Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

The First Computer Programmer

From opening the door of Olin with your keycard to typing up an essay for your class, almost everything in this world uses a code sequence to give out an output. When computers were first invented, they were huge, heavy, and more expensive to build than the desktop computers sold in Apple stores today Their only purpose was to calculate tedious equations, like a less versatile calculator But if computers were initially designed only to calculate complex and repetitive mathematical equations, who first saw the possibility of this future of automatic doors and minuscule pixelated screens?

By: Ariella Sato-Baran ‘25 Women In STEM: Issue 4.

Who Is She?

On December 10th, 1815 Augusta Ada King-Noel, was born in London (1) She was the daughter of the famed poet George Byron and Annabella Milbanke, though many know her as Ada Lovelace from when she became the Countess of Lovelace later in her life

Childhood/ Early Life:

To prevent her from having a quick-tempered and irate nature like her father, her mother hired mathematics and science tutors instead of tutors focused on the arts, unlike typical aristocratic families of the time (2). Even at an early age, Lovelace’s prowess and natural intellect in the field of mathematics were apparent; however, she was also very imaginative and curious, like her father An example of her nature is when, through thorough observation of birds at the age of 13, Lovelace composed and illustrated a guide on “Flyology” which recorded her findings and design on a flying machine based on her wish to fly like a bird (2-3).

When she was only 17, Lovelace met Charles Babbage in 1833 at Cambridge University. They quickly became close friends through their shared interest in mathematics and soon after, he became a mentor to her Babbage is most well-known as the “father of the computer” (3) due to his invention of the Difference engine and Analytical engine

Lovelace’s father was imaginative and saw life through rose-colored lenses, while her mother was factual and logical. The stark difference in personality between them created discord in the two’s marriage, and only four months after Lovelace was born, the two divorced (2) Annabella moved with Lovelace to the countryside of England while George sailed across to Greece, where he later died when she was eight (1).

The Difference engine is a complex machine that calculates and tabulates polynomial functions. The Analytical engine, in contrast, was made to be able to perform any calculations given It had four components: the mill, the store, the reader, and the printer (4) The mill was the calculating unit, analogous to our modern-day CPUs, and the store was where data was stored (memory and storage). The reader and printer are the input and output devices (4). Though never completed, the Analytical engine was the first ever mechanical generalpurpose computer proposed However, it was only when Lovelace suggested the computational possibilities of the engine that it became seen as the first computer

Lovelace’s proximity to Babbage allowed her to see the machine in its early stage of design and calculations, and later, when she was asked to translate into English Babbage’s article of work, she composed seven notes The most famous note of all is the last note, Note G In the note, she highlighted how, by utilizing the flexibility of how the engine requires punch cards with instructions as their input, it can follow a recursive algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This would make the Analytical engine programmable (4). Lovelace followed up her hypothesis with a table of data containing the mathematics behind the engine’s calculation of Bernoulli numbers Her calculations were proven to be correct when decades later researchers finished the engine and tested her theory She also theorized how machines such as the analytical engine would soon be able to translate images, pictures, and sound into a digital format: “The analytical engine might act upon other things besides numbers, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations (programs)” (5). Centuries later, when her mathematics was proven correct, she was named “the first computer programmer”

Unfortunately, Lovelace passed away at 36 from uterine cancer after suffering years of medical conditions following the birth of her second son Until the very end, her relationship with her mother was rocky, for when she was urged to embrace religion to be forgiven, she turned down her mother by declaring that “[r]eligion to [her] is science, and science is religion” (5). Her achievements were not recognized until the 1950s when an English scientist, BV Bowden, republished her work in his hit book ‘Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines’ and in 1980, the US Department of Defense named their newly developed advanced computer programming language "Ada" after her (5). Only in recent years were her accomplishments and genius suitably acknowledged for someone so ahead of her time