$AUGUSTA$ $ADA$, $COUNTESS$ $OF$ $LOVELACE$ $(1815–1852)$

Augusta Ada was the only child from the marriage of the flamboyant and notorious poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron, Annabella Millbanke, who separated when Ada was 1 month old, because of Lord Byron’s scandalous affair with his half sister.

The Lord Byron had quite a reputation, being described by one of his lovers as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

Lady Byron was noted for her intellect and had a passion for mathematics; she was called by Lord Byron “The Princess of Parallelograms.” Augusta was raised by her mother, who encouraged her intellectual talents especially in music and mathematics, to counter what Lady Byron considered dangerous poetic tendencies.

At this time, women were not allowed to attend universities and could not join learned societies.

Nevertheless, Augusta pursued her mathematical studies independently and with mathematicians, including William Frend. She was also encouraged by another female mathematician, Mary Somerville, and in 1834 at a dinner party hosted by Mary Somerville, she learned about Charles Babbage’s ideas for a calculating machine, called the Analytic Engine.

In 1838 Augusta Ada married Lord King, later elevated to Earl of Lovelace. Together they had three children.



Augusta Ada continued her mathematical studies after her marriage. Charles Babbage had continued work on his Analytic Engine and lectured on this in Europe. In 1842 Babbage asked Augusta Ada to translate an article in French describing Babbage’s invention. When Babbage saw her translation, he suggested she add her own notes, and the resulting work was three times the length of the original. The most complete accounts of the Analytic Engine are found in Augusta Ada’s notes. In her notes, she compared the working of the Analytic Engine to that of the Jacquard loom, with Babbage’s punch cards analogous to the cards used to create patterns on the loom. Furthermore, she recognized the promise of the machine as a general purpose computer much better than Babbage did. She stated that the “engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.” Her notes on the Analytic Engine anticipate many future developments, including computer-generated music. Augusta Ada published her writings under her initials A.A.L., concealing her identity as a woman as did many women at a time when women were not considered to be the intellectual equals of men. After 1845 she and Babbage worked toward the development of a system to predict horse races. Unfortunately, their system did not work well, leaving Augusta Ada heavily in debt at the time of her death at an unfortunately young age from uterine cancer.

In 1953 Augusta Ada’s notes on the Analytic Engine were republished more than 100 years after they were written, and after they had been long forgotten. In his work in the 1950s on the capacity of computers to think (and his influential Turing test for determining whether a machine is intelligent), Alan Turing responded to Augusta Ada’s statement that “The Analytic Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.” This “dialogue” between Turing and Augusta Ada is still the subject of controversy. Because of her fundamental contributions to computing, the programming language Ada is named in honor of the Countess of Lovelace.