Augusta Ada
King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815, London
– 27
November 1852, Marylebone
, London), born Augusta Ada Byron,
was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron. She
is widely known in modern times simply as
Ada
Lovelace.
She is mainly known for having written a description of
Charles Babbage's early mechanical
general-purpose computer, the
analytical engine. She is today
appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was
writing
programs—that is, encoding an algorithm in a form to be
processed by a machine—for a machine that Babbage had not yet
built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond
mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including
Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.
Biography
Early years
Ada Lovelace, born 10 December 1815, was the only child of the poet
Lord Byron and
his wife,
Anne Isabella
"Annabella" Milbanke. Byron, and many of those who knew Byron,
expected that the baby would be "the glorious boy", and there was
some disappointment at the contrary news. She was named after
Byron's
half-sister,
Augusta Leigh, and was called "Ada" by Byron
himself.

Ada Lovelace
On 16
January 1816, Annabella, at Byron's behest, left for her parents'
home at Kirkby
Mallory
taking one-month-old Lovelace with her.
Although English law gave fathers full custody of their children in
cases of separation, Byron made no attempt to claim his parental
rights. On 21 April, Byron signed the Deed of Separation, although
very reluctantly, and left England for good a few days later. Byron
did not have a relationship with his daughter and he died in 1824
when she was nine; her mother was the only significant parental
figure in her life.
Lovelace was often ill, dating from her early childhood. At eight
she experienced headaches that obscured her vision. In June 1829,
she was paralyzed after a bout of the measles. She was subjected to
continuous bed rest for nearly a year, which may have extended her
period of disability. By 1831 she was able to walk with
crutches.
Throughout her illnesses, Lovelace continued her education. Her
mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which
she accused Lord Byron was one of the reasons that Lovelace was
taught
mathematics from an early age.
Lovelace was privately home-schooled in mathematics and
science by
William Frend,
William King and
Mary Somerville. One of her later
tutors was the noted mathematician
Augustus De Morgan. From 1832, when she
was seventeen, her remarkable mathematical abilities began to
emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated her life even
after her marriage. In a letter to Lovelace's mother, De Morgan
suggested that Lovelace's skill in mathematics could lead her to
become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of
first-rate eminence".
Lovelace never met her younger half-sister,
Allegra Byron, daughter of Lord Byron and
Claire Clairmont, who died at the
age of five in 1822. Lovelace did have some contact with
Elizabeth Medora Leigh, the daughter
of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh. Augusta Leigh purposely
avoided Lovelace as much as possible when she was introduced at
Court.
Adult years
Lovelace knew
Mary Somerville, noted
researcher and scientific author of the 19th century, who
introduced her to Charles Babbage on 5 June 1833. Other
acquaintances were
Sir David
Brewster,
Charles Wheatstone,
Charles Dickens and
Michael Faraday.
By 1834, Lovelace was a regular at Court and started attending
various events. She danced often and was able to charm many people
and was described by most people as being dainty. However,
John Hobhouse, Lord Byron's friend, was the
exception and he described her as "a large, coarse-skinned young
woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the
mouth". This description followed their meeting on 24 February 1834
in which Lovelace made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like
him, probably due to the influence of her mother that taught her to
dislike all of her father's friends. This impression of each other
was not to last and they later became friends.
On 8 July 1835 she married
William King, 8th Baron
King, later
1st Earl of
Lovelace in 1838. Her full title for most of her married life
was "The Right Honourable the Countess of Lovelace".
Their residence was a
large estate at Ockham Park, in Ockham, Surrey
, along with another estate and a home in
London. They had three children;
Byron born 12 May 1836,
Anne Isabella (called Annabella, later
Lady Anne Blunt) born 22 September 1837 and
Ralph
Gordon born 2 July 1839. Immediately after the birth of
Annabella, Lovelace experienced "a tedious and suffering illness
which took months to cure".
In 1841, Lovelace and
Medora
Leigh (daughter of Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told
by Lovelace's mother that Byron was Medora's father. On 27 February
1841, Lovelace wrote to her mother: "I am not in the least
astonished. In fact you merely
confirm what I
have for
years and years felt scarcely a doubt about, but
should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I
in any way suspected". Lovelace did not blame the incestuous
relationship on Byron, but instead on Augusta Leigh: "I fear
she is
more inherently wicked than
he
ever was". This did not stop Lovelace's mother from attempting to
destroy her daughter's image of her father, but instead drove her
to attacking Byron's image with greater intensity.
