Ada
Lovelace
1815-1852
Biography
Ada
Lovelace was one of the most charismatic characters in computer history.
Ada was born
December 10,
1815 the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke.
Five
weeks later after Ada birth, Annabella Milbanke asked for a separation
from
Byron, and she was given sole custody of Ada who she brought up to be a
mathematician and scientist. Annabella was terrified that Ada might end up being a poet like her
father. In spite of Annabella’s programming, Ada did not sublimate her poetical
inclinations. She hoped to be "an analyst and a metaphysician".
In
her 30's she wrote her mother, if you can't give me poetry, can't you give
me
"poetical science?" Her understanding of mathematics was laced
with
imagination, and described in metaphors.
Ada never met her younger sister, Allegra Byron, who was
the
daughter of Byron and his other wife Claire Clairmont. Allegra died at age
of
five in 1822. In mean while
Ada lived with her
mother,
who was highly interested in mathematics. Annabella taught Ada
mathematics just to keep Ada
away from Byron. Ada
was taught mathematics and science by William King, who was an English
nobleman
and a scientist, William Fred, who was a clergyman, social reformer and
writer,
and Mary Somerville, who was a Scottish science writer and polymath, at
time
when women’s participation in science was encouraged. Ada
was also an active member of London
society and she was a member of Bluestockings at her childhood.
In
1835
she married William King, 8th Baron King who was an
English
nobleman and scientist, and they had three kids; Byron who was born on May
12,
1836, Annabella who was born on September 22, 1837, and Ralph Gordon who
was
born on July 2, 1839. Ada’s
full name in her married was The Right honorable Augusta Ada, Countless of
Lovelace. But she was very famous as Ada Lovelace, or by her maiden name,
Ada
Byron. Ada knew Mary Somerville, who taught
Ada, an author of
19th
century and she also introduced her to Charles Babbage on June 5, 1833.
Some of
her acquaintance were Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Charles
Dickens
and Michael faraday.
During
the
ninth month period of 1842-1843, Ada
translated Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea’s memoir on Babbage’s
newest
proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. During the translation she
appended a
set of notes which specified in complete detail a method for calculating
Bernoulli numbers with Engine, which recognized as the world first
computer
program. There were some argument debated by historian that the programs
were
written by Babbage himself. Some of Ada’s
genres suggest some possibilities which Babbage never published, such as
speculating that “the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific piece
of music
of any degree of complexity or extent.”
Ada
Lovelace, coincidently, died at age of 36 the same age as her father died,
the
same cause, and she was buried next to her father at the Church
of St. Mary Magdalene in
Hucknall, Nottingham, too. She died of bleeding to death by
her own
physician, who was trying to treat her uterine cancer. Ada
left two sons and a daughter who was famous in her traveling to Middle East and breeding Arabian horses, and she was
also
a co-founder of the Crabbet Arabian Stud.
Analytical
Engine
The analytical engine,
an
important step in the history of computer, was the design of a mechanical
general-purpose computer by the British professor of mathematics Charles
Babbage. It was first described in1837, but Babbage continued to work on
the
design until his death in1817. Because of financial, political, and legal
issues, the engine was never actually built. In its logical design the
machine
was essentially modern, anticipating the first completed general-purpose
computers by about 100 years.
Some believe that the technological limitations of the time were one
of the
hardest obstacles to the construction of the machine while others believe
that
the machine could have been built successfully with the technology of the
time
if funded more and supported by politicians. Charles Babbage was
notoriously
hard to work with and alienated a great number of people who had at first
supported him, including his engineer Joseph Clement (2 and 3).
Charles Babbage's first attempt at a mechanical computing device was
the
difference engine, a multipurpose calculator designed to calculate
logarithms
and trigonometric functions by evaluating approximate polynomials. As this
project faltered for personal and political reasons, he realized that a
much
more general design was possible and started work designing the analytical
engine. The analytical engine was to be powered by a steam engine and
would
have been over 30 meters long and 10 meters wide. The input was to be
provided
to the machine via punch cards, a method being used at the time to direct
mechanical looms. For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve
plotter
and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to
be
read in later. It employed ordinary base-10 fixed-point arithmetic (Huskey
et
al. 1980-84).
