Ada Lovelace. The first program in the world and a look into the future

Ada lovelace

December 10, 1815 Ada Lovelace, most of us known as the world's first programmer, was born. It so happens that this title belongs to the fair sex. Today marks two hundred and one years since the birth of this man. And in this post I would like to tell a little about the most interesting moments from her life, not getting rid of fragmentary phrases, but also not too delving into details. The material can be found anywhere with Internet at hand. However, few people climb up to look for him just for the sake of interest. So anyone interested, welcome under cat.

Studying at school, sitting in literature classes, I knew perfectly well who George Byron was.


We read and, at will, memorized his poems. After a while, choosing a profession for myself, I found out who the mysterious Ada Lovelace was - the first girl programmer, the daughter of that same Lord George Byron. Then for me it turned out to be an amazing discovery. I remembered for all my life who Ada was and, somehow completely unnoticed by myself, I forgot about Byron himself.
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Augustus Ada King (later Countess Lovelace, but more on that later) was the daughter of the English poet Lord George Gordon Byron and his wife Anna Isabella Byron. However, Byron left a month after the birth of his daughter, and they never saw each other again. Byron himself died when Ada was eight years old. He himself once again recalled his daughter in his poems.

It is evident that Ada herself grew up in a rather talented family. Her mother, Anna Isabel, before the birth of her daughter was very interested in mathematics, for which she once received a funny nickname from her husband - “the queen of parallelograms”. It was a really unusual family. Anna, after her husband left, managed to raise her daughter alone, and this is what came of it.

At twelve years old, Ada collected her aircraft! Prior to this, a twelve-year-old girl had locked herself for some time from her mother in a room and was writing something. Mother was afraid that she would start reading her father’s poems and go the same way. However, all this time she traced.

Mathematical logic occupied her more than anything else. Once, Ada fell ill and spent three years in bed. But all this time she wanted and continued to study. To her came a variety of doctors and teachers. One of them was Augustus de Morgan - a famous mathematician and logician (yes, the law of de Morgan is named after him). Since then, Ada has plunged into the world of mathematics.


As a result, Ada grew up a unique girl. She was beautiful and intelligent, just like her mother was engaged in mathematics, and in conversations on scientific topics even avoided the guys from Cambridge and Oxford. Among other people, mostly female, this caused hidden anger and envy. She was often spoken of as something dark, even diabolical. It must be said that Ada herself felt unusual forces (funny, but in Russian her name sounds really a little devilish). But this is not unusual, since the girl-mathematician in the high English society of that time - from the outside it really looked strange. And many men, meanwhile, were crazy about her.

Mathematics is mathematics, but how did it happen that programmers remember about it first of all? One of the most momentous meetings of Ada Lovelace was the meeting with Charles Babbage - the inventor of the first analytical computing machine.


At that time, in France, where Babbage arrived, a large-scale project was launched to create tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions. Babbage began to dream of automating this work, at the same time eliminating possible human errors, since at that time people were the ones who manually created such tables. So Babbage thought about building his difference machine (calculating a polynomial using the difference method).



He created a huge number of drawings, and the prototype itself was completed in 1832, the very one that Ada Lovelace will see after a year.

In 1835, Ada will marry a very worthy man - Baron William King, who was later awarded the title of Count, and Ada herself became the Countess of Lovelace. Four years later, they already had three children - two sons and a daughter. The sons of Hell gave names in honor of the father - one was named Ralph Gordon, and the other - Byron.

What about the very first program in the world? And what is the fate of the Babbage machine? In 1842, the Italian scientist Luis Manabrea wrote a book about Babbage's car. Ada, at the request of Babbage, will translate it. During the translation of the book itself, she made a huge amount of comments, seeing in this car seems more than Babbage himself.

Here are her words: “The essence and purpose of the machine will change depending on the information we include in it. The machine will be able to write music, draw pictures and show science such ways that we have never seen anywhere else. ”Alan Turing subsequently read her notes, introducing the term Lady Lovelace’s objection to the ability of machines to think.

At the same time, when describing the Babbage machine, Ada introduced such computer terms as cycle and cell. She also compiled a set of operations for calculating Bernoulli numbers. This is in fact the very first computer program. Babbage never built his car, it was collected after his death and is now stored in the Museum of Science in London.

Ada Lovelace herself died on November 27, 1852, just 36 years old. Exactly as much as her father lived. She was buried in the family crypt with her father, whom she never recognized.
In honor of Ada, Lovelace was named the Ada programming language developed in the 1980s by the US Department of Defense.

PS Probably, those people who have the phrase “The first programmer was a girl” causing discontent or a smile should at least once take an interest in the biography of this person. People like Ada Lovelace or Alan Turing and many others should be remembered. And for someone, these stories are another reason to understand that there is nothing impossible in the world.

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