08/03/2022
Meet the world’s first computer programmer! 👩💻
Ada Lovelace, who was born in 1815 – was witness to the beginning of the industrial revolution. A brilliant mind who studied math & a passion for music – she was the first author of a computer program. She envisioned machines to have multiple uses & saw a way in which they could manipulate symbols, not just numbers. She was a gifted mathematician who was very ahead of her time 💫💫💫
When Ada was a teenager, she had met Charles Babbage, a mathematician at Cambridge. He was her intellectual mentor – often revered as the father of the computers. He invented the analytic engine – the engine could be programmed to carry out mathematical operations 💻⌨️️
He had asked Lovelace to translate a description of his engine written by an Italian mathematician. She spent several months studying the engine – she dove deep & understood the machine more than Babbage did & the Italian mathematician initially had. She noted many errors in some of the calculations & demonstrated the machines application. She demonstrated how the machine could be used to calculate a sequence of numbers known as Bernoulli numbers.
She diagrammed the computations the analytical machine would create – and the result was what would read today as a computer algorithm. She also speculated that it could be used for different practical & scientific purposes & perhaps be able to create music at an elaborate extent ( which we definitely use computers for today!) 🦸 Her decades long correspondence with Baggage & many other mathmeticians, as well as her translated notes were posthumously published.
She realized that a machine was capable of doing more than one thing. Her creativity & mathematical mind saw a potential in a program that can offer us more.
An analyst and metaphysician, baggage endearingly referred to her as an “enchantress of numbers”.
What a queen! 👑
