Ada Lovelace
The first programmer in history.
The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves, she noted back in the 19th century!
She was the daughter of the aristocrat Anna Isabella Milbanke and George Gordon Byron, a Romantic era poet whom she never met. She was born on 10 December 1815 in London. Her mother was interested in the sciences. After she and her husband separated, wanting to ensure that young Ada will have an exemplary life (a different from the one led by her father) – she decided to enrol her in a rigorous course in mathematics.
Thanks to her home education, Ada began to develop the abilities inherited from her parents, manifested in a rich creative imagination and an open and
analytical mind. Using books and correspondence, she was educated by herself. She was relentless in her pursuit of a full understanding of a subject, often daring to question the fundamentals of mathematics, and the astuteness of her mind delighted many distinguished minds of 19th century England. Although she has started a family and gave birth to three children, this did not prevent her from developing her skills and interests – she devoted herself daily to her beloved mathematics.
During one social evening in London, she attended a demonstration of a differential machine, created by Charles Babbage. The machine consisted of interconnected brass gears driven by steam. Enthralled by the invention, she maintained an ongoing correspondence with its author. She admired him for his imagination and for the fact that, like her, he believed that operations on numbers had a metaphysical basis. Through her acquaintance with Babbage, she developed an unusual way of thinking that combined poetry with mathematics.
Babbage’s ambitions looked technologically many years into the future. Working on the design of an analytical machine capable of performing any sequence of calculations, he suggested to Ada that she translate his idea, enriching it with her own thoughts. In her written observations, the mathematician saw the unlimited possibilities of the invention. By enriching the assumptions of the invention with her own concepts of the device’s application, she synthesised the work and, with the help of sophisticated language, made the text comprehensible and interesting.
Preceding in her article was also an appendix showing a recursive algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers. In her assumptions, Lovelace was ahead of her time: she foresaw the direction this technology would take many decades later, making it possible to program not just numbers, but sound or images!
Although Babbage’s analytical machine was never constructed, its theoretical assumptions and mainly the elements of its mechanism corresponded to the operation of modern computers. The eminent mathematician Ada Lovelace was fully recognised almost a century later when technology confirmed that her calculations were correct. Today, scientists emphasise that Ada’s mathematical proofs can confidently be regarded as the first computer program to be created back in the 19th century!
