I wanna dedicate this presentation about
Ada to her daughter Anabella,
later Lady Anne Blunt.
I wanna start at the end and then, move to the beginning.
A year before Ada died, she was, of course, already very, very ill.
And she was supposed to go to a hunting ball.
And she asked her daughter to take her place.
Now, Ada was, despite the bad press, a magnificent mother.
How do I know that?
Well, in her letter to her daughter
Annabella she jokes just like Byron jokes,
and also later Lord Liten jokes.
And this is part of a letter that Ada wrote to Annabella.
Mrs. Burr sends her love to you and
is very busy about her fancy ball.
And we are deciding on the weighty matter of trust for you.
You are, I believe to be, a young Spanish lady in
and as the dress is entirely black and
not at all gay we do think it may meet with your demure approbation.
We had an idea of you're being the Infanta Isabella,
daughter of the Isabella of Castille.
But we found her dress so hideous, so
like a hag in armor, that we gave it up in horror.
Can you possibly imagine how Annabella, a teenager,
felt seeing her mother waste away and die?
What Annabella did was her correspondence to Ada,
and why I'm dedicating this speech to her.
Was wonderful.
She sent her mother puzzles and riddles.
One of the riddles she sent her
mother was why is a wise man wise?
The answer, he asked lots of whys and
that is why a wise man is wise.
I am actually going to talk about five of
the questions that Ada asked throughout her life.
Not just about the analytical machine, but every aspect of her life.
But I'm gonna relegate my discussion to her mathematics,
her correspondence with Babbage and
why I think she is a pivotal single parent in computing today.
The first question which I didn't like, is what is the question?
I learned a vital lesson when I was a teenager graduate,
undergraduate student at the University of Chicago,
which was based some of it on the model of Oxford with tutors.
But the big thing was it was based on reading original sources.
And in physics, which I had to take.
I just wanted the textbook.
Give me the end.
I don't want to have to read to Ptolemy,
Copernicus, Kepler, all the way up to Einstein.
That was to this day, I have never read
a textbook discussing these heroes of science
that come close to what they actually wrought.
What I learned is each one of them had a mindset.
And as a result of the mindset, they asked questions.
For example, Ptolemy was, I'm the center of the universe,
therefore, everything goes around me, all the way up to Einstein,
who realized that the observer has an effect on what is observed.
Ada was very, she lived in the Victorian era but
her thinking was just like Einstein.
In a letter Dorothy Stein asked the question,
not question was Ada a good mathematician.
That wasn't my question.
My question was how did Ada understand mathematics?
There is a pivotal letter which was in my first article,
which Sir Drummond added in, and it was about
Ada's difficulty in understanding a functional equation.
What she couldn't get was really absorbing a point and
a line and a wave at the same time.
So she wrote to Morgan, these functional
equations are the willow of the wisp to me.
That as soon as I feel I got hold of it, it totally vanishes.
And that metaphor of tangibility and
her explanation is just the way
modern physics use mathematics.
Ada's, how we're first introduced to something
I'd fall in love with him instantly and that sets the tone.
Ada met Babbage in 1833,
in November and December of 1834.
Just, right, actually I'm gonna
talk about a letter that was written December 15, 1834,
which was a rainy night.
It was a night when Babbage was so
upset that they have pulled funding for his difference engine.
He paced back and forth, he took a piece of
paper binding Mrs. Somerville's yarn.
Oh color, this is a good way to explain things.
And then, when he decried having the funding pulled he then said well,
no matter, I have an idea for a new machine,
which he described years later in passages.
How he got the idea of a machine that could
not only foresee but act on that foresight.
When Ada got home, she told her mother about the evening.
And we know this from Lady Byron's journals.
In that journal Lady Byron said, oh, Babbage has another idea.
It's the whim of the moment.
But Ada used that word which was used a lot this morning.
And that was, his idea what's universal.
And so from the beginning before,
she, nine years before she wrote the note.
That question, what is this machine about?
Was in a way, already set in her mind.
So the next question is, what is the source of information?
With Babbage's difference engine in 1833 she didn't want to bother him.
She went to the lectures of Damascus Lardner.
She got the blueprints from Herschel Babbage.
She went to see the machine.
But through the years, from 1834
till the time Babbage went to Turing.
She had conversations with him, and
she really relied directly on him for
her information about the analytical engine.
She started thinking, and this is surprisingly, nobody's quoted this yet.
She knew the issues Babbage was dealing with, and
she wrote Babbage a letter about a game called solitaire.
And that game is not the card game we play but
rather a board game like Chinese checkers where you leave,
how you win is you get rid of all the checkers or
what have you and she wrote him.
What if she said
we take the board and this is what she wrote.
What if we number the pegs.
Wow, that sounds obvious, but it isn't obvious,
and it is a way of tracing every move.
And she said, for instance, we could write out if peg number 19,
the center one, is taken out to begin with then peg 6 may
hop over Peg 12.
