Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer. She is best known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical computer, the analytical engine. This machine was designed to do many kinds of tasks, not just one. She was the first to see that the machine could be used for more than simple calculation. Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer.

Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and the reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke. Her father separated from her mother a month after Ada was born. He died when she was eight. Lovelace was often ill as a child, but she studied assiduously. In 1835 she married William King. In 1838, King became Viscount Ockham and 1st Earl of Lovelace, which made Ada the Countess of Lovelace. The name Lovelace was chosen because Ada was descended from the extinct Baron Lovelaces.

Through her education and social life, Lovelace met scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday. She also knew the author Charles Dickens. She used these friendships to help her learn more. She described her approach as "poetical science" and called herself an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)".

At age 18, Lovelace began a long working relationship and friendship with Charles Babbage, another British mathematician. She was especially interested in his work on the analytical engine. They first met on 5 June 1833, when she and her mother went to one of Charles Babbage's Saturday night soirées. They went with a friend, Mary Somerville, who was also Lovelace's private tutor. The analytical engine was never built. However, it has been recognised as a Turing-complete general-purpose computer, which had many of the key features of a modern electronic computer. Babbage is known as the "father of computers," and Lovelace is credited with several computing "firsts" from her work with him. She translated an article about the analytical engine by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea. She also added seven long explanatory notes. In these notes, she described a way to use the machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This is often called the first published computer program.

Lovelace saw that computers could do more than calculating or working with numbers. Many others, including Babbage, focused only on those abilities. She was the first to point out that information other than arithmetical figures, such as music, could also be stored and changed by such a machine. Her "poetical science" approach also led her to ask how people and society work with technology as a helpful tool. Ada is widely remembered today. Her name is used for a programming language, and there are roads, buildings, institutes, programmes, lectures and courses named after her. There are plaques, statues, paintings, and books about her.

For the computer microarchitecture, see Ada Lovelace (microarchitecture).

Biography

Lord Byron had hoped for a "glorious boy," so he was disappointed when Lady Byron had a girl. The baby was named after his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and Byron called her "Ada." In January 1816, Lady Byron took the baby to her parents' home at Kirkby Mallory. Lord Byron signed the deed of separation and left England for good. Ada did not have a close relationship with her father, who died in April 1824 when she was eight. She did not feel especially close to her mother either, so her grandmother often looked after her. Ada was often ill as a child. In June 1829, she had measles and became paralysed for a time. Tutors including William King, Mary Somerville, and Augustus De Morgan helped her learn harder subjects, such as the "numbers of Bernoulli." She also studied differential calculus and believed that imagination was important in science. She valued metaphysics as much as mathematics. She became friends with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, and Michael Faraday, and she knew the author Charles Dickens. In 1833, she met Charles Babbage through Mary Somerville.

In 1835, she married William, 8th Baron King, and became Lady King. The couple had homes at Ockham Park in Surrey, an estate on Loch Torridon in Ross-shire, and a house in London. They spent their honeymoon near Porlock Weir in Somerset. From 1845, their main home was Horsley Towers, built in the Tudorbethan style by Charles Barry. They had three children: Byron, Anne Isabella, and Ralph Gordon. In 1838, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace, so Ada became the Countess of Lovelace. She was a descendant of the Barons Lovelace. Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852, from cervical cancer. Under her mother's influence, she made Lady Byron her executor. At her request, she was buried next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.

Work

Lovelace was interested in the science of her time, including phrenology and mesmerism. After working with Babbage, she hoped to build a mathematical model of how the brain creates thoughts, but she never achieved this. In 1844 she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse to learn about electrical experiments. She also wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, but it was never published.

She first met Charles Babbage in 1833, through Mary Somerville. She became fascinated by his difference engine, and he called her "The Enchantress of Number." In 1840, Babbage gave a talk at the University of Turin. Luigi Menabrea wrote it up in French. Charles Wheatstone asked Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She added seven notes, and the work was published in 1843 in Scientific Memoirs under her initials. People liked her writing, and Michael Faraday supported it. Later, she and Babbage had a disagreement over an unsigned preface, but they settled it and their friendship recovered. The historian Benjamin Woolley later wrote about their relationship.

The notes are important in the early history of computers. Note G described a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using an algorithm on the Analytical Engine. It is often called the first published computer program, although Babbage had written earlier programs that were mostly never published. The notes were republished in 1953 in a book by B. V. Bowden. Some writers, including those at Scientific American, argue that Lovelace should not be called the first computer programmer. Others, such as Dorothy K. Stein and Allan G. Bromley, point out the limits of her work. Still, Doron Swade and Stephen Wolfram agree that she saw something important: numbers could stand for other things. Walter Isaacson notes that she was inspired by mechanical looms that used punchcards to weave patterns. Her ideas still matter today, and John Graham-Cumming is working on building the first complete Analytical Engine. Her notes also include "Lady Lovelace's Objection" to artificial intelligence. This name was given by Alan Turing in his paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence."

