, " Sonoma State University,http://www.sonoma.edu/Math/faculty/Falbo/adabyron.html (March 15, 1998).

Ada Lovelace
Born	10 December 1815(1815-12-10) London
Died	27 November 1852 (aged 36) Marylebone, London
Nationality	English
Fields	Mathematics, computing

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815, London – 27 November 1852, Marylebone, London), born Augusta Ada Byron, was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron. She is widely known in modern times simply as Ada Lovelace.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, encoding an algorithm in a form to be processed by a machine—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. 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.^[1]

Contents 1 Biography 1.1 Early years 1.2 Adult years 1.3 Charles Babbage 1.4 Death 2 Influence 3 Titles and styles 4 See also 5 Notes 6 References 7 External links

Biography

Early years

Ada Lovelace, born 10 December 1815, was the only child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella "Annabella" Milbanke.^[2] 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.^[3] She was named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was called "Ada" by Byron himself.^[4]

Ada Lovelace

On 16 January 1816, Annabella, at Byron's behest, left for her parents' home at Kirkby Mallory taking one-month-old Lovelace with her.^[3] Although English law gave fathers full custody of their children in cases of separation, Byron made no attempt to claim his parental rights.^[5] On 21 April, Byron signed the Deed of Separation, although very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later.^[6] 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.^[7]

Lovelace was often ill, dating from her early childhood. At eight she experienced headaches that obscured her vision.^[8] In June 1829, she was paralyzed 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, Lovelace continued her education.^[9] Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Lord Byron was one of the reasons that Lovelace was taught mathematics from an early age. Lovelace was privately home-schooled in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King and Mary Somerville.^[10] One of her later tutors was the noted mathematician Augustus De Morgan. From 1832, when she was seventeen, her remarkable mathematical abilities began to emerge,^[7] and her interest in mathematics dominated her life even after her marriage. 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".^[11]

Lovelace never met her younger half-sister, Allegra Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, who died at the age of five in 1822. Lovelace did 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.^[12]

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, Lovelace 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".^[13] 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 that taught her to dislike all of her father's friends. This impression of each other was not to last and they later became friends.^[14]

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 and a home in London. 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".^[14]

In 1841, Lovelace and Medora Leigh (daughter of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told by Lovelace's mother that Byron was Medora's father.^[15] 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".^[16] Lovelace did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead on Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was".^[17] This did not stop Lovelace's mother from attempting to destroy her daughter's image of her father, but instead drove her to attacking Byron's image with greater intensity.^[18]

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:^[19]

Forget this world and all its troubles and if

possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

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.^[20] 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 ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely credited with being the first computer programmer^[21] and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.

However, biographers debate the extent of her original contributions. Dorothy Stein, author of Ada: A Life and a Legacy, contends that the programs were mostly written by Babbage himself.^[22] Babbage wrote the following on the subject, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1846):^[23]

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 level of impact of Lovelace on Babbage's engines is difficult to resolve due to Babbage's tendency not to acknowledge (either orally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work. However, Lovelace was certainly one of the few people who fully understood Babbage's ideas and created a program for the Analytical Engine, indeed there are numerous clues that she might also have suggested the usage of punched cards for Babbage's second machine since her notes in Menabrea's memoir suggest she deeply understood the Jacquard's Loom as well as the Analytical Engine. Her prose also acknowledged some possibilities of the machine which Babbage never published, such as speculation that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent".^[20]

Death

Lovelace died at the age of thirty-six, on 27 November 1852,^[24] from uterine cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.^[25] She was survived by her three children. She was buried next to the father she never knew at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham.

Influence

In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognized as an early model for a computer and Lovelace's notes as a description of a computer and software.^[26]

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. In addition Lovelace's image can be seen on the Microsoft product authenticity hologram stickers.^{[citation needed]} Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded a medal in her name^[27] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science.^[28]

In popular media, Lovelace has been portrayed in the movie Conceiving Ada and the novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. There is also a webcomic, "2D Goggles", set in an alternate universe where Lovelace and Charles Babbage are inventors together.^[29]

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

See also

• Women in computing

Notes

1. ^ Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 19, 25.
2. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 14
3. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 35
4. ^ Stein, Ada pp. 17
5. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 16
6. ^ Turney 1972 p. 36-38
7. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 138
8. ^ Stein, Ada p. 17
9. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 28-30
10. ^ Woolley, Benjamin (February 2002). The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071388605/. Retrieved 2009-01-20. 
11. ^ Stein, Ada, p. 82.
12. ^ Turney 1972 p. 155
13. ^ Turney 1972 pp. 138-139
14. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 139
15. ^ Turney 1972 p. 159
16. ^ Turney 1972 p. 160
17. ^ Moore 1961 p. 431
18. ^ Turney 1972 p. 161
19. ^ Toole 1998 Acknowledgments
20. ^ ^{a b} Menabrea 1843
21. ^ J. Fuegi and J. Francis, "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'." Annals of the History of Computing 25 #4 (October-December 2003): 16-26. Digital Object Identifier
22. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 92–110.
23. ^ Babbage, Charles (1864). Passages from the life of a philosopher. p. 136. 
24. ^ GRO Register of Deaths: December 1852 1a * MARYLEBONE — Augusta Ada Lovelace
25. ^ Baum 1986 pp. 99-100
26. ^ Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 16-26
27. ^ Lovelace Lecture & Medal : BCS Accessed 2 March 2008
28. ^ Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium, BCSWomen Accessed 6 March 2008
29. ^ 2D Goggles Accessed 29 December 2009

References

• Baum, Joan. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron. Archon Books, 1986. ISBN 0208021191
• Fuegi, J. and Francis, J. "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'." Annals of the History of Computing 25 #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. http://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html. Retrieved 2008-08-29.  With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator
• Moore, Doris Langley (1961). The Late Lord Byron. Philadelphia: Lippincott. 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 026219242X. 
• 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, Prophet of the Computer Age, 1998
• Turney, Catherine (1972). Byron's Daughter. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0684127539. 
• Woolley, Benjamin (February 2002). The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron's Daughter. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071388605/. Retrieved 2008-08-29. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ada Lovelace

• Ada Lovelace: Founder of Scientific Computing (SDSC Women in Science)
• "Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace", Biographies of Women Mathematicians, Agnes Scott College
• O'Connor, John J.; Robertson, Edmund F., "Ada Lovelace", MacTutor History of Mathematics archive, 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 - Examining the "Ada myth" at Salon.com
• BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time - Ada Lovelace - streaming audio
• Biography of Ada Lovelace at L'Oreal: Women in Science

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