Ada+Byron

Ada Byron also known as Lady Lovelace contributed very much to the development of the computer. She was born December 10, 1815 the daughter of a poet, Lord Byron. When Ada was just five weeks old her parents were separated and her mother took custody of her and brought her up to be a mathematician and scientist. Ada’s mother did not want her to be like a poet like her father so she really pushed her to be a mathematician. At 17 Ada was introduced to Mary Somerville who was a very intelligent and sophisticated woman. Mrs. Somerville helped Ada with her mathematical studies and also showed her how to put mathematics and technology into an appropriate human context. Mrs. Somerville also introduced to Ada, Babbage’s ideas for a new calculating engine, the Analytical engine. Babbage thought what if a calculating engine could not only foresee but could act on that foresight. Ada was touched by the “universality of his ideas”. Babbage had plans for a new engine and Menabrea, and Italian wrote a summary of these plans which Ada translated and read it. She showed Babbage her translation and he told her she should add her own notes, she did and they were three times the size of the original article. Letters between Babbage went back and forth between the two and Ada’s articles were published. Ada had many things to say about her predictions that such a machine could be used not only for complex music, to produce graphics, and could also be used for practical and scientific use. She ended being correct. Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now know as the first “computer program.” A software language that has been developed by the U.S. Department of Defense which was named “Ada” in her honor in 1979.