ADA BYRON LOVELACE---THE FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMER


     Born in London in 1815, Augusta Ada Byron was the only legitimate 
child of Lord Byron, a British poet, and his wife, Annabella Milbanke. 
Due to her mother’s separation from her father when she was five weeks 
old, Ada was brought up exclusively by her mother, who thought to
forestall her daughter becoming like her dissolute and scandal-plagued
father by insisting that Ada study mathematics to discipline her mind.
To this end, Lady Byron employed both her old tutor, William Frend, who
taught Ada astronomy, algebra, and geometry, and also Augustus
DeMorgan,a famous English logician, who admired Ada’s mathematical
abilities, but was concerned that her intellectual pursuits would
overtax her female body (Moore 99).
     Fortunately for Ada, when she was fifteen she met Mary Fairfax
Somerville, a Scottish mathematician who wrote “The Mechanism of the
Heavens”, a book on mathematical astronomy, and the two became friends
as well as mentor and student. Mrs. Somerville not only introduced AdA
to Charles Babbage (who was impressed with Ada’s interest in and 
understanding of his designs for an “analytical engine”), but to her
future husband, Lord William King, Earl of Lovelace, with whom she had
three children (Weber 1).
     Through her friendship with Babbage, Ada was asked by him to 
translate a paper written in French by an Italian mathematician and 
military engineer, Luigi Menabrea, who had endeavored to transcribe 
a lecture on the analytical engine that Babbage had given at the 
University of Turin in Italy in 1840. Ada was just twenty-eight and had
three small children; nevertheless, she translated the paper and added
her own notes to clarify and expand the original article. Her notes 
outlined fundamental concepts of computer programming and even went 
beyond what Babbage himself had envisioned. She introduced the concept
of “backing” (now called “looping”), which would make an operation card
move back into a position so it could work on the next data card, in 
order to use any card or cards repeatedly to solve a specific problem.
She also predicted the general purpose computer, anticipated the idea
of memory locations and addresses, and wrote out a program which the
analytical engine could use to generate a table of the Bernoulli 
numbers (Falbo 2,3).
     Although Babbage gave her complete credit for her ideas, since she
had signed the paper only with her initials, it was nearly thirty years
before the general public knew who had written it. Ada collaborated
with Babbage on a scheme (which didn’t work) to beat the odds at horse
races and it ended up with both of them being disgraced with massive 
gambling debts. Her physical health started to decline as well, and she
suffered from delusions brought on by the heavy doses of drugs and 
alcohol prescribed by her doctors. She died from cancer in 1852 at the
age of thirty-six, and is buried next to her father in Nottinghamshire.
Her contributions to the field of computer science are amazing, 
especially given the attitudes towards educating women in her lifetime;
however, since everything she wrote about was gradually rediscovered
during the 1940’s and 1950’s without prior knowledge of her work, her
work is mostly of historical interest. Even so, because she is credited
with writing the first “computer program”, the United States Department
of Defense named a software language “Ada” in her honor in 1979
(Toole 1).



WORKS CITED

1. Falbo, Clement. “Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace.”
        19 August 2003     
        http://www.sonoma.edu/Math/faculty/falbo/AdaByron.html.
2. Moore, Doris Langley. Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron’s Legitimate
        Daughter. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
3. Toole, Betty Alexandra. “Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace.” Biographies of 
        Women Mathematicians Web Site. 19 August 2003 
        http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.htm.
4. Weber, J.M. “Ada Byron Lovelace---The First Computer Programmer”. 
        Aims Education Foundation. 19 August 2003 
        http://www.aimsedu.org/Math_History/Samples/ADA/Ada.html. Also,
        http://www.aimsedu.org/Math_History/Samples/ADA/Ada2.html.