Many consider Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) to be the first computer programmer. Imagine that! She was the first, even without “masculine energy.” Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the famous poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, a mathematician in her own right. Lady Byron wished her daughter to avoid the bipolar disorder of her father. She made sure Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music. By the age of thirteen, mathematics took wing when she produced the design for a flying machine.
Lovelace first met Charles Babbage in 1833, a math professor at Cambridge who invented the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine using the method of finite differences. Ada felt the Analytical Engine could do more than numerical calculations, suggesting it might manipulate symbols and create complex music.
Lovelace wrote an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine while translating an article by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea on the Analytical Engine. Her program calculated Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of rational numbers used for number theory, a branch of pure mathematics devoted primarily to studying the integers and arithmetic functions and performing mathematical analysis. Her program detailed a step-by-step process for the machine to follow, including loops and conditional branching.
“The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.”
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