Ada Lovelace - The first computer programmer

Nowadays, it is thought that technology, and more specifically computer programming are male-dominated and women are not suitable for this scientific area. This fact is a bit ironic considering that the first computer algorithm was published by a woman named Ada Lovelace.

Who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada Lovelace was born in December 10, 1815 in London and died in November 27, 1852 in Marylebone, London. She was the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron. Her parents separated in less than a year after her birth and Ada never met her father. Fearing that Ada would inherit her father’s volatile “poetic” temperament, her mother, who also had mathematical training, raised her under a strict regimen of science, logic, and mathematics. She was educated privately by tutors and then self-educated but was helped in her advanced studies by mathematician-logician Augustus De Morgan, the first professor of mathematics at the University of London. On July 8, 1835, she married William King, 8th Baron King and, when he was created an earl in 1838, she became countess of Lovelace.

The first computer program

In 1833, at the age of seventeen, Ada met the mathematician Charles Babbage, who had designed a calculating machine called the Difference Engine. She was inspired by the prototype of the Difference Engine and became Babbage’s lifelong friend. Babbage had a new project in mind, a much more-advanced machine, the Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace translated a French paper that Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea wrote about the Analytical Engine. She also added thousands of words of her own notes to the paper. Lovelace realized that the Analytical Engine could carry out an extensive sequence of mathematical operations. The example she wrote of one such sequence — how to calculate Bernoulli numbers — is regarded by computer historians as the first computer program. She even speculated that the Analytical Engine could be used to perform operations on “other things besides number” such as musical notes.

Ada Lovelace Day

Only a small piece of the Analytical Engine was ever built and Ada Lovelace died in 1852. Her efforts, however, have been remembered. The early programming language Ada was named after her and the second Tuesday in October has become Ada Lovelace Day, on which the contributions of women to science, technology, engineering and mathematics are honored.

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