Today we celebrate the life of a lady that was a true visionary...
As today is International Women’s Day, we thought we’d give a shout out to the absolute pioneer in mathematics Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, better known by the name Ada Lovelace.
Born in 1815 to the iconic rake of Regency London - Lord Byron and reformer Anne Milbanke, Ada showed a keen in interest in logic and maths from a young age. Her mother was supportive of these passions and urged her to explore them, mainly due to a concern that she would end up ‘insane’ like her estranged Father who had left them behind when she was only a month old.
The Enchantress of Numbers
At the age of eighteen, thanks to her obvious talents and interests, Ada was brought into contact with Charles Babbage (also known as the Father of Computing). This meeting happened at one of his Saturday Night Soirees and would possibly have never occurred if not for Ada’s private tutor - scientist, polymath and writer Mary Somerville. A peculiar character herself, Ada felt that she needed someone equally as open-minded to teach her successfully and their working-relationship and friendship blossomed quickly. Later that month Babbage invited her to see the prototype for his difference engine (a mechanical computer), which she immediately became fascinated with. Inspired by her new teacher, Ada used her relationship with Somerville to her advantage and visited Babbage as often as she could. Incredibly impressed by her analytic skills and intellectual ability, he christened her ‘The Enchantress of Numbers,’ a nickname which has stood the test of time.
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.
Ada Lovelace
1815-1852
The First Computer Program
Lovelace would go on to document Babbage's difference engine, as well as envisioning how it may be used by writing algorithms in her notes. She is widely credited as having written the first published computer program, when her algorithm to calculate the Bernoulli numbers was printed in a scientific journal in 1843.
Ada’s exploits also helped her create relationships with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her knowledge and gain more insight into her passions. Ada described her approach as ‘poetical science’ and was a self-described Analyst & Metaphysician.
More than a century after her death, her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished and the Engine itself has now been recognised as an early model for the computer. Her notes describing this and the software show us just how advanced Charles and Ada both were in their thinking. Ada had many ideas about the potential of these machines and anticipated modern computing one hundred years early... Now that’s impressive!!
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