Ada Lovelace

“That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.”

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron, 1815 – 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She is believed by some to be the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and is believed by some to have published the first computer algorithm. As a result, she is often regarded as the first to recognise the full potential of computers and one of the first computer programmers.

Early childhood

“I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.”

Ada was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and his wife. He was disappointed that she was not a boy, but named her after his half-sister. A month after her birth, Byron left his wife and despite English law automatically granting full custody to the father, made no attempt to retain custody of his daughter although he did ask to be kept informed of her welfare. He commemorated the parting in a poem that begins, "Is thy face like thy mother's my fair child! ADA! sole daughter of my house and heart?".  In 1816, he also wrote "Fare Thee Well" to his wife Lady Byron after their separation after the birth of Ada Lovelace. In the poem he writes:

And when thou would'st solace gather—

When our child's first accents flow—

Wilt thou teach her to say "Father!"

Though his care she must forego?

When her little hands shall press thee—

When her lip to thine is pressed—

Think of him whose prayer shall bless thee—

Think of him thy love had blessed!

Should her lineaments resemble

Those thou never more may'st see,

Then thy heart will softly tremble

With a pulse yet true to me.

Her father died when Ada was eight years old. Her mother never got over his betrayal, but this worked out well for Ada and for history, as her mother encouraged her interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Ada remained interested in Byron, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her eventual death, she was buried next to him at her request. She never met any of her half siblings.

Lovelace did not have a close relationship with her mother who often left her in the care of her maternal grandmother. Nonetheless, social pressures dictated that Lady Byron present herself as a doting mother. However, she remained outspoken about her husband’s immorality, and Lady Byron had her teenage daughter watched by close friends for any sign of moral deviation. Lovelace dubbed these observers the "Furies" and later complained they exaggerated and invented stories about her.

When Ada was twelve years old, she decided she wanted to fly. She approached the project methodically, thoughtfully, with imagination and passion. Her first step, in February 1828, was to construct wings. She investigated different material and sizes. She examined the anatomy of birds to determine the right proportion between the wings and the body. She decided to write a book, Flyology, illustrating some of her findings. She decided what equipment she would need and integrated steam “with the art of flying”. While of course this endeavour was unsuccessful, it shows Ada’s logical and imaginative brain and her already scientific approach to life.

Education

“The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.”

From a young age, Lovelace was often ill and often left unable to walk without crutches. However, this did not hamper her studies which she remained diligently dedicated to.

Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Byron was one of the reasons that Ada was taught mathematics from an early age. She was privately educated in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted 19th-century researcher and scientific author. From the age of 17, her mathematical abilities became apparent, a passion which dominated most of her adult life. One tutor wrote to her mother that Ada’s skill in mathematics could lead her to become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence." How right he was!

In early 1833, Ada had an affair with her tutor, with whom she attempted to elope before being caught. Lady Byron and her friends covered the incident up to prevent a public scandal.

Youth

Lovelace became close friends with her tutor Mary Somerville, who she greatly respected. Other notable friends of hers included Charles Dickens. She was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind."By 1834, Ada was a regular star at court, charming her peers with her dancing and wit. She was mostly described as being dainty, although John Hobhouse, Byron's friend, 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 Ada made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like him, probably due to her mother's influence, which led her to dislike all of her father's friends. This first impression was not to last however, and they later became friends.

On 8 July 1835, Ada married William King, later becoming Countess Lovelace. They had three homes and three children – two boys and a girl. Immediately after the birth of Annabella, Lady King experienced "a tedious and suffering illness, which took months to cure”. In 1843–44, Ada's mother assigned William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada's children and to act as a "moral" instructor for Ada. He quickly fell in love with her. Despite protesting that that he would never atc in an “unbecoming manner”, his advances led Ada to terminate their arrangement. However, this shows how her mother continued to meddle in her life, fixating on the idea that she would turn out like her father.

In 1841, Lovelace found out that her father had also fathered a child with his half-sister, for whom Ada had been named. Ada 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.” She did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead blamed Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was." This shows how she continued to idolise her father despite her mother’s best efforts.

In the 1840s, Ada followed in her father’s footsteps by flirting with scandal. Firstly, she mirrored his relaxed approach to extra-marital relationships and there were numerous rumours of her affairs with other men. Secondly, she had a strong penchant for gambling. She apparently lost more than £3,000 on the horses during the later 1840s. The gambling led to her forming a syndicate with male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt which she was forced to pass on to her husband. She also had a suspicious relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards. John Crosse destroyed most of their correspondence after her death as part of a legal agreement. She bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her. During her final illness, she would panic at the idea of the younger Crosse being kept from visiting her.

Charles Babbage

“Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.”

In June 1833, Mary Somerville introduced Ada to “father of computers”, Charles Babbage, who would become increasingly important to her throughout her life.  She was in particular interested in Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Shortly after meeting, Babbage invited Lovelace to see the prototype for his difference engine. She became fascinated with the machine and visited him as frequently as possible. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and analytic skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Number." In 1843 he wrote to her: “Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—every thing in short but the Enchantress of Number.”

