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Ada Lovelace

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Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She was the first to recognise the machine had applications beyond pure calculation. Lovelace is often considered the first computer programmer.

Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke. Lord Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born, and died when she was eight. Although often ill in childhood, Lovelace pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was a Baron, and was created Viscount Ockham and 1st Earl of Lovelace in 1838. The name Lovelace was chosen because Ada was descended from the extinct Baron Lovelaces. The title given to her husband thus made Ada the Countess of Lovelace.

Lovelace's educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Lovelace described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)".

When she was eighteen, Lovelace's mathematical talents led her to a long working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage. She was particularly interested in Babbage's work on the analytical engine. Lovelace first met him on 5 June 1833, when she and her mother attended one of Charles Babbage's Saturday night soirées with their mutual friend, and Lovelace's private tutor, Mary Somerville. Though Babbage's analytical engine was never constructed and did not influence the invention of electronic computers, it has been recognised as a Turing-complete general-purpose computer, which anticipated the essential features of a modern electronic computer. Babbage is therefore known as the "father of computers," and Lovelace is credited with several computing "firsts" for her collaboration with him. Lovelace translated an article by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea about the analytical engine, supplementing it with seven long explanatory notes. These described a method of using the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers which is often called the first published computer program.

She developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage, focused only on those capabilities. Lovelace was the first to point out the possibility of encoding information besides mere arithmetical figures, such as music, and manipulating it with such a machine. Her mindset of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the analytical engine, examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool. Ada is widely commemorated, including in the names of a programming language, roads, buildings and institutes, as well as programmes, lectures and courses. There are plaques, statues, paintings, literary and non-fiction works about her.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Hobbes maintains that even divine foreknowledge alone would be sufficient to establish an absolute necessity of events. This was also the opinion of Wyclif, and even of Luther, when he wrote _De Servo Arbitrio_; or at least they spoke so. But it is sufficiently acknowledged to-day that this kind of necessity which is termed hypothetical, and springs from foreknowledge or from other anterior reasons, has nothing in…
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
States what Ada Lovelace is; the author is tied to Ada Lovelace in the knowledge graph.
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I will choose one poem only, the fourth act of his _Prometheus Unbound_. The Earth and the Moon converse together in the language of accurate science. Physical experiments guide his imagery. For example, the Earth’s exclamation, “The vaporous exultation not to be confined!” is the poetic transcript of ‘the expansive force of gases,’ as it is termed in books on science. Again, take the Earth’s stanza, “I spin beneath…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
States what Ada Lovelace is.
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The laws which regulate her existence are now known to us; and the more deeply her nature is investigated, the stronger is our consciousness of her reality and of the greatness of her benefits. The thought of her stimulates all the powers of Imagination, and thus enables us to participate in a measure in the universality of her life, throughout the whole extent of Time and Space of which we have any real knowledge…
Auguste Comte, A General View of Positivism Or, Summary exposition of the System of Thought and Life
Close in meaning to Ada Lovelace; the term itself is not named.
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Ada Lovelace

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