The real boards, she said, are not numbered.
And then she went on to say, I hope you are bearing me in mind.
I mean my mathematical interests.
This is the greatest favor anyone can do me.
Perhaps no one can estimate how great.
Who can calculate to what it might lead?
So she already, years before,
was caught really deeply thinking about
Babbage and his analytical engine.
The next step is what is the source of information.
Today the last cut counts.
That's what everybody,
it's rare for people to go to original sources and
make up their own mind about information.
They just take it off the internet or what have you.
And this, then, becomes the new truth.
Ada always, what I did is I had to sit there and
I sat at the Bodleum for three years.
And another thing was, at that time, they didn't let me bring a computer.
So, what I had to do was hand transcribe the information.
And naturally I'm in debit to Mary Clapinson who organized the files.
But I also listen to another Byron friend, William St.
Clair, who one day, I went to visit him, and
he was working on his book, The Godwins and the Shelley's,
and I looked in his bedroom and it was a mess.
There were piles of papers and what have you.
And I said William, how do you figure anything out in this chaos?
He said it's easy.
It's random access.
And after a year of going through each file.
I did random access.
And that's when I came across that little
scrap of a blue paper in which Ada wrote
to her mother if you cannot conceive me
poetry can you conceive me, poetical science?
Well, that, for me, was the organizing theme
of who Ada was about, that she was both her father,
the poet's daughter, as well as her mother's daughter.
The mathematician.
Ada after she wrote this solitaire
letter she wrote about imagination,
that it should be more important.
For scientists and let's say computer
specialists to have imagination then it is for anyone else.
It's primarily the discovering facility.
What happened with her notes is that
we do believe it was Weed Stone who her
encouraged her to translate the article
which you've heard a lot about by.
And when Ada did that and added notes,
her notes to me are far more important than whether or
not she was the first programmer.
Because when she looked at the machine, it was not something out there.
It was something in which a human being had a relationship to.
It wasn't just the designs of the variable cards or what have you.
She saw her vision was fraught,
people say she was manic.
If she was, I hope all of us are manic.
Because in this world, where it is so digitized,
it is critical that we have a broad vision.
We've already heard a lot of her broad vision.
First of all, how was it expressed?
Yes, it was expressed in number and she saw
how giving it a language expanded its possibilities.
She also saw what if,
which is the next one of the questions.
She could then prophesize once she saw the true meaning of the analytical engine.
That it wasn't old wine in new bottles.
But it was new wine and new bottles.
It was totally a different concept from the difference engine.
She, many people were annoyed that over and over and
over again, she discussed the difference between these two machines.
So she projected it, it could compose music.
She also saw that it could
weave algebraic patterns.
But we come to Turing, who a hundred years later read what he wrote.
And Professor Roberts at Stanford just alerted
me to a phrase that Turing wrote about what Ada did,
saying, this is how we know about Babbage's analytical engine.
What Turing is famous for is he took issue
with what Ada wrote, when she wrote,
this engine does not originate anything.
It only knows what we know how to order it to perform.
And it was called the Lovelace objection, and
of course all of us have heard about the Lovelace test.
In Ada's correspondence to Morgan, and
I do want to touch on that because what does that mean?
Having taken a lot of statistics, the most, and I'm so anxious to hear.
The talk tomorrow on the De Morgan correspondence.
But the first thing you have to do when you see the Lovelace, Barne collection,
the Babbage Collection at the British Library is,
you have to ask what does this sample represent?
Ada's correspondence to De Morgan,
which I include some in my book, but didn't include the equations.
And two weeks ago, Stephen Wolfram has gotten
those letters with With the algebraic notation.
But what did they represent?
Ada was not paying De Morgan and she felt so
guilty about it that every letter ended why didn't he come for a visit.
Why don't you, we have some chickens?
Take the chickens.
And if you are studying by mail from such an illustrious and
wonderful professor Estam Markham was,
you can ask him what you know.
No, you're gonna ask him what you don't know.
So the literary remains of the De Morgan correspondence are a skewed sample.
They summarize what Ada didn't know.
Yesterday, Miranda Seymour justifiably said,
that Ada would repeat over and
over again, I don't understand this.
And that was another one of her traits.
Explain it again.
What do you mean?
How was it derived?
How was it got?
Unless I know the assumption it's based on,
I don't know what it means.
As Ada was proceeding along with the notes,
and Duran said they started in February.
The actual notes in the collection are really six to eight weeks long.
And it's kind of amazing that she wrote 50
pages of letters that we know of, she probably wrote more.
And she also wrote these notes in a period where
her mother was badgering her to take care of her supposed half sister's maid.
She was hemorrhaging.
She was probably on laudanum some of the time, and
yet she still managed to do this.
Well, Babbage and Ada had a very good relationship,
definitely not romantic, because they tease one another too much.
But Babbage was furious still
that his funding had been pulled.