In 1842–43, Lovelace translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's article on Babbage's newest proposed machine. She appended this with a set of notes. Explaining the Analytical Engine's function was a difficult task, as many other scientists did not really grasp the concept and the British establishment had shown little interest. Her work was well received by scientist of the time. The notes she added are around three times longer than the article itself. Based on this work, Lovelace is now widely considered to be the first computer programmer and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.

Lovelace was dismissive of artificial intelligence. She wrote that "The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths." This objection has been the subject of much debate and rebuttal, for example by Alan Turing in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

Lovelace and Babbage had a minor falling out when the papers were published, when he tried to leave his own statement (criticising the government's treatment of his Engine) as an unsigned preface, which could have been mistakenly interpreted as a joint declaration. When Taylor's Scientific Memoirs ruled that the statement should be signed, Babbage wrote to Lovelace asking her to withdraw the paper. This was the first that she knew he was leaving it unsigned, and she wrote back refusing to withdraw the paper. Historian Benjamin Woolley theorised that "His actions suggested he had so enthusiastically sought Ada's involvement, and so happily indulged her ... because of her 'celebrated name'." Their friendship recovered however, and they continued to correspond. On 12 August 1851, when she was dying of cancer, Lovelace wrote to him asking him to be her executor

In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical

 

Computer Work

“The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.”

Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, containing what many consider to be the first computer program—an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating numbers, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities. Her mindset of "poetical science" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.

Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions by integrating poetry and science. Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts. She valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, viewing both as tools for exploring "the unseen worlds around us."

Throughout her life, Lovelace was strongly interested in scientific developments and fads of the day. After her work with Babbage, Lovelace continued to work on other projects. In 1844 she expressed her desire to create 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 pre-occupation, 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 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning "certain productions" she was working on regarding the relation of maths and music.

Ada’s analysis was an important development from previous ideas about the capabilities of computing devices and anticipated the implications of modern computing one hundred years before they were realised.

According to the historian of computing and Babbage specialist Doron Swade:

“Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number...What Lovelace saw...was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation—to general-purpose computation—and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper.”

“Those who have learned to walk on the threshold of the unknown worlds, by means of what are commonly termed par excellence the exact sciences, may then, with the fair white wings of imagination, hope to soar further into the unexplored amidst which we live.”

Though Lovelace is often referred to as the first computer programmer, some biographers, computer scientists and historians of computing claim otherwise.

Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis that Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in any way".[83]

Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole consider it "incorrect" to regard Lovelace as the first computer programmer, as Babbage wrote the initial programs for his Analytical Engine, although the majority were never published. Dorothy K. Stein regards Lovelace's notes as "more a reflection of the mathematical uncertainty of the author, the political purposes of the inventor, and, above all, of the social and cultural context in which it was written, than a blueprint for a scientific development."

In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. While acknowledging that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine prior to Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that "there's nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of the Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it."

Death

“I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.”

Lovelace died at the age of 36 from uterine cancer, probably exacerbated by bloodletting by her physicians. The illness lasted several months, in which time her daughter took command over whom Ada saw, and excluded all of her friends and confidants. Under her mother's influence, Ada had a religious transformation and was coaxed into repenting of her previous conduct and making her daughter executor.  She lost contact with her husband after confessing something to him on 30 August which caused him to abandon her bedside. It is not known what she told him. She was buried, at her request, next to her father.

A century after her death, Alan Turing referred to Ada’s notes while developing some of the first modern computers. Every year, Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the achievemens of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

I love Ada because she is one of the few women who is known more for her own achievements than for her famous father or even her own personal scandals. Her philosophical approach to science strikes a real chord with me because despite my mother being a scientist I have the least scientific brain in the world but this makes it almost seem appealing! It really humanises science and shows how it can be inspired by the natural world around us as well as bigger questions – the relationship between science and religion is something which I’ve studied a fair bit and I wish I could’ve had that chat with Ada. I’m going to add her to my “hypothetical dinner party”. Despite controversies surrounding Ada’s contribution, her achievements and genius are undeniable in my opinion, and it is little surprise that history would rather remember her in the shadow of a male mentor than as remarkable in her own right. When you think of a scientist, or a computer genius, I bet very few of you picture a Victorian Lady. Even today, I’ve witnessed how ladies in STEM are severely underrepresented, underappreciated, and undervalued – so one can only imagine the stigma that Ada had to fight to be taken seriously in that field in her time. I got an A in Higher Computing and Advanced Higher History, but never once heard the name Ada Lovelace mentioned in either class and I think that’s a true injustice. Little girls everywhere should learn about Ada and know that they are just as capable, if not more so, than men in such careers, and be taught the legacy that we all owe to the women who paved the way for the technology we use to build our own careers today.