Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815–27 November 1852), more famously known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer primarily known for her work with Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to see applications beyond pure calculation that a machine had.
Childhood
Lord Byron expected his child to be a “glorious boy” and was disappointed when Lady Byron gave birth to a girl. The child was named after Byron’s half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and was called “Ada” by Byron himself. On 16 January 1816, at Lord Byron’s command, Lady Byron left for her parents’ home at Kirkby Mallory, taking their five-week-old daughter with her. Although English law at the time granted full custody of children to the father in cases of separation, Lord Byron did not attempt to claim his parental rights but did request that his sister keep him informed of Ada’s welfare.
On 21 April, Lord Byron signed the deed of separation, although very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later. Aside from an acrimonious separation, Lady Byron continued throughout her life to make allegations about her husband’s immoral behavior. This set of events made Lovelace infamous in Victorian society. Ada did not have a relationship with her father. He died in 1824 when she was eight years old. Her mother was the only significant parental figure in her life.
What is Ada Lovelace known for?
Ada Lovelace was one of the only English mathematicians and writers whom people call “the first programmer,” because she basically helped revolutionize the trajectory that the computer industry took. At the time she realized that a computer had capabilities much greater than just mathematical calculations.
What is the famous quote of Ada Lovelace?
“The more I study, the more insatiable I feel my genius for it to be.
Did Ada Lovelace have a daughter?
Anne Blunt, 15th Baroness Wentworth.
What are 5 interesting facts about Ada Lovelace?
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- Growing up, Lovelace had a remarkable nickname.
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- She suffered from gambling issues.
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- Lovelace and her father both died young.
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- She had a legendary mentor
Success in Work
Throughout her life, Lovelace was strongly interested in scientific developments and fads of the day, including phrenology and mesmerism. After her work with Babbage, Lovelace continued to work on other projects. In 1844, she wrote to a friend, Woronzow Greig, of her wish to construct a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings (“a calculus of the nervous system”).
She never achieved this, however. In part, her interest in the brain came from a long-running preoccupation, inherited from her mother, about her “potential” madness. As part of her research into this project, she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn how to carry out electrical experiments.
In the same year, she wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, Researches on Magnetism, but this was not published and does not appear to have progressed past the first draft. In 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning “certain productions” she was working on regarding the relation of math and music.
The first published computer program
In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer and the future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed Babbage’s lecture into French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage’s friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea’s paper into English. She then fleshed out the paper with notes, which she included in the translation. Ada Lovelace took the better part of a year to do this, with the aid of input from Babbage. These notes, which run much longer than Menabrea’s paper, were published under the initialism AAL in the September 1843 edition of Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs.
Observed Commemoration
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.
In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing established its Ada Lovelace Award. To date, as of 1998, the British Computer Society (BCS) has granted the Lovelace Medal, and in 2008 launched an annual competition for women students. BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, a conference that convenes annually for women undergraduates. Ada College is a further education college in Tottenham Hale, London, specializing in digital skills.
Famous Novels and plays
Lovelace appears in Romulus Linney’s 1977 play Childe Byron. In Tom Stoppard’s 1993 play Arcadia, the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly—a character “apparently based” on Ada Lovelace (the play also involves Lord Byron)—comes to understand chaos theory and theorizes the second law of thermodynamics before either is officially recognized.
In the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Lovelace addresses the “punched cards” program, which determines Gödel’s incompleteness theorems decades before their actual discovery. Lovelace and Mary Shelley as teenagers are the central characters in Jordan Stratford’s steampunk series, The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency.
Film and television
In the 1997 film Conceiving Ada, a computer scientist obsessed with Ada finds a way of communicating with her in the past using “undying information waves.”. She is Ada Augusta Byron and is portrayed by Lily Lesser in the second season of The Frankenstein Chronicles. She is employed as an “analyst” to provide the workings of a life-sized humanoid automaton, complete with brass workings that recall Babbage’s analytical engine. Her employment is said to keep her occupied until she returns to her studies in advanced mathematics.
What illness did Ada Lovelace die from?
Lovelace died of uterine cancer at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852. The illness lasted for several months, during which time Annabella took control over whom Ada saw and excluded all of her friends and confidants.
Where is Ada Lovelace buried?
Church of St Mary Magdalene, Hucknall, United Kingdom. After her death, she was buried in the Byron family vault inside the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in the small English town of Hucknall at her request. Her coffin lay side by side with that of her father, who died when he was 36 years old.