the scientist of the day today is ada lovelace. a mathematician from the 19th century, lovelace is best known for her work in advancing and publicizing charles babbage’s analytical engine, but she did far more than just following in babbage’s footsteps. lovelace was one of the first people to think of computers the way we understand them now—she recognized the potential of computers to do far more than just crunch numbers, and wrote what is sometimes considered to be the first computer program. now, i’ll try to keep these scientist posts as science-focused as possible, but allow me a little digression here to talk about lovelace’s personal life, because she is super cool. lovelace was born in 1815 to lord and lady byron (yes, that lord byron). her parents split when she was very young, and neither of her parents cared about her all that much. she was also regularly plagued with illness, and was bedridden for over a year when she was 14. nevertheless, she continued to display a bright scientific mind. she somehow got it into her head that she wanted to fly (as young 14-year-olds tend to do), and promptly began researching the anatomy of birds and the physics of flight, even building her very own pair of mechanical wings. she collected her findings in the book flyology, which you can read an excerpt of here: https://www.thepedestalmagazine.com/gabrielle-bates-flyology/. highly recommend reading, its awfully poetic.
lovelace’s childhood, a chaotic mix of difficulty and discovery, set the backdrop for a similarly chaotic later life. she was tutored by mary somerville (yes, that somerville—more on her in a few days), through which she met charles babbage (more on him in a moment). after being presented at court at 17, she secured a wealthy and noble husband to become countess of lovelace. she became close acquaintances with several notable people, including augustus demorgan (yes, that demorgan), michael faraday (yes, that faraday), and charles dickens (yes…). she was charming and popular, leading to several rumors of affairs and probably at least one actual affair.
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through all this chaos in her personal life, lovelace was hard at work as a mathematician and scientist. this is where our good friend babbage comes in. charles babbage was an inventor who had just had the idea for what he called the “analytical engine”, which was essentially a very basic mechanical computer. lovelace and babbage had corresponded quite frequently about his earlier difference engine (imagine a very large calculator), and she was thus tasked with translating an article on the analytical engine into english. well, lovelace did a whole lot more than translate the article. she appended a set of notes, nearly three times longer than the article itself. in those notes she described a method of using the analytical engine to calculate bernoulli numbers, in what is sometimes called the world’s first computer program. we’ll never know if her program works as the analytical engine was never built, but it was a foundational step in developing the field of computer programming. perhaps more importantly though, lovelace’s notes contain a discussion on the potential of the computer. lovelace was the first to imagine that computers could be used for purposes other than large calculations. she reasoned that if computers could act on numbers with such precision, what was stopping them from acting on things like letters or music notes? up until this point, everyone, including babbage himself, had not considered that computers could be used for anything but number crunching. lovelace was the first to see the potential of computers as more than a calculator, and for that, we owe her our modern conception of computer science.
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"Is this not what we mean when we say beauty?
The meet of things immiscible?
What we cannot by our nature become,
does not there wait our legacy,
arching to be stroked?"
-Ada Lovelace, Flyology
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(written 3/9/21)
