Lovely Ada

Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, circa 1840, possibly by Alfred Edward Chalon

ADA DAY: We have fallen into a productive and comfortable routine of doing our algebra, science and grammar in the mornings, first thing. 

Tuesday, while perusing science topics on BrainPOP, we learned that the second Tuesday of every October 9 is Ada Lovelace day. The day was reportedly founded in 2009 by technologist Suw Charman-Anderson, to celebrate the achievements of women in STEM careers. Lovelace is considered by many to be the world's first computer programmer. 

Ada is no stranger to us. A couple years back, we attended a really fun birthday bash for Ada at the Living Computer Museum.

However, yesterday, we learned more about her, both from the BrainPOP video, Wikipedia, and a couple of other articles online. 

We knew that famed poet Lord Byron was Ada's father. We didn't know that he ditched Ada and her mother, when Ada was just a month old. (One report was that he was disappointed that his wife gave birth to a girl instead of the 'glorious boy' he was expecting. Ada never saw her father again. He died when she was eight years old.

Ada was a mother to three children (one son was named Byron, so I guess she didn't hold a grudge).

Ada was a sickly child, and contracted measles at one point, which left her bedridden for a year. Ada was home schooled, by a contingent of friends of the family, including Mary Somerville, who became a mentor. In 1833, Somerville introduced Lovelace to Charles Babbage, a British mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer. It was Babbage who originated the concept of a digital programmable computer.  We were fortunate to see his Difference Engine No. 1 when visiting the Science Museum in London a few years back.

photo: Science Museum collection, shared under Creative Commons license

Lovelace studied Babbage's The Analytical Engine at length. She provided extensive notes to Babbage about its potential. She realized that the machine "might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine...Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." ^{(Citation: Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by} 

^{Charles Babbage Esq". Scientific Memoirs. Richard Taylor: 694.}

So clearly, what Ada Lovelace saw was that numbers could represent entities other than quantity. It was a revolutionary notion.

Ada Lovelace (Augusta Ada Byron), in either 1843 or 1850. This daguerreotype by Antoine Claudet, and was likely taken in his studio in London. It's one of only two photos of Ada.

Unfortunately, Ada died in 1852, at young age of 36. One source said she had been ill for years, and died of uterine cancer.