December 10, 1815: Ada Lovelace is born.
Today’s Google Doodle honors Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s only legitimate child and the woman who is popularly credited as “the world’s first computer programmer”. Lady Byron, who separated from Ada’s father just a month after she was born, sought to raise her daughter in a manner that ensured she would not end up like her volatile poet father. Ada, often ill as a child, began studying mathematics at a young age and soon discovered her natural flair for the subject, so strong that one of her tutors, Augustus De Morgan, suggested that she become a mathematician “of first-rate eminence” later in life. In 1833, Ada attempted to elope with another one of her tutors, although her attempt failed, and the entire incident was covered up.
That year, she also met Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor with whom Ada shared a close correspondence for the rest of her life. Over a nine-month-long period in 1842 and 1843, Ada translated an Italian memoir regarding Babbage’s Analytical Engine; she supplemented her translation with her own set of notes (which actually ended up longer than the memoir itself) explaining in detail the differences between Babbage’s machine and his Difference Engine. Ada was optimistic about the future of these engines and machines. Although a mathematician, she was not limited by numbers and predicted that someday a more complex descendant of Babbage’s engines “might act upon other things besides number… the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. She also provided what is today recognized as “the world’s first computer program” - a proposed algorithm that would generate Bernoulli numbers using the analytical machine. Whether Ada formulated the plan herself, or whether it was the product of close collaboration between herself, Babbage, and associates, or whether it was someone else’s work entirely, remains subject to debate to this day. Babbage, at least, was as impressed by Ada as she was by him; in 1843 he wrote of her:
Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans – every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.