The Computing Credentials of the Lady Lovelace

n                Augusta Ada Byron was the onlynlegitimate child of Lord Byron; she was born on December 10^th 1815,nbut Byron and her mother separated a month after Ada was born and she had noncontact with her father, who died when she was nine years old. Her mother, AnnenIsabella Milbanke, feared that her daughter would inherit her father’snwaywardness and she had her rigorously tutored in a bid to extirpate any latentnmoral turpitude. The young Ada showed a precocious talent for mathematics andnshe was encouraged in her studies of the subject. 

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nHer mother showed littleninterest in her upbringing, farming her out to her doting mother, but she madensure to write enough ‘concerned’ letters regarding the child’s welfare tondispel public suspicions (she urged the grandmother to keep these, as proof ifnit were ever needed, even though she referred to Ada as ‘it’ on occasion).nConcerns that the Byron blood might be strong in Ada were confirmed when thenseventeen year old tried to elope with her private tutor, whose relatives recognisednher and informed her mother. 

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nIn 1835, she married William King, the 8^thnBaron King, who, in 1838, became the Earl of Lovelace, providing her with the name by which she isnmost usually known – Ada Lovelace. In the 1840s she enjoyed a relaxednrelationship with a number of men, which led to rumours of various affairs,nincluding one with John Crosse, the son of electrical pioneer Andrew Crosse, tonwhom she bequeathed the personal mementoes left to her by her father. She alsonentered into a gambling syndicate with several male colleagues, hoping tonexploit a mathematical model that would ensure success in large bets – thisnfailed badly, leaving her many thousands of pounds in debt, which her iratenhusband was forced to settle. 

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nLovelace was acquainted with Charles Babbage, theneccentric inventor of the Difference and Analytical Engines, which are commonlynheld to be the precursors of the modern computer. In 1842, Babbage gave anseminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine, which wasnwritten up by Luigi Menabrea (then an engineering student, later Prime Ministernof Italy), in French and was published in the Bibliothèque Universelle denGenève. Babbage asked Lovelace to translate this into English and to addnnotes, which she spent close to a year doing. It is these notes that have lednsome to claim that Lovelace wrote the first ‘computer program’, as the table innNote G is an algorithm for the computation of Bernoulli numbers using thenAnalytical Engine, although other have pointed out that Babbage supplied the notesnwhich he had written several years before and all Lovelace did was to spot an‘bug’ in the table. Nevertheless, the position of the world’s first computernprogrammer is currently filled by Ada, The Right Honourable the Countess ofnLovelace, (The computer language ‘Ada’, created for the United StatesnDepartment of Defence {I’m sorry, my American friends, it’s a noun not anverb…}, is named after her). 

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nRegardless of her contribution, she was thenfirst to realise that the Analytical Engine was capable of being programmed,nrather than simply being a huge number-cruncher, and for that alone shendeserves to be recognised on the lamentably far too-short list of femalencontributors to the history of science (there are simply not enough role-modelsnfor future women scientists as it is, although, happily, things arenstarting to change). 

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nIn 1852, Lovelace was diagnosed with uterine cancer, andnas the illness progressed she fell further and further under the influence ofnher mother, who curtailed who could, and who could not, make visits – hernfriends and confidants were all excluded. She underwent a religious conversion,nand on August 30^th she whispered a confession to her husband, whonleft the bedside and never returned (was it an admission of infidelity,nperhaps?). She died on November 27^th 1852, aged thirty-six.

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