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Ada Lovelace

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Ada, Countess of Lovelace
Ada Lovelace portrait.jpg
Ada, Countess of Lovelace, 1840
Born The Hon. Augusta Ada Byron
(1815-12-10)10 December 1815
London, England
Marylebone, London, England
Known for Mathematics
Title Countess of Lovelace


Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet George, Lord Byron, and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke ("Annabella"), Lady Wentworth.[4] All Byron's other children were born out of wedlock to other women.[5] Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever four months later, eventually dying of disease in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old. Her mother remained bitter towards Lord Byron and promoted Ada's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing what she saw as the insanity seen in her father, but Ada remained interested in him despite this (and was, upon her eventual death, buried next to him at her request). Often ill, she spent most of her childhood sick. Ada married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, and she became Countess of Lovelace.







Ada, aged four




Ada, aged seventeen, 1832



Adult years


On 8 July 1835, she married William, 8th Baron King,[a] becoming Lady King.[26] They had three homes: Ockham Park, Surrey, a Scottish estate on Loch Torridon in Ross-shire, and a house in London. They spent their honeymoon at Worthy Manor in Ashley Combe near Porlock Weir, Somerset. The Manor had been built as a hunting lodge in 1799 and was improved by King in preparation for their honeymoon. It later became their summer retreat and was further improved during this time. From 1845 the family's main house was East Horsley Towers, rebuilt in the Victorian Gothic fashion by the architect of the Houses of Parliament, Charles Barry.[27][28]

They had three children: Byron (born 12 May 1836); Anne Isabella (called Annabella; born 22 September 1837); and Ralph Gordon (born 2 July 1839). Immediately after the birth of Annabella, Lady King experienced "a tedious and suffering illness, which took months to cure."[25] Ada was a descendant of the extinct Barons Lovelace and in 1838, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham,[29] meaning Ada became the Countess of Lovelace. In 1843–44, Ada's mother assigned William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada's children and to act as a 'moral' instructor for Ada.[30] He quickly fell for her and encouraged her to express any frustrated affections, claiming that his marriage meant he'd never act in an "unbecoming" manner. When it became clear that Carpenter was trying to start an affair, Ada cut it off.[31]

In 1841 Lovelace and Medora Leigh (the daughter of Lord Byron's half-sister Augusta Leigh) were told by Ada's mother that her father was also Medora's father.[32] On 27 February 1841, Ada wrote to her mother: "I am not in the least astonished. In fact, you merely confirm what I have for years and years felt scarcely a doubt about, but should have considered it most improper in me to hint to you that I in any way suspected."[33] She did not blame the incestuous relationship on Byron, but instead blamed Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is more inherently wicked than he ever was."[34] In the 1840s Ada flirted with scandals: firstly from a relaxed relationship with men who were not her husband, which led to rumours of affairs[35]—and secondly, her love of gambling. The gambling led to her forming a syndicate with male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt to the syndicate, forcing her to admit it all to her husband.[36] She had a shadowy relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards. John Crosse destroyed most of their correspondence after her death as part of a legal agreement. She bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her.[37] During her final illness, she would panic at the idea of the younger Crosse being kept from visiting her.[38]








Lovelace died at the age of 36 – the same age that her father had died – on 27 November 1852,[43] from uterine cancer probably exacerbated by bloodletting by her physicians.[44] The illness lasted several months, in which time Annabella took command over whom Ada saw, and excluded all of her friends and confidants. Under her mother's influence, she had a religious transformation and was coaxed into repenting of her previous conduct and making Annabella her executor.[45] She lost contact with her husband after she confessed something to him on 30 August which caused him to abandon her bedside. What she told him is unknown.[46] She was buried, at her request, next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. A memorial plaque in Latin to her and her father is in the chapel attached to Horsley Towers.


Throughout her life, Lovelace was strongly interested in scientific developments and fads of the day, including phrenology[47] and mesmerism.[48] After her work with Babbage, Lovelace continued to work on other projects. In 1844 she commented to a friend Woronzow Greig about her desire to create a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings ("a calculus of the nervous system").[49] She never achieved this, however. In part, her interest in the brain came from a long-running pre-occupation, inherited from her mother, about her 'potential' madness. As part of her research into this project, she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn how to carry out electrical experiments.[50] In the same year, she wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, Researches on Magnetism, but this was not published and does not appear to have progressed past the first draft.[51] In 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning "certain productions" she was working on regarding the relation of maths and music.[52]

Portrait of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836)

Lovelace first met Charles Babbage in June 1833, through their mutual friend Mary Somerville. Later that month Babbage invited Lovelace to see the prototype for his Difference Engine.[53] She became fascinated with the machine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit Babbage as often as she could. Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and analytic skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Number".[54][note 1] In 1843 he wrote of her:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans—every thing in short but the Enchantress of Number.[54]