So at the very end, he wrote a preface
on how bad the British government had been to him.
And he inserted it in front of the article that Ada wrote.
She blew and
she then wrote Babbage a 14 page letter sort
of somebody said she wrote Faraday 11 pages.
But that letter, August 14th,
I think is one of the most important letters.
It took a long time to describe, and
the late Andrew Nicholson checked it to make sure it was right.
And in it, she says to Babbage, what you're doing,
Babbage, is just really for fame and glory.
That isn't what this is about, this whole thing.
If the way I do things, she says,
is for the benefit of mankind.
And that now, is something I
think all of us need to remember,
is that what Ada is not a symbol.
She is not the mother, Statue of Liberty, a community.
She is, she was, a human being.
And the best review I ever got of my book was a letter
from the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling,
whose Difference Engine came out before my book.
And what he said is, if my book had come out first.
He never would have written the different sunshine because what my book
did, is he showed me Ada was a human being.
And once I saw she was a human being
I could no longer make a stereotype of her.
I think that in structuring
the history of computing and
the beginning, which I believe
was with Charles Babbage and Ada.
There is no way that Ada could have ever printed
anything unless the structure of Babbage's machine.
Was similar to many of the components of modern computing.
In Chinese history there is a philosopher called,
I don't think I'm pronouncing his name correctly.
Liang Chow Chi, and before the Chinese Revolution
in the early 20th century.
Liang Chow Chi went and looked at Confucius,
and rewrote who Confucius was,
that Confucius was a great revolutionary.
And that was sort of to give a basic
rework of what needed to be done in Chinese society.
Prophetically Ada's writings
reveal a deep understanding of how
much computing will change our society.
In 1843, she once again implored Babbage and she did it in many ways.
Stop being so tied up with this machine.
It isn't really just about you.
When we think about the future of computing, we need to
ask ourselves whether we are using these
amazing machines to create a better world.
Just like there's a Turing test, I think there should be a Lovelace
test that underscores that question.
How are these machines being used?
Are they being used to benefit mankind.
Origin stories are important because, and
we all know it, with an origin story we structure
the future in the context of our understanding of the past.
And celebrating the 200th birthday of Ada Byron,
we honor a computing pioneer, whose vision still touches us today.
By insisting as she did.
That the power of computing be harnessed for most effective use of mankind.
We ensure not only that the memory of Ada Lovelace lives on,
but that our species does as well.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[INAUDIBLE]
>> We have, I think,
about five minutes for questions to Betty.
Sit down and relax.
That very interesting talk through there of Ada, not so much,
well, from computing to humanity and the future of humanity.
Any questions, or any observations?
Yes, please?
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> What?
>> Machines for a better world, is that an actual quote?
>> Machines for a better world, is that an actual quote?
>> Are you actually quoting what Ada said?
Yes, for the benefit of mankind.
It's in the letter- >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Oh, it's a 12, 14 page letter.
In the letter, she sermonizes Babbage,
which is amazing, this young woman sermonizing this.
What you do is for fame and glory.
What I do and why I'm doing all of this
is I want to see what if this thing is for
the benefit of mankind.
It's not about you or me or writing a book or selling a book or what.
Oh, I forgot the last line.
And that is thank you, Richard, where is it.
In my e-book, I start with an activity.
Which I did at the University of California,
when I taught history of science.
The ending of the book, the activity is to build a kaleidoscope.
When I started in 84 and came here I had a kaleidoscope in my purse.
I did not know Ada's connection to Fiscot's
so David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope, and
towards the end of my research I was looking for
evidence of gambling, so I looked in the bank books.
Guess what? I didn't find any evidence of gambling,
but I found Ada's last purchase in life was a kaleidoscope,
and to me, it's such a metaphor,
because every turn of the wheel is a different picture.
And Ada was somebody called it a relational,
her style of thinking was poetical science, was relations.
And what a kaleidoscope is, it's distinctly human,
every turn gives you a new look.
>> Anybody else?
Can I just perhaps pick up the 14 page letter for a second?
Because the 14 page letter is one of the pieces of evidence that those who
call her manic use, isn't it?
>> Right, and personally, Sir Drummond, I think we should all be manic.
Because if manic means having a broader vision of what is going on,
rather than a narrow vision of a computer.
I was going to quote the young woman who won the award,
who wrote a beautiful, her last line was beautiful.
As the same time, she, I read that,
my son send me an email about the Lovelace Test,
and he wrote, computers Should work with us.
As Walter Isaacson pointed out, we're in synergy.
But not define us.
>> Any other thoughts?
Otherwise we'll move on.
>> I would like to say something about Richard [LAUGH] Holmes,
and that I think >> It's one, after Richard speaks,
we're all going to celebrate the human beings' 200th birthday.
And I'm looking forward to somebody as knowledgeable about
imagination to show the process of Ada's thinking, thank you.
>> Thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]
