Ada Lovelace was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation, and to have published the first algorithm intended to be carried out by such a machine.
71 Facts About Ada Lovelace
2.
Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada Lovelace was born and left England forever.
3.
Ada Lovelace's mother remained bitter and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity.
4.
King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.
5.
Ada Lovelace described her approach as "poetical science" and herself as an "Analyst ".
6.
Ada Lovelace was in particular interested in Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine.
7.
Ada Lovelace first met him in June 1833, through their mutual friend, and her private tutor, Mary Somerville.
8.
Between 1842 and 1843, Ada Lovelace translated an article by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea about the Analytical Engine, supplementing it with an elaborate set of notes, simply called "Notes".
9.
Ada Lovelace developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.
10.
Ada Lovelace died in 1824 when she was eight years old.
11.
Ada Lovelace's mother was the only significant parental figure in her life.
12.
Ada Lovelace was not shown the family portrait of her father until her 20th birthday.
13.
Ada Lovelace did not have a close relationship with her mother.
14.
Ada Lovelace was often left in the care of her maternal grandmother Judith, Hon.
15.
Ada Lovelace dubbed these observers the "Furies" and later complained they exaggerated and invented stories about her.
16.
Ada Lovelace Byron went about the project methodically, thoughtfully, with imagination and passion.
17.
Ada Lovelace considered various materials for the wings: paper, oilsilk, wires, and feathers.
18.
Ada Lovelace examined the anatomy of birds to determine the right proportion between the wings and the body.
19.
Ada Lovelace decided to write a book, Flyology, illustrating, with plates, some of her findings.
20.
Ada Lovelace decided what equipment she would need; for example, a compass, to "cut across the country by the most direct road", so that she could surmount mountains, rivers, and valleys.
21.
Ada Lovelace Byron had an affair with a tutor in early 1833.
22.
Ada Lovelace tried to elope with him after she was caught, but the tutor's relatives recognised her and contacted her mother.
23.
Ada Lovelace never met her younger half-sister, Allegra, the daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont.
24.
Ada Lovelace became close friends with her tutor Mary Somerville, who introduced her to Charles Babbage in 1833.
25.
Ada Lovelace had a strong respect and affection for Somerville, and they corresponded for many years.
26.
Ada Lovelace was presented at Court at the age of seventeen "and became a popular belle of the season" in part because of her "brilliant mind".
27.
Ada Lovelace danced often and was able to charm many people, and was described by most people as being dainty, although John Hobhouse, Byron's friend, described her as "a large, coarse-skinned young woman but with something of my friend's features, particularly the mouth".
28.
Ada was a descendant of the extinct Barons Lovelace and in 1838, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham, meaning Ada became the Countess of Lovelace.
29.
Ada Lovelace quickly fell for her and encouraged her to express any frustrated affections, claiming that his marriage meant he would never act in an "unbecoming" manner.
30.
When it became clear that Carpenter was trying to start an affair, Ada Lovelace cut it off.
31.
Ada Lovelace had a shadowy relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards.
32.
Ada Lovelace bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her.
33.
Ada Lovelace was privately educated in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted 19th-century researcher and scientific author.
34.
Ada Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions through integrating poetry and science.
35.
Ada Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts.
36.
Ada Lovelace valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, viewing both as tools for exploring "the unseen worlds around us".
37.
Ada Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852, from uterine cancer.
38.
The illness lasted several months, in which time Annabella took command over whom Ada Lovelace saw, and excluded all of her friends and confidants.
39.
Under her mother's influence, Ada Lovelace had a religious transformation and was coaxed into repenting of her previous conduct and making Annabella her executor.
40.
Ada Lovelace was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
41.
Ada Lovelace first met Charles Babbage in June 1833, through their mutual friend Mary Somerville.
42.
Ada Lovelace became fascinated with the machine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit Babbage as often as she could.
43.
Ada Lovelace's work was well received at the time; the scientist Michael Faraday described himself as a supporter of her writing.
44.
When Taylor's Scientific Memoirs ruled that the statement should be signed, Babbage wrote to Ada Lovelace asking her to withdraw the paper.
45.
On 12 August 1851, when she was dying of cancer, Ada Lovelace wrote to him asking him to be her executor, though this letter did not give him the necessary legal authority.
46.
Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English.
47.
Ada Lovelace then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation.
48.
Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage.
49.
Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers.
50.
Ada Lovelace realised the potential of the device extended far beyond mere number crunching.
51.
Ada Lovelace saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see.
52.
Ada Lovelace recognized the difference between the details of the computing mechanism, as covered in a 1834 article on the Difference Engine, and the logical structure of the Analytical Engine, on which the article she was reviewing dwelt.
53.
Ada Lovelace noted that different specialists might be required in each area.
54.
Not only is there no evidence that Ada Lovelace ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so.
55.
Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis that Ada Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in any way".
56.
Ada Lovelace explained that Ada was only a "promising beginner" instead of genius in mathematics, that she began studying basic concepts of mathematics five years after Babbage conceived the analytical engine so she could not have made important contributions to it, and that she only published the first computer program instead of actually writing it.
57.
Ada Lovelace is portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play Childe Byron.
58.
Ada Lovelace is employed as an "analyst" to provide the workings of a life-sized humanoid automaton.
59.
Ada Lovelace's employment is described as keeping her occupied until she returns to her studies in advanced mathematics.
60.
Ada Lovelace is a primary character in the 2019 Big Finish Doctor Who audio play The Enchantress of Numbers, starring Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor and Jane Slavin as his current companion, WPC Ann Kelso.
61.
In 2019, Ada Lovelace is a featured character in the play STEM FEMMES by Philadelphia theater company Applied Mechanics.
62.
Ada Lovelace College is a further-education college in Tottenham Hale, London, focused on digital skills.
63.
Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, which began in 2009.
64.
The Ada Lovelace Initiative was a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.
65.
The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Ada Lovelace lived, is named after her.
66.
Ada Lovelace House is a council-owned building in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, near where Lovelace spent her infancy.
67.
On 17 September 2013, the BBC Radio 4 biography programme Great Lives devoted an episode to Ada Lovelace; she was sponsored by TV presenter Konnie Huq.
68.
In March 2022, a statue of Ada Lovelace was installed at the site of the former Ergon House in the City of Westminster, London, honoring its scientific history.
69.
The bicentenary of Ada Lovelace's birth was celebrated with a number of events, including:.
70.
Six copies of the 1843 first edition of Sketch of the Analytical Engine with Ada Lovelace's "Notes" have been located.
71.
In December 2016, a letter written by Ada Lovelace was forfeited by Martin Shkreli to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance for unpaid taxes owed by Shkreli.