Ada Lovelace

Collage, Summary, and Sources by Dyuthi Gurijala

Ada Lovelace, formally thought of as "The First Programmer" was born on December 10, 1815. Her mother, Lady Byron, had mathematical training and had insisted Ada learn about it., so she started tutoring her. As a result, Ada was fascinated with math and technology from a young age even though it was a very unusual education for women during this time period.

Lovelace soon met Charles Babbage, who was known as "The Father of the Computer," and he slowly started mentoring Ada. Babbage had invented a machine which was being recognized all over the world, causing many reporters to write about it all over the world. One assignment that Babbage gave Lovelace was to translate an Italian Article into French. And while translating it, Lovelace wrote a set of instructions for an additional feature of the machine. She envisioned that by writing a set of instructions to give to the machine, the machine could do whatever a person wanted. She hypothesized that the programming could work with anything like numbers and symbols (the machine could calculate numbers called Bernoulli numbers). Ada also conceptualized that the computers may also be able to compose elaborate pieces of music by connecting pitched sounds to mathematic expressions. Her insights provided ways to develop computers that were previously thought of as not possible.

Additionally, at the age of 12, Lovelace envisioned the idea for a flying machine after studying about the anatomy of birds and various other materials. She envisioned a winged flying apparatus and a powered flight. She had made so many contributions to the field of science. However, her life was unfortunately cut short after receiving uterine cancer and passing away. She passed away on November 27, 1852, only at the age of 36. Her contributions were only discovered a century after her death. But, they will always be remembered by many!