Ada Lovelace Facts
Ada Lovelace Facts
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| Interesting Ada Lovelace Facts: |
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| Ada Byron was born to Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, and his wife, Anne Isabelle Milbanke. |
| Due to Lord Byron's constant philandering and multiple affairs, several of which produced illegitimate children, the marriage ended unofficially within a month of Ada's birth; she never met her father, who died in Greece when Ada was eight years old. |
| In order to keep her daughter from becoming like Lord Byron, Anne made sure to immerse her in the sciences and mathematics, despite the fact that these were not considered ideal pursuits for girls of Ada's social class. |
| Ada excelled in math and had a lifelong interest in numbers and number theory. |
| Later in her life, she actually became involved in a gambling scheme that cost her thousands of pounds when it failed; had it worked according to plan, it would have provided calculations to rig large scale betting. |
| She became an important factor in the work of Charles Babbage, inventor of the famed Difference Engine, the early precursor to the calculator that was based on a finite number of possible calculations. |
| She helped write the translation and then wrote the supplemental information to accompany an Italian mathematician's in-depth analysis of Babbage's work on his next project, the Analytical Engine. |
| This machine of Babbage's is now recognized as the earliest model for the computer, and Ada's own writings became the first algorithm in that they serve to make the machine function based on the written "program." |
| Her work included an algorithm that would make the machine compute Bernoulli numbers. |
| This writing has marked Lovelace as the first computer programmer in history. |
| Unfortunately, Babbage did not finish designing and building the machine, so her program was never tested. |
| In her writings on the two machines, Lovelace emphasized the major differences between Babbage's devices, but more importantly, she theorized that there were practical uses and implications for the Analytic Engine that went way past simply doing mathematical computations. |
| One particular area of lifelong interest to Lovelace was music, and she wrote extensively to her mother of the work she was doing in composing music based on numbers, a potential application she envisioned for the Analytic Engine. |
| Whether she intended to or not, Lovelace laid the groundwork for the development of the computer as we know it today. |
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