Ada Lovelace

"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc."

Ada Lovelace

Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, was one of the most picturesque characters in computer history. A brilliant mathematician, analyst and metaphysician, she is widely regarded as the founder of scientific computing.
Augusta Ada Byron was born in December 10, 1815, the only legitimate child of Anne Isabella “Annabella” Milbanke and the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Five weeks after her daughter’s birth, Lady Byron asked for a separation from Lord Byron, and was awarded sole custody of Ada, who she brought up to become a mathematician and scientist. Terrified that Ada might end up being a poet like her father, Lady Byron insisted that she receives tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies. But Ada’s complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics that gave her life a meaning. Despite her mother’s programming, however, she did not deny her poetical inclinations. She wanted to be "an analyst and a metaphysician" and often referred to herself as a “poetical scientist.” Hence, her understanding of mathematics was laced with imagination, and described in metaphors.
 
Ada met Charles Babbage, a Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, when she was just 17. It was at a dinner party at their mutual friend’s house that she heard for the first time of Babbage's ideas for the invention of a new calculating engine, the Analytical Engine. Babbage presumed it was possible that a calculating engine could not only foresee but could act on that foresight. Ada was touched by the "universality of his ideas." Since that moment they became friends and began a voluminous correspondence on different subjects such as mathematics and logic.
In the autumn of 1841, Babbage was working on the plans for his new engine. His parliamentary sponsors, however, refused to support a second machine with his first invention - the Difference Engine, still unfinished. Nevertheless, Babbage found sympathy for the new project abroad. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menabrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. On the other hand, Ada, in 1843, married to the Earl of Lovelace and already the mother of three children under the age of eight, translated Menabrea's original memoir into English. When she showed Babbage her translation he suggested that she add her own notes and comments, which turned out to be three times the length of the memoir itself. Ada’s work was published in the same year. In it Lady Lovelace elaborated on her idea that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. She was correct. Furthermore, it was her translation of Menabrea’s original work and the Notes she appended to it that became the source of Ada Byron’s enduring fame. She had anticipated for more than a century most of what we nowadays consider brand-new computing.

Ada called herself “an Analyst and Metaphysician.” She put all her knowledge and analytical skills to use in the Notes she appended to Menabrea’s memoir’s translation. Both she and Babbage understood the plans for the new device but Ada had one advantage – she was much better at articulating the Analytical Engine’s promise. She rightly saw it as what we nowadays would call a general-purpose computer. She speculated that the new engine might act upon other things beside numbers. Her ideas of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that numbers could represent entities other than quantities mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation. Lovelace was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. That is why she has been referred to as the “prophet of the computer age.” Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. In this the tribute paid to her personality is well-founded.
Furthermore, Ada suggested to Babbage that she writes a plan for how the new engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. The plan she wrote thereafter, is now regarded as the first "computer program."
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Ada 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. In 1979, the United States Department of Defense developed a programming language and named it after Lovelace – Ada. 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. Furthermore, 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.