Ada Lovelace

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

View more Science videos

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).

"Lady Ada" redirects here. For the electronics engineer, see Limor Fried.

Ada Lovelace
Born	10 December 1815(1815-12-10) London
Died	27 November 1852(1852-11-27) (aged 36) Marylebone, London
Nationality	British
Title	Countess of Lovelace
Spouse	1st Earl of Lovelace
Children	12th Baron Wentworth 15th Baroness Wentworth 2nd Earl of Lovelace
Parents	6th Baron Byron 11th Baroness Wentworth

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English 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). 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 1 Biography 1.1 Adult years 1.2 Charles Babbage 1.3 Death 2 First computer program 3 Modern references 4 Commemoration 5 Titles and styles 6 Publications 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 External links

Biography

Ada Augusta Byron was born on December 10, 1815, the child of the poet Lord Byron, 6th Lord 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]

Portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter

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, Lovelace 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 Lovelace 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 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".^[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, 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".^[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 July 8, 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 "Philosophers Walk", as it was there that Lovelace and Babbage were reputed to have walked discussing mathematical principles. In 1939, the house was let to Dr Barnardos housing child evacuees from cities, including Bristol, during World War II. After a brief spell as a country club in the early 1950s, it fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1974. Parts of the gardens, though severely overgrown, are visible from the footpath from Porlock Weir to Culbone. The village computer centre in the nearby village of Porlock is named after Lovelace.

Some 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.^[23] Babbage wrote the following on the subject, in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864).^[24]

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 from Babbage's writings due to Babbage's tendency not to acknowledge (either orally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work.^{[citation needed]}

Death

Lovelace died at the age of thirty-six, on 27 November 1852,^[25] from uterine cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.^[26] She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottingham.

First computer program

An illustration inspired by the A.E. Chaton portrait created for the Ada Initiative, which supports open technology and women.

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.^[27]

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.^[28] However the engine was never actually constructed to completion during Lovelace's lifetime.

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^[29] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer science.^[30]

Modern 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 the webcomic 2D Goggles^[31][32] by Sydney Padua. Ada Lovelace Day is an organization whose goal is to "raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering and maths".

Commemoration

In the UK, the annual conference for women undergraduates is named after Ada Lovelace (the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium). This moves around; in 2008 and 2009 it was in Leeds, 2010 in Cardiff, and 2011 in Birmingham. 2012 will be in Bath^[33].

In 2009 and 2010, 24 March was commemorated by some as Ada Lovelace Day, a day to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. The 2011 Ada Lovelace Day was on 7 October.^[34]

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

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

Computer programming portal

• Women in computing

Notes

1. ^ ^{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
2. ^ "Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace". http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/tap/Files/ada-bio.html. Retrieved 11 July 2010. 
3. ^ Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 19, 25.
4. ^ Stein, Ada, p. 14
5. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 35
6. ^ ^{a b} Stein, Ada p. 17
7. ^ Stein, Ada, p. 16
8. ^ Turney 1972 pp. 36–38
9. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 138
10. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 28–30
11. ^ 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. 
12. ^ Stein, Ada, p. 82.
13. ^ Turney 1972 p. 155
14. ^ Turney 1972 pp. 138–139
15. ^ ^{a b} Turney 1972 p. 139
16. ^ Turney 1972 p. 159
17. ^ Turney 1972 p. 160
18. ^ Moore 1961 p. 431
19. ^ Turney 1972 p. 161
20. ^ Toole 1998, Acknowledgments.
21. ^ Menabrea 1843.
22. ^ Gleick, J. (2011), The Information: a History, a Theory, a Flood, London, Fourth Estate, pp116–118
23. ^ Stein, Ada, pp. 92–110.
24. ^ Babbage, Charles (1864). Passages from the life of a philosopher. p. 136. ISBN 0-8135-2066-5. 
25. ^ GRO Register of Deaths: December 1852 1a * MARYLEBONE – Augusta Ada Lovelace
26. ^ Baum 1986 pp. 99–100
27. ^ Fuegi; Francis (2003). pp. 16–26 .
28. ^ http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/03/ada-lovelace-day.html
29. ^ Lovelace Lecture & Medal. BCS. http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.5822. Retrieved 2 March 2008 .
30. ^ Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium, BCSWomen. Leeds. http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/bcswomen. Retrieved 6 March 2008 .
31. ^ The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage
32. ^ Experiments in Comics with Sydney Padua
33. ^ "Bath to host 2012 BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium". http://www.bath.ac.uk/comp-sci/news/news_0004.html. 
34. ^ Suw Charman-Anderson. "Ada Lovelace Day: 7 October 2011". findingada.com. http://blog.findingada.com/blog/2011/03/03/ada-lovelace-day-7-october-2011/. Retrieved 7 March 2011. 

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. 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

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, 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

Persondata
Name	Lovelace, Ada King, Countess Of
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	10 December 1815
Place of birth	London
Date of death	27 November 1852
Place of death	Marylebone, London

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)