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 a poet Lord
Byron she was a mathematician in the
Victorian age the very first computer
programmer
her father was known as a kind of loose
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 and 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 of itself
she roped all of these mathematicians
and scientists of her day into
corresponding with her and giving her
lessons but ultimately 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 corresponding 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 is
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
LF menabrea who and
becoming the Prime Minister of Italy he
wrote a technical paper about the
analytical engine
I 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
more voluminous than the original paper
she made a massive jump that wasn't
really recognized until the 1950s at the
dawn of the pursuit 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
you