Biography of lady ada byron
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Certainly she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. The Notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems and Ada is often referred to as 'the first programmer'.
But Ada's complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. Ada continued her interest in mathematics and science and met and corresponded with other scientists and mathematicians. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine.
Her contributions to science were resurrected only recently, but many new biographies* attest to the fascination of Babbage's "Enchantress of Numbers."
Ada Lovelace was one of the women profiled in our Women in Computing Festival 2017 of entitled Where Did All the Women Go?. Click here for the Women in Computing timeline created for that event.
Historical Timeline for Ada Lovelace :
She has been referred to as 'prophet of the computer age'. She took months to recover from the birth of her second child, and she began having what she called heart or rheumatic attacks in the 1840s. Byron soon left the country, and Ada never saw her father again.
Despite growing up in a wealthy family in England, Ada's childhood was not easy.
Babbage asked Ada to translate an Italian mathematician's memoir analyzing his Analytical Engine (a machine that would perform simple mathematical calculations andbe programmed with punchcards), but Ada went beyond completing a simple translation. The idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules and that number could represent entities other than quantity mark the fundamental transition from calculation to computation.
She was often ill and became bedridden for an entire year after a bout with the measles. Her mother, Lady Byron, had mathematical training (Byron called her his 'Princess of Parallelograms') and insisted that Ada, who was tutored privately, study mathematics too - an unusual education for a woman. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship and Anne decamped with baby Ada to her parent's home a month after the birth.
She wrote her own set of notes about the machine and even included a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers; this is now considered to be the first computer program.
But Ada's true potential in science and mathematics would never be known. the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent'.
In 1843 she published a translation from the French of an article on the Analytical Engine by an Italian engineer, Luigi Menabrea, to which Ada added extensive notes of her own.
The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.Ada was the first to explicitly articulate this notion and in this she appears to have seen further than Babbage. Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy.
Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies.Ada was brought up not only to be a proper young lady of her class but also encouraged to follow her interests in science and mathematics.
In 1835 she married William King, Baron King (and later Earl of Lovelace), with whom she would have three children. the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.
Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37, and was buried beside the father she never knew.