My name is Gwen Miller. I have a very
special place in my heart for Ada
Lovelace because she is considered the
mother of the modern computer algorithm,
which is what I do for a living. In her
time, which was the 19th century, Ada was
mostly famous for being the only
legitimate child of Lord Byron,
the poet and the notorious womanizer. Her
parents separated when she was very
young. Her mother hated Lord Byron so
much she tried to get petty revenge on
him by encouraging her daughter to love
the things that Lady Byron considered to
be the direct opposite of poetry - things
like mathematics and science.
Unfortunately for her mother, Ada saw
poetry and mathematics and science as
being the same thing. She called her
approach "poetical science." As a
aristocratic young woman, she learned a
lot of languages. She had learned math
and science - little less the poetry, but
she kind of got back to him on the sly
herself by reading her father's stuff. In
her late teenage years,
Ada met Charles Babbage, who is
considered the father of the modern
computer - or as he called it, his
analytical engine. He was 30 years her
senior, but they formed a lifelong
friendship and really an academic
collaboration - he called her his
"enchantress of numbers." Their most famous
collaboration came about ten years later,
after she had already gotten married to
the Earl of Lovelace and had three
children. Basically, Charles Babbage gave
a speech. This Italian engineer wrote
down the speech but it was in French, so
Ada ended up translating that speech
back into English and, in the process,
added a bunch of her own notes. Now, in
those notes is an algorithm that is
widely considered to be the first
computer program, so there is some
question of how much was Babbage and how
much was Ada, but there is absolutely no
debate over the fact that Ada is the
only one of her era to really understand
the true potential of the computer. At
this point, the computer had never been
built, this was all theoretical
in her time period. She saw out in the
world that weaving was already being
done on machines that used punch cards.
It's a woven picture, essentially. If
you can do this with a loom, these new
computers - they can do anything that you
can represent with numbers. All the men
of her era were very much obsessed with
the focus on using the computer to, well,
compute mathematics, and Ada, because
she had this ability to love science, to
love poetry - she freaking was even into
metaphysics! - was able to predict and see
that the computer could be used for so
much more: for music, for images, for text,
for sound. And this this is really why we
need a diversity of perspectives, which is
what moves these fields forward. She died
at the age of 36 of cancer. Even in the
year before her death, she wrote her
mother about her latest obsession and
project, which was the relationship
between mathematics and music. Can you
imagine living your life where every
second is just filled with the awe of
the world around you? That was Ada. Like,
she's my patron saint. I've adopted her
as my patron saint.
