On the 10 December 1815 Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born to Lord Byron and Lady Byron. She was a mathematician and writer, known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed mechanical general purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. As the first to recognise the potential application of the machine beyond calculation and she had published the first algorithm to be compiled on a computational machine in 1843, she is often recognised as the first computer programmer.
The program was to generate Bernoulli Numbers. Babbage had written fragments of programs but Ada’s work was the most complete and more elaborate and the first to be published. Ada also explained how the Analytical Engine could potentially be used to do more than create numbers and through the right programming and inputs had the potential to create music and art.
This was a significant break though at a time when women were discouraged from academic/intellectual thought and work. Her vision of computing’s possibilities went unrecognised for more than a century and was unmatched by her peers.
You can read more about Ada Lovelace through the extract from ‘A Passion for Science: Tales of Discovery and Invention’ by Suw Charman-Anderson