It was capable of storing and holding 1,000 numbers of 50 digits each.
An
arithmetical unit would be able to perform all four arithmetical
operations,
plus comparisons and optionally square roots. Initially it was conceived
as a
difference engine curved back upon itself, in a generally circular layout,
with
the long store exiting off to one side. Like the CPU (Central Processing
Unit)
in a modern computer, the mill would rely upon its own internal
procedures, to
be stored in the form of pegs inserted into rotating drums called
"barrels," in order to carry out some of the more complex
instructions
the user's program might specify (Huskey et al. 1980-84).
The programming language to be employed by users was akin to modern
day
assembly language. Loops and conditional branching were possible and so
the
language as conceived would have been Turing Machine long before Alan
Turing's
concept. Three different types of punch cards were used: one for
arithmetical
operations, one for numerical constants, and one for load and store
operations,
transferring numbers from the store to the arithmetical unit or back.
In 1842, the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, whom Babbage had
met
while traveling in Italy,
wrote a description of the engine in French. In 1843, the description was
translated into English and extensively annotated by Ada Lovelace, who had
become interested in the engine ten years earlier. In recognition of her
additions to Menabrea’s paper, which included a way to calculate Bernoulli
numbers using the machine, she has been described as the first computer
programmer. The modern computer programming language named Ada after Ada Lovelace for her honor
(Huskey
et al. 1980-84).
In 1842 Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the
University of
Turin about his analytical engine.
Luigi
Menabrea, a young Italian Engineer, and future prime minister, wrote up
Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently
published in
the Bibliotheque Unverselle de Geneve in October 1842. Babbage asked Ada
Lovelace (born Ada Byron), to translate Menabrea's paper into English,
subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the
translation.
Ada spent
most
of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than
Menabrea's
paper, were then published in the ladies Diary and Taylor's Scientific
Memoir under the initialism "A.A.L." Her notes were labeled
alphabetically from A to G. Note G is the longest of the seven. In note G,
Ada describes an
algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is
generally considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for
implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is considered by
many to
be the first computer programmer.
Note
G could possibly also be said to be the first expression of the modern
computer
phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” (1 and Rappaport et al. 1987).
Ada Lovelace as
World’s First Computer Programmer
Ada Lovelace was the first
computer Programmer. She worked with Charles Babbage when he was planning
the
analytical engine. She actually wrote the very first computer programs and
since analytical engine was never completed, the programs were used and
executed. Ada
also earned a great reputation and a space in history of science and
computation due her contribution to Charles Babbage’s Analytical
Engine. There source that Ada not only wrote
programs
or added a set of note to Babbage’s Analytical Engine but she actually
found
bugs in Babbage’s writing and debugged them. Therefore, she is not only
the
world’s first computer programmer but she also the world’s first
software-oriented technical writer.
In
general,
she has contributed not only in computer and software engineering field,
but
she was a great impact on Bernoulli number in solving sum and polynomial
and
later which was the used to calculate function and generating function and
it
was also used to find the radius convergence and power series and many
other
related mathematical problems. Thus, Ada
was one great mathematician and computer programmer and software-oriented
technical writer. Unfortunately, she expired at her early ages leaving
behind
her great contribution to world science, computer and mathematics. In her
memory and honor, there is a computer language known as Ada, which was named after her, still
used in
modern day.
Charles
Babbage
1791-1871
References:
1. http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/WOMEN/ada-love.htm
2. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Biographies/Lovelace.html
3. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lovelace.html
V. R. Huskey and H D Huskey,
Lady
Lovelace and Charles Babbage, Ann. History of Computer. 2
(4)
(1980), 299-329.
V. R. Huskey and H D Huskey, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, and her
contribution
to computing, Abacus 1 (1984), 22-29.
K.
D.
Rappaport, Augusta Ada
Lovelace (1815-1852), in L S Grinstein
and P J
Campbell (eds.), Women of Mathematics (Westport, Conn., 1987),
135-139.
B. A. Toole, Ada Byron, Lady
Lovelace, an analyst and metaphysician, IEEE Ann. History of
Computer. 18
(3) (1996), 4-12.
Ahmed Jawaid
Rasekh
Stony Brook University
CSE 301
