Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace's work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine, is the work most closely associated with her name and the basis on which she is often considered the first computer programmer.
Lovelace was born in London on 10 December 1815, a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. She worked across several disciplines, identifying as a mathematician, writer, translator, poet, engineer, inventor, and programmer. It was through her work on the analytical engine — Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer — that she produced the contributions for which she became known.
Her engagement with the analytical engine brought together her capacities as a mathematician, computer scientist, and writer. She worked in English, and her work on the engine is what has led many to regard her as the first computer programmer. That recognition is grounded in her documented involvement with Babbage's project rather than in any general claim about her career.
Lovelace died on 27 November 1852 in Marylebone, at the age of thirty-six. She is often considered the first computer programmer, a distinction tied directly to her work on Charles Babbage's analytical engine — the concrete fact on which her reputation as a mathematician and programmer rests.
Quotes by Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace's insights on:
I was rather foolish in saying that I did not like arithmetic and to learn figures when I did - I was not thinking quite what I was about. The sums can be done better, if I tried, than they are.
We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.
In the case of the Analytical Engine, we have undoubtedly to lay out a certain capital of analytical labour in one particular line, but this is in order that the engine may bring us in a much larger return in another line.
I wish to add my mite towards expounding & interpreting the Almighty, & his laws & works, for the most effective use of mankind; and certainly, I should feel it no small glory if I were enabled to be one of his most noted prophets (using this word in my own peculiar sense) in this world.
The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.
The ideas which led to the Analytical Engine occurred in a manner wholly independent of any that were connected with the Difference Engine. These ideas are indeed, in their own intrinsic nature, independent of the latter engine and might equally have occurred had it never existed nor even been thought of at all.
Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions of abstract and speculative science rather than upon those involving everyday and ordinary human interests.
The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.
I am much pleased to find how very well I stand work & how my powers of attention & continued effort increase.
I have my hopes, & very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into mathematical equations: in short, a law or laws for the mutual actions of the molecules of the brain (equivalent to the law of gravitation for the planetary & sideral world).