Ada Lovelace: The worlds first computer programer.

Mar 30

Speaking of awesome women, how about Ada Lovelace who at 18 years old in the year 1833 befriended fellow mathematician Charles Babbage — known as “The father of computers”.

She went on create the first computer program.

“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.”

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Ada Lovelace Day was created in 2009 by Suw Charman-Anderson and is celebrated every October 13th. The goal is to inspire more women to work in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and math, by celebrating women who currently work in these fields.

Read some of her quotes below and then a little back story of how she brought art, science and calculations together to form the world’s first computer program.

Her writings on artificial intelligence and Alan Turing’s rebuttal specifically to her in "Computing Machinery and Intelligence – Lady Lovelace's Objection" show how so far ahead of her time she was.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815 – 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine.

She was the first to recognize the engine could do more than pure calculation, and published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by Babbage’s Analytical Engine.

Ada’s father was a poet and left England forever, leaving her and her mother four months after her birth.

Ada’s mother, in an attempt to push her daughter away from her father’s perceived insanity, promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic.

In 1843, Ada published a paper on a seminar Babbage gave which included her own notes labeled A to G. In note G she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers and is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically designed for a computer.

“When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage’s engine used punched cards to make calculations.”

— Walter Isaacson