Ada Lovelace

Born: December 10th, 1815

Birthplace: London, England

Died: November 27th, 1852

Place of Death: Marylebone, England

scientist

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Author: Antoine Claudet | License: Public domain

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born on December 10, 1815, in London. She was the only legitimate child of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron.

Encouraged by her mother, who was passionate about mathematics, Ada studied science and music. In 1832, she met Scottish scientist and polymath Mary Somerville. Somerville introduced her to Charles Babbage, inventor of prototypes for calculating machines.

In 1835, Ada Byron married William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace. They had three children: Byron, born on May 12, 1836, Annabella (Anne Blunt), born on September 22, 1837, and Ralph Gordon, born on July 2, 1839.

Fascinated by Babbage's calculating machine, Ada became interested in code and symbols. She began collaborating with Babbage, convinced of the machine's potential to process not only numbers, but also letters and anything else that could be represented by symbolic notation.

In 1843, she translated into English and annotated a French text by Luigi Menabrea, a mathematician and military engineer, entitled “Notions on the Analytical Engine of Mr. Charles Babbage.” One of her annotations was based on a very detailed algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine. This program is considered to be the world's first computer program.

In the hope of financing the construction of Babbage's machine, she took up gambling and found herself crippled with debt. She died on November 27, 1852, at the age of 36, from cervix cancer.

Posthumous fame

In tribute to Ada Lovelace, a programming language developed in the late 1970s for the US Department of Defense and still in use today is called the Ada language.

References

Ada Lovelace on Wikipedia
Betty Toole, Ada and the first computer, Scientific American, 1999: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_and_the_First_Computer.pdf
The text of Ada Lovelace's translation of Menabrea text can be found here: https://www.fourmilab.ch/babbage/sketch.html. It has also been reprinted (see Books section below)

Books about Ada Lovelace

Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage: Translation and Notes by Ada Lovelace by Luigi Federico Menabrea (Author), Ada Lovelace (Author, Translator) (2020) - View on Amazon

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Books about Ada Lovelace

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Ada Lovelace

Posthumous fame

References

Books about Ada Lovelace

📍 Birthplace Location

🏙️ Also born in London (29 total)

Born on this day

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