During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea's article on Babbage's newest proposed machine, the Analytical Engine. With the article, she appended a set of notes.[55] Explaining the Analytical Engine's function was a difficult task, as even many other scientists did not really grasp the concept and the British establishment was uninterested in it.[56] Lovelace's notes even had to explain how the Analytical Engine differed from the original Difference Engine.[57] Her work was well received at the time; the scientist Michael Faraday described himself as a supporter of her writing.[58]

The notes are around three times longer than the article itself and include (in Section G[59]), in complete detail, a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers with the Engine, which could have run correctly[citation needed] had the Analytical Engine been built (only his Difference Engine has been built, completed in London in 2002[60]). Based on this work Lovelace is now widely considered the first computer programmer[1] and her method is recognised as the world's first computer program.[61]



First computer program

Lovelace's diagram from Note G, the first published computer algorithm

In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and the future Prime Minister of Italy wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842. Babbage's friend Charles Wheatstone commissioned Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English. She then augmented the paper with notes, which were added to the translation. Ada Lovelace spent the better part of a year doing this, assisted with input from Babbage. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism AAL.

Ada Lovelace's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first published algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and Ada Lovelace has often been cited as the first computer programmer for this reason.[64][65] The engine was never completed so her program was never tested.[66]

In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been recognised as an early model for a computer and her notes as a description of a computer and software.[67]

Beyond numbers

In her notes, Lovelace emphasised the difference between the Analytical Engine and previous calculating machines, particularly its ability to be programmed to solve problems of any complexity.[68] She realised the potential of the device extended far beyond mere number crunching. In her notes, she wrote:


This analysis was an important development from previous ideas about the capabilities of computing devices and anticipated the implications of modern computing one hundred years before they were realised. Walter Isaacson ascribes Lovelace's insight regarding the application of computing to any process based on logical symbols to an observation about textiles: "When she saw some mechanical looms that used punchcards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded her of how Babbage's engine used punched cards to make calculations."[71] This insight is seen as significant by writers such as Betty Toole and Benjamin Woolley, as well as the programmer John Graham-Cumming, whose project Plan 28 has the aim of constructing the first complete Analytical Engine.[72][73][74]

According to the historian of computing and Babbage specialist Doron Swade: "Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number...What Lovelace saw – what Ada Byron saw—was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules. It is this fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating symbols according to rules that is the fundamental transition from calculation to computation–to general-purpose computation — and looking back from the present high ground of modern computing, if we are looking and sifting history for that transition, then that transition was made explicitly by Ada in that 1843 paper".[1]

Controversy over extent of contributions




Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard University PhD thesis that Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that she advanced the design or theory of it in any way".[76]

Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole consider it "incorrect" to regard Lovelace as the first computer programmer, as Babbage wrote the initial programs for his Analytical Engine, although the majority were never published.[77] Bromley notes several dozen sample programs prepared by Babbage between 1837 and 1840, all substantially predating Lovelace's notes.[78] Dorothy K. Stein regards Lovelace's notes as "more a reflection of the mathematical uncertainty of the author, the political purposes of the inventor, and, above all, of the social and cultural context in which it was written, than a blueprint for a scientific development".[79]

In popular culture


Lovelace has been portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play Childe Byron,[80] the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling,[81] the 1997 film Conceiving Ada,[82] and in John Crowley's 2005 novel Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land, where she is featured as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel.[83]

In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly (a character "apparently based" on Ada Lovelace—the play also involves Lord Byron) comes to understand chaos theory, and theorises the second law of thermodynamics, before either is officially recognised.[84][85] The 2015 play Ada and the Memory Engine by Lauren Gunderson portrays Lovelace and Charles Babbage in unrequited love, and it imagines a post-death meeting between Lovelace and her father.[86][87]


Lovelace and Mary Shelley as teenagers are the central characters in Jordan Stratford's steampunk series, The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency.[89]


Blue plaque to Lovelace in St. James's Square, London


Since 1998 the British Computer Society (BCS) has awarded the Lovelace Medal,[90] and in 2008 initiated an annual competition for women students.[91]BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference for women undergraduates.[92] Ada College is a further-education college in Tottenham Hale, London focused on digital skills.[93]

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated in mid-October[94] whose goal is to "... raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and maths," (see Women in STEM fields) and to "create new role models for girls and women" in these fields. The Ada Initiative was a non-profit organisation dedicated to increasing the involvement of women in the free culture and open source movements.[95]

The Engineering in Computer Science and Telecommunications College building in Zaragoza University is called the Ada Byron Building.[96] The computer centre in the village of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after her. Ada Lovelace House is a council-owned building in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, near where Lovelace spent her infancy; the building was once an internet centre[97]

One of the tunnel boring machines excavating London's Crossrail project is named Ada.[98]


Adafruit Industries is an open-source hardware company named in her honour.[100] Seattle has a geek bookshop and cafe named after her.[101]

Titles and styles by which she was known




The bicentenary of Ada Lovelace's birth was celebrated with a number of events, including:[102]

Special exhibitions were displayed by the Science Museum in London[106] and the Weston Library[107] (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, England.


