Ada Lovelace
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London, England
Biography
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born in London in 1815, the only child of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke. Her mother, fearful that she might inherit the temperament of the father Ada never knew, had her taught mathematics and science from an early age — unusual for a woman of her time.
At seventeen she met Charles Babbage, who introduced her to his Analytical Engine, a mechanical computer a century ahead of its time. Captivated, Ada translated a French article about the machine and added her own notes, three times longer than the original text.
In the famous "Note G" she described, step by step, a method for the machine to compute the sequence of Bernoulli numbers — what is recognised today as the first algorithm ever devised to be carried out by a machine. She died of cancer at thirty-six, in 1852, without ever seeing the machine she imagined so vividly come to life.
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.
Contributions
- The first algorithm ever devised to be carried out by a machine
- The vision that a computer could go beyond mere numerical calculation
- Her celebrated “Notes” on Babbage’s Analytical Engine
- The idea that a machine might one day compose music and create art
- The concept of a program as a logical sequence of instructions
Legacy
More than a century before the first computer existed, Ada Lovelace glimpsed its true power. Today she is recognised as the world's first programmer: the Ada programming language is named in her honour.