Augusta Ada Lovelace: Math Genius

World Math Day or Pi Day is celebrated on March 14. This week’s RW of the Week is Countess Augusta Ada Lovelace, a mathematical genius who wrote the first computer program in 1843.

At a time when few girls were getting even a basic education, Augusta Ada Lovelace, was creating the first known computer program in the world. That was in 1843, a full century before the first generation of modern computers were developed and 140 years before personal computers were produced. It was a time when technology was not a word that existed and the latest inventions were the telegraph, the fax machine and the typewriter.

Lovelace, born in 1815, envisioned something called “the analytical machine,” would serve as the basis for today’s computers and dramatically change not only business, but society.

Augusta Ada Byron was born to parents who were completely opposite in temperament. They were both from the upper crust of British society. Her father, George Gordon Byron, known as Lord Byron, was a renowned poet with a reputation as a charming philanderer. Her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke was religious and highly educated. She had such an affinity for math that Byron called her “the princess of parallelograms.” Their ill-fated marriage lasted only 14 months, during which they were separated most of the time.

Ada never knew her father because her mother would not allow Byron to visit her. Believing that Byron was mentally unstable and would be a bad influence on their daughter, Ada’s mother was determined to squash her daughter’s imaginative or poetic interests. Some of the eras most prominent scientists and mathematicians tutored Ada. Among her private tutors was the Scottish polymath Mary Somerville, who would be instrumental in introducing her to Charles Babbage, now regarded as the “father of computing.”Ada showed an early natural talent for math. At the same time, her imagination was far from being suppressed. At twelve, after studying birds, she wanted to construct a flying machine. It’s not clear whether she knew about Leonardo da Vinci’s blueprint for a helicopter before she wrote her own theory about flight in a paper called “Flyology.”

She wrote, “I have got a scheme, to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of a horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.”

In 1833, when Ada was 17, she met mathematician Charles Babbage¸ who gave her a demonstration of his Difference Machine, an early prototype of an adding machine or calculator. Ada’s interest in the machine’s potential led to a correspondence between the two, which developed into a long professional relationship.

Ada’s marriage in 1835 to William King, who later became Count of Lovelace, and the births of their three children did not deter her interests in math and science. The more she studied and investigated, the more she believed that intuition and imagination were just as important as logical reasoning.

Several years later, she demonstrated how well she could integrate science and imagination. In the early 1840s, at a conference of scientists in Italy, Babbage presented his blueprint for an Analytical Machine, an invention capable of performing more mathematical functions and with greater accuracy.

His ideas prompted Luigi Menabrea, a mathematician in the audience, to write a report, later published in French. Asked to translate the report, Ada did more than that. In a lengthy series of notes, she laid out Menabrea’s observations of how this machine could be programmed with a code to solve complex formulas.

Ada compared how this might work to a textile loom in use at the time, which employed a chain of punch cards to create designs out of threads. Ada posited that the Analytical Machine could also use punch cards to create algebraic patterns to make calculations. Punch cards were a symbol of the data processing power of mainframe computers first developed in the 20th century.

She provided an example, a step-by-step computation leading to a mathematical solution. Based on this example, she is credited by many as the first computer programmer. Some math historians dispute this, saying Babbage had already formulated algorithms in his writings. Even if that were the case, it took Ada to crystallize the importance of the concept in a compelling way to the world.

But no one challenges Ada’s brilliant vision for the potential of the Analytical Machine. She wrote the engine, “might act upon other things besides numbers…for instance…the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” Indeed, one story goes that she and Babbage used the Analytical Machine as a betting machine to predict horse races and events. Ada was able to see beyond math, an incredible vision more than a century before the phrase, “there’s an app for that” would become commonplace.

Regardless of whether Ada was the first programmer or not, her legacy as a pioneer in computer science is secure. In 1979, the Department of Defense developed a computer language that would codify all the different languages in use by the military. They named it ADA in her honor and it’s still in use today in the banking, aviation, health care and space industries.

In her lifetime, Ada’s contributions were uncelebrated, partly because her ideas were so far ahead of her time. The telephone didn’t exist, radio waves hadn’t been discovered and photography was still a new fascination. Women weren’t allowed to study in universities. Ada Lovelace’s story is all the more remarkable because of the societal limitations and restrictions against women.

©2023 Alice Look
Co-founder, Remarkable Women Project.org
Executive Producer, Remarkable Women Project