Ada, Countess of Lovelace (181552), daughter of romantic poet Lord Byron and the highly educated Anne Isabella, is sometimes called the worlds first computer programmer, and she has become an icon for women in technology today. But how did a young woman in the nineteenth century, without access to formal schooling or university education, acquire the knowledge and expertise to become a pioneer of computer science? Although it was an unusual pursuit for women at the time, Ada Lovelace studied science and mathematics from a young age. This book uses previously unpublished archival material to explore her precocious childhoodfrom her curiosity about the science of rainbows to her design for a steam-powered flying horseas well as her ambitious young adulthood. Active in Victorian Londons social and scientific elite alongside Mary Somerville, Michael Faraday, and Charles Dickens, Ada Lovelace became fascinated by the computing machines of Charles Babbage, whose ambitious, unbuilt invention known as the Analytical Engine inspired Lovelace to devise a table of mathematical formulae which many now refer to as the first program. Ada Lovelace died at just thirty-six, but her work strikes a chord to this day, offering clear explanations of the principles of computing, and exploring ideas about computer music and artificial intelligence that have been realized in modern digital computers. Featuring detailed illustrations of the first program alongside mathematical models, correspondence, and contemporary images, this book shows how Ada Lovelace, with astonishing prescience, first investigated the key mathematical questions behind the principles of modern computing.
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Encyclopedia of Computer ScienceAugusta Ada Byron was born in London on 10 December 1815. She was the daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron, whose separation a little over a month after her birth was followed by Lord Byron's leaving England, never to return. She married ...
Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, An Analyst and Metaphysician
There may be controversy about when the computer revolution began, but to me a revolution begins with an idea, and that idea was Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine conceived in 1834. The computer revolution also began with a woman, Augusta Ada Byron, ...
The multifaceted impact of Ada Lovelace in the digital age
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), the Victorian-era mathematician daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, is famous for her work with Charles Babbage on the Analytic Engine and is widely celebrated as the first computer programmer. Her work has been ...