Main article: Note G

Commemoration

The computer language Ada was created for the United States Department of Defense and was named after Lovelace. Its reference manual was approved on 10 December 1980. Its Department of Defense Military Standard, MIL-STD-1815, was given the number of the year she was born. In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing started the Ada Lovelace Award. By 1998, the British Computer Society (BCS) had given the Lovelace Medal. In 2008, it started a yearly competition for women students. BCSWomen runs the Lovelace Colloquium, a yearly conference for women undergraduates. In 2013, the University of Deusto in Spain began the Ada Byron Award for women in technology. The award later spread to several Latin American countries.

Ada, the National College for Digital Skills, is a specialist college of further education and higher education in England. It focuses on digital skills and has campuses in London (Pimlico) and Manchester (Ancoats). Ada Lovelace Day began in 2009. It is celebrated each year on the second Tuesday of October to help people notice women in science, technology, engineering, and maths. Events have included Wikipedia edit-a-thons, which aimed to reduce gender bias on Wikipedia. The Ada Initiative was a non-profit group that helped bring more women into the free culture and open source movements.

Many buildings and places also carry her name. The Engineering Mathematics building at the University of Bristol is called the Ada Lovelace Building. A building at Zaragoza University is called the Ada Byron Building. The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after her. Ada Lovelace House in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, is near where she spent her early years.

In 2012, a Google Doodle honoured her on her birthday. In 2013, Ada Developers Academy was founded and named after her. On 17 September 2013, the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives devoted an episode to her. It was sponsored by TV presenter Konnie Huq. As of November 2015, all new British passports have included an illustration of Lovelace and Babbage. In 2017, a Google Doodle honoured her along with other women on International Women's Day.

On 2 February 2018, Satellogic, a company that works with Earth observation imaging, launched a ÑuSat type micro-satellite named in her honour. In March 2018, The New York Times published a late obituary for her. On 27 July 2018, Senator Ron Wyden submitted a resolution in the United States Senate to name 9 October 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day. In November 2020, it was announced that Trinity College Dublin would add four new busts of women to its library. One of them is of Lovelace. Until then, all the busts in the library had been of men. The busts were unveiled on 1 February 2023.

In March 2022, a statue of Lovelace was put up at the former Ergon House site in the City of Westminster, London. The redevelopment was part of a project that included Imperial Chemical House. The statue was sculpted by Etienne and Mary Millner, based on a portrait by Margaret Sarah Carpenter. It was unveiled on International Women's Day 2022, overlooking the junction of Dean Bradley Street and Horseferry Road. The 2022 graphics processor microarchitecture from Nvidia is named Ada Lovelace. In July 2023, the Royal Mint issued four commemorative £2 coins in different metals.

In 2025, the National Portrait Gallery acquired three images of Lovelace. These are the only known photographs of her. Two were daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet, taken around 1843. The third was taken by an unknown photographer and shows a copy of Henry Wyndham Phillips's portrait of Lovelace. In February 2026, a statue of Lovelace was unveiled on the Hinckley campus of the North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College.

Her 200th birthday in 2015 was marked with many events. These included The Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Lectures on Computability at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and an Ada Lovelace Symposium at the University of Oxford. There was also Ada.Ada.Ada, a one-woman show that opened at the Edinburgh International Science Festival in April 2015. Special exhibitions were displayed at the Science Museum in London and the Weston Library, which is part of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

In popular culture

Ada Lovelace appears in many books, plays, films, and TV shows. She is a character in Romulus Linney's 1977 play Childe Byron. In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, a clever teenager named Thomasina Coverly is "apparently based" on Ada Lovelace. Thomasina understands chaos theory and works out the second law of thermodynamics before either one is officially known. Lovelace also appears in the steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. She appears in Jordan Stratford's steampunk series, The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency, where she and Mary Shelley are teenagers. In the 1997 film Conceiving Ada, a computer scientist finds a way to talk with her in the past. Lily Lesser plays Lovelace in the second series of The Frankenstein Chronicles. Emerald Fennell plays her in the second season of the ITV series Victoria. She also appears in "Spyfall, Part 2", an episode of Doctor Who, series 12. It first aired on BBC One on 5 January 2020.

Lovelace appears in games too. These include the 2023 video game Starfield and Sid Meier's Civilization VII, where she is a leader that players can control. Many places and groups are named after her. These include Ada Lovelace Day, the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society, and the Ada Lovelace Award from the Association for Women in Computing. A computer language called Ada was developed by the US Department of Defense. Buildings at the University of Bristol, University of Malaga, and University of Southampton carry her name. The Cardano cryptocurrency platform uses Ada as the name of its digital currency. In the UK, a green plaque is on Fordhook Avenue. Blue plaques mark places at Mallory Park and St James's Square. The Lovelace Memorial in Kirkby Mallory is a listed monument.

Publications

Some of Lovelace's writings were collected in a 1992 book called Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers. It includes some of her letters and her description of the first computer.

In 1843, she translated an article by Luigi Federico Menabrea about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. She also added her own notes. Copies of this first edition with her notes are rare. Only six are known. Three are at Harvard University, one is at the University of Oklahoma, and one is at the United States Air Force Academy. On 20 July 2018, the sixth copy was sold at auction to a buyer whose name was not shared, for £95,000. You can view a digital copy of one of the Harvard copies online.

In December 2016, a letter written by Ada Lovelace was given up by Martin Shkreli. He gave it to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance because he had not paid taxes that he owed.