Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace
Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815. She was the daughter of the celebrated English poet Lord Byron. She was encouraged from a very early age to study mathematics by her mother who was determined that her daughter should not become a poet. She worked closely with the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage who developed the calculator he called the Analytical Engine. The first descriptions of the Analytical Engine were written by the Italian mathematician Menabrea. Babbage asked Ada Lovelace to translate Menabea's account into English. Ada's translation included some of her own insights into the possibilities of the Analytical Engine. She predicted that the Analytical Engine and its future prototypes, i.e. computers, would someday generate not only numbers but images. She further predicted that computers would be used not only by mathematicians and scientists, but in everyday life.
Ada Lovelace designed a way Babbage's Analystical Engine could be used to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan is now recognized as the first computer program. The U.S. Department of Defence developed a computer program in 1979 and named it ADA in honor of the"enchantress of numbers." Ada Lovelace died in 1852. She was only 36 at the time of her death.
Seshat Goddess of Numbers
References:
Ada, The Enchantress of Numbers by Betty Alexandra Toole (Strawberry Press,Mothers and Daughter of Invention by Autumn Stanley (Rutgers University Press, 1995) pp. 433-436,466, 503.
Ada: Countess of Lovelace by Doris Langley Moore (John Murray, 1977).
The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron by Joan Baum (Archon Books, 1986).
Web Sites
Ada Byron, Lady LovelaceAda Byron:Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing
Ada Lovelace
Video and Film
Conceving Ada, directed by Lynn Hershmann LeesonMinerva's Machine: Women and Computing