See also


  1. ^ Sources disagree on whether William King, her maths tutor, and William King, her later husband, were the same person.
  1. ^ Some writers give it as "Enchantress of Numbers"



  1. ^ a b c Fuegi & Francis 2003.
  4. ^ Ada Lovelace Biography,
  5. ^ a b c Toole, Betty Alexandra (1987), "Poetical Science", The Byron Journal, 15: 55–65, doi:10.3828/bj.1987.6 .
  6. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 234–235.
  7. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 156–157.
  9. ^ a b Turney 1972, p. 35.
  10. ^ a b Stein 1985, p. 17.
  11. ^ Stein 1985, p. 16.
  12. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 80.
  13. ^ Turney 1972, pp. 36–38.
  14. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 74–77.
  15. ^ Turney 1972, p. 138.
  16. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 10.
  17. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 85–87.
  18. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 86.
  19. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 119.
  20. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 120–21.
  21. ^ Turney 1972, p. 155.
  22. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 138–40.
  23. ^ a b Turney 1972, p. 138.
  24. ^ Turney 1972, pp. 138–39.
  25. ^ a b Turney 1972, p. 139.
  28. ^ Andrew Crosse and the mite that shocked the world: The life and work of an electrical pioneer. p. 262. ISBN 9781784624385. 
  29. ^ "Lovelace, Earl of". Cracroft's Peerage. 2005. 
  30. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 285–86.
  31. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 289–96.
  32. ^ Turney 1972, p. 159.
  33. ^ Turney 1972, p. 160.
  34. ^ Moore 1961, p. 431.
  35. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 302.
  36. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 340–42.
  37. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 336–37.
  38. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 361.
  39. ^ Stein 1985, pp. 28–30.
  40. ^ Stein 1985, p. 82.
  41. ^ Toole 1998, p. 99.
  42. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 91–100.
  44. ^ Baum 1986, pp. 99–100.
  45. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 370.
  46. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 369.
  47. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 198.
  48. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 232–33.
  49. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 305.
  50. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 310–14.
  51. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 315–17.
  52. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 335.
  53. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 36–38.
  54. ^ a b Wolfram, Stephen (10 December 2015). "Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace". Then, on Sept. 9, Babbage wrote to Ada, expressing his admiration for her and (famously) describing her as 'Enchantress of Number' and 'my dear and much admired Interpreter'. (Yes, despite what’s often quoted, he wrote 'Number' not 'Numbers'.) 
  55. ^ Menabrea 1843.
  56. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 265.
  57. ^ Woolley 1999, p. 267.
  58. ^ a b Woolley 1999, p. 307.
  60. ^ "The Babbage Engine". Computer History Museum. 2008. 
  62. ^ Alan Turing (2004). Stuart Shieber, ed. Computing Machinery and Intelligence. The Turing Test: Verbal Behavior as the Hallmark of Intelligence. MIT Press. pp. 67–104. 
  63. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 277–80.
  66. ^ Kim & Toole 1999.
  68. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 175–82.
  69. ^ Lovelace, Ada; Menabrea, Luigi (1842). "Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq.". Scientific Memoirs. Richard Taylor: 694. 
  72. ^ Toole 1998, pp. 2–3, 14.
  73. ^ Woolley 1999, pp. 272–77.
  75. ^ Bromley, Allan G. (1990). "Difference and Analytical Engines" (pdf). In Aspray, William. Computing Before Computers. Ames: Iowa State University Press. pp. 59–98. ISBN 0-8138-0047-1.  p. 89.
  76. ^ Collier, Bruce (1970). The Little Engines That Could've: The Calculating Machines of Charles Babbage (Ph.D.). Harvard University. Retrieved 18 December 2015.  chapter 3.
  77. ^ Kim & Toole 1999, p. 76.
  78. ^ Bromley, Allan G. (July–September 1982). "Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, 1838" (pdf). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 4 (3): 197–217. doi:10.1109/mahc.1982.10028.  p. 197.
  79. ^ Stein, Dorothy K. (1984). "Lady Lovelace's Notes: Technical Text and Cultural Context". Victorian Studies. 28 (1): 33–67.  p. 34.
  89. ^ Moyer, Edward (13 April 2012). "Can Jane Austen + steampunk spark girls' science fire?". Retrieved 26 February 2017. 
  90. ^ "Lovelace Lecture & Medal". BCS. Retrieved 2 March 2008. 
  92. ^ "BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium". UK. 
  93. ^ Davis, Anna. "New college in north London 'will boost women in tech sector'". Evening Standard. Retrieved 16 March 2016. 
  94. ^ "FAQ". About. Finding Ada. Retrieved 10 December 2012. 
  96. ^ "Ada Byron Building". 
  97. ^ Robinson, Dan (11 January 2017). "New high-quality offices to be created at house named after Lord Byron's daughter". Nottingham Post. Retrieved 26 February 2017. 
  99. ^ "FAQ – Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology". University of Oregon Libraries. Retrieved 17 April 2015. 
  108. ^ "BBC Radio 4 – Great Lives, Series 31, Konnie Huq on Ada Lovelace". BBC. 


External links