Ada Lovelace - The World's First Computer Programmer

Ada Lovelace is considered by many to be the world’s first computer programmer. Born in 1815, she was the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron. Unfortunately, Lord Byron’s marriage to Ada’s mother was not a happy one and Lady Byron separated from her husband only weeks after their daughter was born. A few months later, Lord Byron left England and Ada never saw her father again.

She had an unusual upbringing for an aristocratic girl. At her mother’s insistence, tutors taught her mathematics and science, subjects which were not standard fare for women at the time, but her mother believed that engaging in rigorous studies would prevent her daughter from developing her father’s moody and unpredictable temperament.

Around the age of 17, Ada met Charles Babbage – a mathematician and inventor. The pair became friends, and the much older Babbage served as a mentor to her. Ada was fascinated by Babbage’s ideas. Babbage invented the difference engine, which was meant to perform mathematical calculations and Ada got a chance to look at the machine before it was finished. She was captivated by it.

Babbage also created plans for another device known as the analytical engine, designed to handle more complex calculations and Ada was later asked to translate an article on Babbage’s analytical engine for a Swiss journal. She not only translated the original French text into English but also added her own thoughts and ideas on the machine. These notes ended up being three times longer than the original article and her work was published in 1843 in an English science journal.
In her notes, Ada described how codes could be created for the device to handle letters and symbols along with numbers. She also theorized a method for the engine to repeat a series of instructions, a process known as looping that computer programs use today. Sadly, her article attracted little attention when she was alive.

In 1835, Ada married William King, who became the Earl of Lovelace three years later. She then took the title of Countess of Lovelace. They shared a love of horses and had three children together. From most accounts, he supported his wide’s academic endeavours, and the pair socialised with many of the interesting minds of the times, including Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens. Ada’s health suffered, however, after a bout of cholera in 1837. She had lingering problems with asthma and her digestive system. Doctors gave her painkillers, such as laudanum and opium, and her personality began to change, and she reportedly experienced mood swings and hallucinations. She died from uterine cancer in London in 1852 at the age of 36.

Ada’s contributions to the field of computer science were not discovered until the 1950s. Her notes were reintroduced to the world by B.V. Bowden, who republished them in Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines in 1953. Since then, Ada has received many posthumous honours for her work and in 1980, the U.S Department of Defence named a newly developed computer language ‘Ada’, after her.

“Religion to me is science, and science is religion.” Ada Lovelace

This is the biography of Ada Lovelace, also know as Lady Lovelace.

[quacky]

Omg, this helped me so much with my homework, thank you!

[Top-Tier-Humanzz]

this lovelace (and babbage) literally made the modern world

[feanorcurufinwe]

Ada Lovelace is not the first computer programmer. Charles Babbage is the inventor of computer. And he did not invent it to harvest the crops. The machine he invented is working with a program in it. You can't accidentally invent something as complex and leave it for someone else to invent something else to make it work. The computer comes with programs in it.
That makes Charles Babbage the first computer programmer.