Ada Lovelace: biography of this mathematician and pioneer of programming.

A look at the life of Ada Lovelace, a pioneer of programming in a world without computers.

Ada Lovelace was a woman ahead of her time.. A woman of science and technology, since 2009, every second Tuesday of October, her international day is celebrated, a date intended to commemorate the achievements of women in fields such as technology, science, engineering and mathematics.

Born Augusta Ada Byron, she was the daughter of the famous and controversial Lord Byron and Anna Isabella Noel Byron, an English aristocrat who held a deep grudge against the English poet.

Ada Lovelace's life has ups and downs marked by a very weak health but that did not prevent her from being ahead of her time, so much so that she came to imagine what today is a computer. Let's learn about her life below. Let's see a summary of her career in this biography of Ada Lovelace..

Brief biography of Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was born Augusta Ada Byron on December 10, 1815.. No sooner had Ada arrived in the world than her parents, after several marital disagreements, scandals and infidelities, separated. Her mother, Anna Isabella Noel Byron, left the family home while her father, the famous poet George Gordon Lord Byron, was asleep, taking with her little Ada, who was only one month old.

Later, her mother filed for divorce from Byron after learning that her husband's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, (for whom little Ada was named) was also his mistress. Scandals followed one after another in Lord Byron's life and, three months after leaving him, Anna Isabella threatened her husband with divorce or she would make famous his incestuous extra-marital affairs and his homosexuality. In the end, Byron would leave England and his daughter would never see him again in her lifetime.

Little Ada was a sickly child. At the age of seven she contracted an illness that kept her bedridden for several months. At the age of fourteen her legs were paralyzed for a time because of a severe measles, which caused the girl, to take advantage of the dead hours, to spend them reading and studying without pause.

Anna Isabella made sure that her daughter received a careful and strict education that included music, French and mathematics.. Still bitter towards her ex-husband, Anna Isabella wanted her daughter to have the most scientific training possible, away from her father's life as a writer, and for this purpose she hired the mathematician and astronomer Mary Somerville. Her mother's aversion to the artistic made Ada see her artistic talents as if they were a disease.

To further stimulate Ada's interest in science and technology, mother and daughter traveled throughout the regions of industrialized England.. Thus, Ada came into contact with the most innovative inventions of the time, steam-powered smoking machines. Among those that impressed her most was the Jacquard loom, a mechanical loom invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard, which at the time used punched cards to operate.

Augusta Ada was a woman, and that in the Victorian England in which she lived was nothing but a hindrance. However, thanks to his high social status, he was able to rub shoulders with prestigious figures of his time, renowned scientists and educated men such as David Brewster, Andrew Crosse, Charles WheatstoneHe was also a member of the scientific community, renowned scientists and educated men such as David Brewster, Andrew Crosse, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the novelist Charles Dickens.

Charles Babbage and programming

When Augusta Ada King turned 18, as with the rest of the young aristocratic girls of her time, began attending high society parties in order to find a suitor to marry. to marry. At one of them, organized by her tutor Mary Somerville, she met the mathematician Charles Babbage, famous for having designed a calculator capable of calculating tables of numerical functions by the method of differences. Babbage is also famous for having designed, but never built, an analytical machine to run tabulation programs.

It is for these inventions that Babbage is considered one of the pioneers in conceiving the idea of what we might today consider a computer.. The mathematician's designs excited the young Ada, so much so that the girl even suggested that one day not too far away machines would make it possible to change people's lives by making the most complicated calculations by receiving commands.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace

In 1835, Augusta Ada met William King-Noel, Lord Lovelace, a member of one of the most influential families in Victorian England. When the possibility of marrying the young woman to such a renowned suitor presented itself, Ada's mother quickly approved of the relationship. The wedding took place on July 8, 1835 and Ada became Lady King. It would be from that moment on that the young woman would always sign her name as Ada Lovelace. The couple would have three children: Byron, Anne and Ralph.

Around that time, the health of the Countess of Lovelace began to deteriorate. Ada Lovelace began to suffer from very painful digestive and respiratory problems and the doctors of the time and the doctors of her time saw fit to treat them with opiates. The consumption of these substances took a toll on her health, causing delirium and mood swings, as well as planting the seeds of a change in her personality.

The opiate-medicated Ada Lovelace had delusions of grandeur, describing herself as a mathematical genius with almost supernatural powers. She tried, unsuccessfully, to get Babbage to become her teacher, although the two would end up working closely together.

A very successful translation

In 1842 Ada would do what was to be her only professional work for the prestigious Scientific Memoirs magazine.. The magazine commissioned her to translate an article written in French by the Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea describing Charles Babbage's analytical machine.

Ada Lovelace published the translated article, as well as accompanying it with copious notes of her own in which she set out her own theories about how the machine worked. These notes were signed only with her initials AAL to hide her status as a woman and prevent this from damaging their dissemination. The notes would not be published under her real name until 1953.

In the end, these extensive annotations would end up becoming very famous, more so than the translation of the article itself. Ada's imagination and ability to see beyond the immediate reality made her capable of developing highly advanced concepts for the time, being considered a true visionary.

The most remarkable of these concepts is the one that refers to the functioning of what we nowadays call computer algorithms. Ada took as an example Bernoulli's numbers, an infinite series of numbers which play a very important role in describing the operations that Babbage's analytical machine would have to perform in order to calculate them.

Ada Lovelace must also have been credited with outlining other interesting current computing concepts. She predicted the existence of what we now call a "loop", a group of instructions that are executed several times, or a "subroutine", part of a program that can be called upon at any time.

It cannot be stated categorically that the young Ada was the first to develop a computer program. However, it can be said that Ada Lovelace had the idea of a machine that could be programmed and reprogrammed to perform a variety of functions and not simply be limited to a computer. came up with the idea of a machine that could be programmed and reprogrammed to perform a variety of functions and not simply be limited to computation.. Ada considered that punched cards similar to those used by the Jacquard loom could be used for this purpose, something that could be considered the first computer idea in history.

End of his life

Although Babbage tried to convince the British government to finance the construction of his machine, he was unsuccessful. If he had succeeded, undoubtedly the industrial England of that time would have taken an abysmal technological leap forward almost a century. Sadly, the mathematician died in poverty after squandering his fortune and failing to materialize his great ideas.

After Babbage's professional rejection, Ada Lovelace never again worked on anything related to mathematics.. Tormented by her illness and opiate addiction, she threw herself into the arms of gambling and, also, of numerous lovers, which cost her much of her fortune and her marriage. Her mother, concerned to see in her daughter the romantic and crazy traits of Lord Byron, convinced her to convert to Christianity and amend her life.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, died on November 27, 1852. She died because of the bloodletting that her doctors applied to her in the hope of trying to cure the uterine Cancer she was suffering from. She was only 36 years old, the same age at which her father, Lord Byron, left the world. Although her mother had done everything possible so that father and daughter would never see each other again in life, she could not prevent them from seeing each other in death, as the young woman's last wish was to be buried next to the father she never knew.

Ada Lovelace's algorithm for calculating the Bernoulli numbers was not implemented or tested due to the fact that Ada Lovelace's analytical machine because Babbage's analytical machine was never built. It would be almost a hundred years before Howard Aiken, an American engineer and pioneer in the field of computing, designed the first electromagnetic computer, closely related to Babbage's work.

Unlike the English mathematician, Aiken obtained financing, in his case from IBM, building it in 1944 and naming the machine Mark I. Who knows if, had they received the support they needed, Babbage and Ada Lovelace would have created a machine as revolutionary as Aiken's?