Clever Divas

She was born Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of Lord and Lady Byron, in 1815. Her parents separated soon after her birth, and Ada was raised by her mother and grew to share her mother’s affinity for mathematics and literature. Ada was privately home-schooled and was by all accounts an eager and exceptional student.

At the age of twenty, she married William King, 8th Baron King, who would later become 1st Earl of Lovelace. Though Ada’s full name and title was to become The Right Honourable Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, she is known today as during her life as Ada Lovelace.

Even after her marriage, Ada continued her work in mathematics. Among her more celebrated works are the translations of foreign mathematical papers and books into English. It was in translating these works that she learned of Charles Babbage and his work in designing mechanical computers. Though Babbage had some early success with simpler machines, it was his Analytical Engine which caught Ada’s attention.

Ada was one of the few people who understood the work Babbage was doing, and one of the fewer still who could appreciate the implications of his work. She began thoroughly reviewing Babbage’s designs and they became correspondents on the project. They met on several occasions to review each other’s work. Ada created a number of configurations and processes for the machine, including processes to calculate Bernoulli numbers and other mathematical sequences. In doing so, she invented and refined the fundamental steps of what would become computer programming. By all accounts, Ada is credited as the world’s first computer programmer.

During the 1970s, the US Department of Defense began a project to create a programming language for all DoD and military software development in an effort to unify and maximize the usability of the software they were paying to have developed. The specification for the language was published in 1980, and it bore the title “The Ada Programming Language” in honor of Ada Lovelace. The document was adopted as ANSI and MIL-STD 1815, numbered so as to commemorate the year of Ada’s birth.

Every year, the British Computer Society awards the Lovelace Medal in recognition of major advancement of Information Systems science. The recipient usually gives a presentation of their work in return, which has come to be known as The Lovelace Lecture.

Technical and financial limitations prevented Babbage’s Analytical Engine being built during their lifetimes. Though it has never been built in solid form, its workings have been produced in computer models and Ada’s programs have been included with every model.

So here’s to Ada Lovelace, who might very well be said to be the first of the Clever Divas in computing.