Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, countess of Lovelace

Born: 10 Dec 1815 in Piccadilly, Middlesex (now in London), England
Died: 29 Nov 1852 in Marylebone, London, England

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Lady Ada Lovelace's father was Lord Byron, the famous poet. Her parents separated soon after her birth and she never knew either of them. She was educated by private tutors, advanced study in mathematics being provided by De Morgan.

In 1833 Augusta became interested in Babbage's analytic engine. Ten years later she produced an annotated translation of Menabrea's Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage (1842). In the annotations she describes how the Analytical Engine could be programmed to compute Bernoulli (Jacob Bernoulli) numbers. She described the Analytical Engine saying

the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Other Web sites:

Clark University, USA
Agnes Scott College, USA
Yale, USA

References:

  1. Biography in Encyclopaedia Britannica
  2. D L Moore, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter (1977).
  3. D Stein, Ada : A Life and a Legacy (Cambridge Mass., 1985).
  4. B A Toole, Ada, the enchantress of numbers : a selection from the letters of Lord Byron's daughter and her description of the first computer (Mill Valley, Calif., 1992).
  5. L S Grinstein and P J Campbell (eds.), Women of Mathematics (Westport, Conn., 1987), 135-139.
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JOC/EFR May 1996