- Ada Lovelace understood that
if you could make a machine
that calculated not
just individual numbers
but abstract variables
that you could use
computers to weave numbers,
musical notes, any kind of
symbolic language and that it
could be applied to really
anything in the way that it is
in our modern world.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter
of the poet Lord Byron.
She was a mathematician
in the Victorian Age,
the very first computer programmer.
Her father was known as a
kind of louche romantic,
you know, a little bit seedy,
a little bit crazy, a little bit wild.
When he divorced her mother,
she decided that she was
going to try to curb out
all the romantic tendencies
in her daughter's spirit
by teaching her mathematics, rigorously,
from a very young age.
So she was instructed in
the maths and sciences
from childhood,
but unfortunately, she
retained some of her father's
poetic spirit, so she
became fixated with the idea
of mathematics as a form of poetry,
and as a metaphysical
art in and of itself.
She wrote all of these
mathematicians and scientists
of her day into corresponding with her
and giving her lessons,
but ultimately, yeah,
she was an autodidact.
She read everything she
could get her hands on,
she kept up-to-date
with all the scientific
publications of her day,
she corresponded with
people that she admired,
and she organized little scientific salons
in her immediate social circles.
So she taught herself everything she knew.
And she ended up spending her life
developing mathematical proofs for
the earliest computer.
In fact, before computers were even built,
she made mathematical proofs
that can be characterized
as the earliest computer programs
for a machine called the difference engine
and then the analytical engine.
So Ada Lovelace's primary contribution
to the history of computer science
is a set of notes that she wrote
that were footnotes of
the translation of a paper
written about Charles
Babbage's analytical engine,
which was a machine that he was having
a really hard time getting funded
by the British government.
He traveled around Europe
giving talks about the machine.
One of the people that
saw one of those talks
was a young Italian engineer
named L. F. Menabrea,
who ended up becoming the
Prime Minister of Italy.
He wrote a technical paper
about the analytical engine
that was published in a Swiss journal.
Ada read it.
She thought it was pretty good.
But she thought she could do better.
She showed it to Babbage, and she said,
"Couldn't I do better
than this?", basically.
She ended up creating a volume of notes
that ended up being several
times more voluminous
than the original paper.
She made a massive jump
that wasn't really
recognized until the 1950s,
the dawn of the computing age.
A number of computer scientists
rediscovered her notes
and republished them because
they had essentially predicted
everything that they were doing
in the early days of computing.
We have to actively make
sure that we develop
our own history
and keep it updated
and maintain it
and open it up to as
many people as possible.
