The first programmer was a woman! The story of Ada Lovelace

Picture

If one is not familiar with the history of programming or mathematics, then the name of Ada Lovelace will not say to him/her anything. Another thing, if you look at this woman from the point of view of literature. Ada was the daughter of Byron, that English romantic poet. Unlike her father, the girl possessed a mathematical mindset and became famous as the first programmer in the world. She wrote only 50 pages describing one machine, but they turned out to be brilliant!

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815. The girl did not know her dad’s love, because her parents broke up almost after her birth. Maybe that's why the lack of influence of the father-poet formed in Ada absolutely other hobbies and inclinations, in particular, passion to mathematics (like her mother had). From father Ada inherited emotionality and deep desire to reach her dreams.

Picture

The girl was fond of cars, read all possible literature on this topic and wanted to invent an aircraft: for this she carefully studied the anatomy of birds.

Ada's mother developed her daughter's interest in science as best as she could do: she invited famous scientists, mathematicians, and astronomers as teachers. Moreover, the girl was ill with measles and for three years was bedridden, so that was perfect time to study. At the age of 17 Anna met with the king and queen, but the girl was more shocked by the opportunity to talk with Professor of Cambridge Charles Babbage. He was engaged in development of a machine that could make calculations to the twentieth sign. Today, his invention is considered the progenitor of a modern computer and is called the "difference engine".

Ada and Charles became not only friends, but like-minded people, because Charles did not have the funding to develop innovation, but as a true scientist he continued his studies. Initially, the project was supported by the royal family, but progress did not go as fast as planned, and the machine itself, 2.5 meters in height and weighing 14 tons, was cumbersome. The investors’ patience ended before the results appeared.

Picture

Talking about Ada as a lady she was very educated, slim, with pale skin, besides Byron's daughter! — many gentlemen laid eyes on her.

At the age of 20, she married Baron King, from whom she gave birth to three children and was happy in marriage. The husband strongly supported his wife in her passion to mathematics and helped financially a lot.

Somehow in 1842, when Babbage was looking for new sources of funding for his project, he was invited to give a lecture at the university and talk about his machine. The lecture was written in French, so he turned to Ada, who was fluent in the language, for the translation, but in addition to translation, the work was enriched with a bunch of footnotes and comments, because Ada knew very well what was going on. Being responsible and scrupulous, Ada took up the matter with all seriousness and the work dured almost a year. At the end, the recording reached 52 pages and contained more comments than the translation, therefore, it was considered an independent work and was printed in the publishing house under the acronym of AAL.

It was noteworthy that the woman foresaw the possible universality of the machine, described the principles of the first "computer", also introduced terms such as "cycle", "working cell" and "distributing map" and described the basics of algorithmization. She also created, in fact, the first computer program — the algorithm for programming an analytical machine for computing Bernoulli numbers.

Ada was gambling and often bets on races, sometimes losing large amounts of money. Basically, this passion was dictated by the desire to help Babbage to continue creating the machine. She tried to apply her knowledge of mathematics in creating a program for predicting the results of horse racing. Unfortunately, her attempts failed.

The most interesting thing is that Lovelace predicted great development of computers and their great role in the future, and she was undoubtedly right. She claimed that after a while machines would not only count figures, but also draw, write music and do other things unimaginable at that time. And this was the 19th century!

Unfortunately, Ada's contemporaries did not appreciate her job at its true worth and only after 150 years scientists revised her records and recognized their genius matter.

Quite a short life was spent by a talented mathematician — at the age of 36 she fell seriously ill (cancer of the uterus) and died. By the way, her father Byron also passed away at this age.

In 1975, the United States began developing a universal programming language, which was called Ada.