Ada Lovelace: biography of this mathematician and programming pioneer

Ada Lovelace was an advanced woman for her time. Woman of science and technology, since 2009, every second Tuesday in October, her international day is celebrated, a date with the which is intended to commemorate the achievements made by women in fields such as technology, science, engineering and math.

Born Augusta Ada Byron, she was the daughter of the famous and controversial Lord Byron and Anna Isabella Noel Byron, an English aristocrat who held a deep grudge against the English poet.

Ada Lovelace's life has ups and downs marked by a very weak health but that did not prevent her from being an advance in her time, so much so that she came to imagine what a computer is today. Let's learn about her life below. Let's see a summary of her career in this biography of Ada Lovelace.

• Related article: "Marie Curie: biography of this pioneering researcher of radioactivity"

Brief Biography of Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born Augusta Ada Byron on December 10, 1815. As soon as Ada her parents arrived in the world, after several marital disagreements, scandals and infidelities, they separated. Her mother, Anna Isabella Noel Byron, left the family home taking advantage of the fact that her father, the famous poet George Gordon Lord Byron, slept, taking with her little Ada, just a month old. life.

Later, her mother filed for divorce from Byron after learning that her husband's half-sister Augusta Leigh (for whom little Ada was named after her) was also her lover. Scandals were happening in Lord Byron's life and, three months after leaving him, Anna Isabella threatened her husband to give him a divorce from her or to make famous the incestuous extramarital affairs of her and his homosexuality. In the end, Byron would leave England and his daughter would never see him again in life.

Little Ada was a sickly child. At the age of seven she contracted an illness that kept her bedridden for several months. At the age of fourteen, her legs were paralyzed for a season due to severe measles, which that made the girl, to take advantage of the dead hours, spend them reading and studying without pause.

Anna Isabella made sure that her daughter received a careful and strict education that included music, French and mathematics. Still spiteful towards her ex-husband, Anna Isabella wanted her daughter to have the most scientific training her possible, she removed from the writing life of her father, and for this she hired the mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. Her mother's aversion to the artistic made Ada see her talents of this kind as if it were a disease.

To further stimulate Ada's interest in science and technology, mother and daughter traveled through the regions of industrialized England.. Thus, Ada had contact with the newest inventions of the time, smoking machines moved by steam. Among those that impressed her the most was the Jacquard loom, a mechanical loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard and which at that time used punched cards to function.

Augusta Ada was a woman, and that in the Victorian England in which she lived was nothing more than an obstacle. Nevertheless, Thanks to her high social status, she was able to rub shoulders with prestigious figures of her time, renowned scientists and learned men such as David Brewster, Andrew Crosse, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the novelist Charles Dickens.

• You may be interested in: "The 12 branches (or fields) of Psychology"

Charles Babbage and programming

When Augusta Ada King turned 18, as with the rest of the young aristocrats of her time, he started attending high society parties in order to find a suitor who to marry. At one of them, organized by her tutor Mary Somerville, she met the famous mathematician Charles Babbage for having designed a calculator capable of calculating tables of numerical functions by the method of differences. Babbage is also famous for having designed, although he never built, an analytical engine for executing tabulation programs.

It is because of these inventions that Babbage is considered one of the pioneers in conceiving the idea of ​​what we could now consider a computer. The mathematician's designs excited the young Ada, so much so that even the girl suggested that one day not too far away machines would make it possible to change people's lives by doing the most complicated calculations receiving commands.

• Related article: "How do we organize the information in our mind? Schemes and categories "

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

In 1835, Augusta Ada met William King-Noel, Lord Lovelace, a member of one of the most influential families in Victorian England. When the possibility of marrying the young woman to such a well-known suitor arose, Ada's mother was quick to approve of the relationship. The wedding took place on July 8, 1835, and Ada became Lady King. It would be from that moment that the young woman would always sign as Ada Lovelace. The marriage would have 3 children: Byron, Anne and Ralph.

Around that time, the health of the already Countess of Lovelace began to deteriorate. Ada Lovelace began to suffer from very painful digestive and respiratory problems and the doctors of her time saw fit to treat them with opiates. The consumption of these substances took a toll on her health, causing delusions and sudden mood swings, in addition to planting the seed of a change in her personality.

Ada Lovelace on opiates had delusions of grandeurher, describing herself as a mathematical genius, with almost supernatural powers. She tried, unsuccessfully, to have Babbage become her teacher, although the two would eventually maintain a close collaboration.

• You may be interested in: "Delusions: what are they, types and differences with hallucinations"

A very successful translation

In 1842 Ada would do what was to be her only professional job for the prestigious Scientific Memoirs magazine.. The magazine commissioned him to translate an article written in French by Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea describing Charles Babbage's analytical engine.

Ada Lovelace published her translated article, in addition to accompanying it with abundant notes from her harvest in which she expounded her own theories about how the machine worked. These notes she signed only with her initials AAL hers to hide her status as a woman from her and to prevent this from harming her dissemination. The notes would not be published under her real name until 1953.

In the end, these extensive annotations would end up becoming very famous, more than the translation of the article itself. Ada's imagination and ability to see beyond immediate reality made her capable of developing very advanced concepts for the time, being she considered a true visionary.

The most remarkable of these concepts is the one that refers to the operation of what today we call a computer algorithm. Ada herself took Bernoulli's numbers as an example, an infinite series of figures which play a very important role in describing the operations that Babbage's analytical engine would have to do in order to calculate them.

Ada Lovelace must have had other interesting current computing concepts outlined as well. She predicted the existence of what we now call a "loop", a group of instructions that are executed several times, or a "subroutine", part of a program that can be required at any time.

It cannot be stated categorically that young Ada was the first to develop a computer program. However, it can be said that Ada Lovelace she had the idea of ​​a machine that could be programmed and reprogrammed to perform various functions and not be limited to just computation. Ada herself considered that punch cards could be used the same as those that she used the Jacquard loom for this, something that could be considered the first computer idea in history.

• Related article: "Computational theory of mind: what does it consist of?"

End of his life

Although Babbage tried to convince the British government to finance the construction of her machine, she was unsuccessful. If it had, undoubtedly the industrial England of that time would have taken an abysmal technological leap forward, almost a century ahead. Unfortunately, the mathematician died in poverty after squandering his fortune and failing to materialize his great ideas.

After Babbage's professional rejection, Ada Lovelace did not return to work on anything related to mathematics. Tormented by her illness and opiate addiction, she threw herself into the arms of the game and, also, of numerous lovers, costing him much of her fortune and her marriage. Her mother, concerned to see in her daughter the romantic and crazy traits of Lord Byron, convinced her to convert to Christianity and make amends for her life.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, died November 27, 1852. She died from the bleeding that her doctors applied to her in the hope of trying to cure her Cancer of uterus that suffered. She was only 36 years old, the same age that her father, Lord Byron, left the world. Although his mother had done everything possible so that father and daughter would not meet again in life, she could not prevent them from doing it in death because the young woman's last wish was to be buried next to her father whom she never He met.

Ada Lovelace's algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers was neither implemented nor tested because Babbage's analytical engine was never built. It would take almost a hundred years before Howard Aiken, an American engineer and pioneer in the field computer science, he designed the first electromagnetic computer, closely related to the work of Babbage.

Unlike the English mathematician, Aiken secured funding, in his case from IBM, building it in 1944 and naming the machine the Mark I.. Who knows if, had they received the support they needed, Babbage and Ada Lovelace would have created a machine as revolutionary as Aiken's ...