Ada Lovelace the Prophet of the Computer Age

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Ada Lovelace The Prophet of the Computer Age Marina Jones March 29, 2013 Ada as a child Not many people know that Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), otherwise known as The Enchantress of Numbers, was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Adas parents separated when she was only one month old and a few months later, Lord Byron left England forever (he died of a fever while fighting for Greek independence, in 1823). Adas mother, Lady Byron, made sure that her daughter received an excellent education and hired private tutors in mathematics and sciences, with little emphasis on the arts and poetry, so that Ada wouldnt resemble her crazy father. At age 13, Ada was designing boats and steam driven flying machines. At 17 she met Charles Babbage, an English mathematician, inventor, and an engineer. They developed a lifelong friendship. When Ada was just 19, she married William King, who later inherited a noble title and became the Earl of Lovelace. They had three children. Ada Lovelaces importance as a mathematician comes from her work on the Notes she wrote to explain Charles Babbages Analytical Engine. Babbage designed two types of engine the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. In Victorian England bankers, architects, navigators, engineers, and mathematicians used the printed mathematical tables that were calculated by human clerks, known as calcula- tors, which were often full of errors. Charles Babbages Difference Engine was designed to mechanize these tables, and was used to compute values of quadratic functions. 1 2 3 Charles Babbage's Difference Engine Source But it was the idea of Babbages Analytical Engine (which was never built) that intrigued Ada Lovelace. She translated an article describing the Analytical Engine, form French, and at Babbages request, wrote her own notes and annotations to further expand on the article. Her Notes, which she published in 1843 (using only her initials rather than her full name, because she was a woman), turned out to be three times as long as the original paper. Babbages Analytical Engine could be programmed using punched cards, and employed some of the features subsequently used in modern computers, such as sequential control, branching and looping. Ada in 1840 Ada Lovelace developed an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers. She clearly understood the devices potential and predicted that the engine might act upon things other than numbers, such as composing elaborate scientific pieces of music. Ada was the first to articulate the notion of machines manipulating symbols in accordance with rules, producing graphics, and being used for both practical and scientific uses. 4 Ada, the brilliant daughter of Lord Byron, died at age 36 (the same age as her father), and at her request, was buried next to him. She called herself an Analyst and Metaphysician but was given a title of the first programmer more than a hundred years after her death. In her honor, in 1979 a software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, was named Ada. 5.

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Lovelace Mausoleum
Lovelace Mausoleum The mausoleum stands north east of the church, enclosed on two sides by walls which separate the churchyard from land formerly owned by the Earl. The building is hexagonal, with a projecting porch which makes it keyhole- shaped on plan. It is covered by a tiled conical roof capped with a small lead lantern. All the cut-brick and flint patterning would seem quite bizarre if the churchyard walls and other surrounding buildings were not all treated in a similar way. Architect(s) Probably the Earl himself. Listing Grade II (England and Wales) Year Created 1873 History The mausoleum was built by William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace (1805-1893). His first wife was Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada (d.1852), a mathematician and pioneer of computing, but she died some years before the mausoleum was built and is buried elsewhere. The Earl was a keen amateur architect. Between 1855 and 1860 he transformed the family house by the addition of an extraordinary collection of flint and brick towers, and then went on to construct castellated gateways, lodges, cottages and miles of elaborately patterned wall in the same polychrome style throughout the village. The date of the mausoleum is not known but was clearly part of the same building campaign. The Earl was laid to rest in the mausoleum in 1893, followed by his second wife, Jane, in 1908. Condition Good. The mausoleum was restored in 2008. Generally open to the public on Heritage Open Days. Sources BoE: Surrey (1971) 204; Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; S Tudsbery-Turner, ‘William, Earl of Lovelace 1805-1893’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 70 (reprinted 2001).
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