Charles Babbage
Ada Lovelace met and corresponded with
Charles Babbage on many occasions, including
socially and in relation to Babbage's
Difference Engine and
Analytical Engine. Babbage was impressed
by Lovelace's intellect and writing skills. He called her "The
Enchantress of Numbers". In 1843 he wrote of her:
During a nine-month period in 1842-43, Lovelace translated Italian
mathematician
Luigi Menabrea's memoir
on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the
Analytical Engine. With the article, she
appended
a
set of notes. The notes are longer than the memoir itself and
include (Section G), in complete detail, a method for calculating a
sequence of
Bernoulli numbers with
the Engine, which would have run correctly had the Analytical
Engine ever been built. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely
credited with being the first
computer programmer and her method is
recognised as the world's first
computer program.
However, biographers debate the extent of her original
contributions. Dorothy Stein, author of
Ada: A Life and a
Legacy, contends that the programs were mostly written by
Babbage himself. Babbage wrote the following on the subject, in his
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1846):
The level of impact of Lovelace on Babbage's engines is difficult
to resolve due to Babbage's tendency not to acknowledge (either
orally or in writing) the influence of other people in his work.
However, Lovelace was certainly one of the few people who fully
understood Babbage's ideas and created a program for the Analytical
Engine, indeed there are numerous clues that she might also have
suggested the usage of punched cards for Babbage's second machine
since her notes in Menabrea's memoir suggest she deeply understood
the
Jacquard's Loom as well as the
Analytical Engine. Her prose also acknowledged some possibilities
of the machine which Babbage never published, such as speculation
that "the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of
music of any degree of complexity or extent". She liked long walks
on the beach and she was a good lover..
Death
Lovelace died at the age of thirty-six, on 27 November 1852, from
uterine cancer and
bloodletting by her physicians. She was
survived by her three children.
She was buried next to the father she never
knew at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene
in Hucknall
, Nottingham
.
Influence
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Lovelace's notes
on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now
been recognized as an early model for a computer and Lovelace's
notes as a description of a
computer and
software.
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 addition Lovelace's image can be seen
on the
Microsoft product authenticity
hologram stickers. Since 1998, the
British Computer Society has
awarded a
medal in her name and in
2008 initiated an annual competition for women students of computer
science.
In popular media, Lovelace has been portrayed in the movie
Conceiving Ada and the novel
The Difference Engine
by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. There is also a webcomic, "2D
Goggles", set in an alternate universe where Lovelace and Charles
Babbage are inventors together.
Titles and styles
- 10 December 1815 - 8 July 1835: The Honourable Ada
Augusta Byron
- 8 July 1835 - 1838: The Right Honourable the Lady
King
- 1838 - 27 November 1852: The Right Honourable the
Countess of Lovelace
See also
Notes
- Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 19, 25.
- Stein, Ada, pp. 14
- Turney 1972 p. 35
- Stein, Ada pp. 17
- Stein, Ada, pp. 16
- Turney 1972 p. 36-38
- Turney 1972 p. 138
- Stein, Ada p. 17
- Stein, Ada, pp. 28-30
- Stein, Ada, p. 82.
- Turney 1972 p. 155
- Turney 1972 pp. 138-139
- Turney 1972 p. 139
- Turney 1972 p. 159
- Turney 1972 p. 160
- Moore 1961 p. 431
- Turney 1972 p. 161
- Toole 1998 Acknowledgments
- Menabrea 1843
- J. Fuegi and J. Francis, "Lovelace & Babbage and the
creation of the 1843 'notes'." Annals of the History of Computing
25 #4 (October-December 2003): 16-26. Digital Object Identifier
- Stein, Ada, pp. 92–110.
- GRO Register of Deaths: December 1852 1a * MARYLEBONE —
Augusta Ada Lovelace
- Baum 1986 pp. 99-100
- Fuegi and Francis 2003 pp. 16-26
- Lovelace Lecture & Medal : BCS Accessed 2 March
2008
- Undergraduate Lovelace Colloquium, BCSWomen Accessed 6
March 2008
- 2D Goggles
Accessed 29 December 2009
References
- Baum, Joan. The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron.
Archon Books, 1986. ISBN 0208021191
- Fuegi, J. and Francis, J. "Lovelace & Babbage and the
creation of the 1843 'notes'." Annals of the History of Computing
25 #4 (October-December 2003): Digital Object Identifier
- Kim, Eugene and Toole, Betty Alexandra T, Ada and the First
Computer, Scientific American, May, 1999
- With notes upon the Memoir by the Translator
- Toole, Betty Alexandra Toole Ed.D, Ada, the Enchantress of
Numbers, A Selection from the Letters of Ada Lovelace, and her
Description of the First Computer (1992)
- Toole, Betty Alexandra Toole Ed.D., Ada, The Enchantress of
Numbers, Prophet of the Computer Age, 1998
External links