Born: London, England, December 10, 1815
Died: London, England, November 27, 1852
Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing
Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic
poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated from
Byron just a month after Ada was born. Four months later, Byron
left England forever. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece
in 1823) and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron. Her life was
an apotheosis of struggle between emotion and reason, subjectivism
and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts
of energy.
Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father,
and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and
music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies.
But Ada's complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828,
when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics
that gave her life its wings.
Lady Byron and Ada moved in an elite London society, one in which
gentlemen not members of the clergy or occupied with politics
or the affairs of a regiment were quite likely to spend their
time and fortunes pursuing botany, geology, or astronomy. In the
early nineteenth century there were no "professional" scientists
(indeed, the word "scientist" was only coined by William Whewell
in 1836)--but the participation of noblewomen in intellectual
pursuits was not widely encouraged.
One of the gentlemanly scientists of the era was to become Ada's
lifelong friend. Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics
at Cambridge, was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine,
an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of
finite differences. Ada met Babbage in 1833, when she was just
17, and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of
mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects.
In 1835, Ada married William King, ten years her senior, and when
King inherited a noble title in 1838, they became the Earl and
Countess of Lovelace. Ada had three children. The family and its
fortunes were very much directed by Lady Byron, whose domineering
was rarely opposed by King.
Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine
(although the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical
Engine. His Parliamentary sponsors refused to support a second
machine with the first unfinished, but Babbage found sympathy
for his new project abroad. In 1842, an Italian mathematician,
Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of
the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for
the memoir, and during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked
feverishly on the article and a set of Notes she appended to it.
These are the source of her enduring fame.
Ada called herself "an Analyst (& Metaphysician)," and the combination
was put to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the
device as well as Babbage but was better at articulating its promise.
She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer.
It was suited for "developping [sic] and tabulating any function
whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of any indefinite
function of any degree of generality and complexity." Her Notes
anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.
Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37, and was buried beside
the father she never knew. Her contributions to science were resurrected
only recently, but many new biographies* attest to the fascination of Babbage's "Enchantress of Numbers."