Ada Lovelace

programmingops culture

The 19th-century mathematician often called the first programmer for her notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine.

In 1843 she translated a paper on Charles Babbage's proposed machine and added notes far longer than the original, including what is often described as the first published algorithm intended for a computer. She also grasped that such a machine could manipulate symbols, not just numbers - an insight ahead of its time.

Ada Lovelace's notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, published in 1843, contain what is generally regarded as the first published algorithm intended for a machine: a method for computing Bernoulli numbers. Her notes ran to roughly three times the length of the paper she was translating.

The more consequential contribution is conceptual. Babbage saw a calculator; Lovelace saw that if the machine could manipulate symbols according to rules, and if numbers could represent things other than quantity, then it could operate on anything expressible in symbols, including music. That leap from arithmetic to general symbol manipulation is the idea computing is built on, and nobody else made it for a century.

Her assessment of limits has aged just as interestingly. She wrote that the engine could originate nothing and could only do what we know how to order it to perform, a position Turing later named Lady Lovelace's objection and argued against directly. That exchange, conducted across a hundred years, is still the shape of the argument about what machines can do, which is a remarkable thing for notes appended to a translation.

Also known as: Ada Lovelace, Note G, Augusta Ada King

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