Ada Lovelace, Enchantress of Numbers
Props to the Prophetess of the Computer Age
Please enjoy this short essay I wrote for a class I’m taking. I got an A. Not bragging, just reporting.
Augusta Ada Byron – aka Ada Lovelace – was born on December 10th, 1815, in the middle of the first Industrial Revolution of Britain. In her thirty-six years, Ada, the only child of Romantic poet George Gordon “Lord” Byron and educational reformer Baroness Annabella Milbanke, would make an indelible mark on the history of mathematics, proving herself a visionary of what we now call computer science. In her day, machines for math were considered mere calculators, or, at best, analyzers of data.
Ada alone knew they could be much more. In terms of insight, she is on a par with Zuckerberg, Jobs and Gates.
Higher learning institutions of the Georgian era barred women, so all of Ada’s studies were tutorial. Despite these restrictions on her gender, she excelled, often to the amazement of her private teachers. After seven weeks, Dr. William King – the family physician, drafted into teaching by Lady Byron – would apologetically remark to thirteen-year-old Ada, “You will soon puzzle me in your studies.”
Ada’s esteem in the world of computer science stems from her distinction as the likely author of the first algorithm, composed when she was twenty-eight for her mentor Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, so named because it would perform mathematical analysis, as opposed to just calculating. Babbage, a visionary in his own right, nicknamed Ada “the Enchantress of Numbers.”
Due largely to expense, the Analytical Engine was never built, but it would have been steam-powered, massive in scale, operated by punch cards like the Jacquard loom used at the time, and very likely operational. (Its precursor, Babbage’s Difference Engine, a calculator as opposed to computer, has been built, is 11 feet long, weighs five tons, and works. The Analytical Engine would have been much, much bigger.)
Additionally, Ada expressed insights into the possibilities of using math to animate such a machine to carry out more than just numerical analysis. These insights set Ada apart from all her contemporaries. In her famous notes on Babbage’s engine, she wrote: “Supposing that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” The year was 1848.
Ada’s untimely death from uterine cancer four years later would rob science of a truly original mind. Thankfully, much of her correspondence survives. (A collection of love letters to an extramarital paramour, however, was burned.)
Although Ada’s famous father certainly bequeathed his daughter immeasurable intellectual and, perhaps more importantly, imaginative gifts, Annabella Milbanke deserves the credit for nurturing Ada’s talents. After barely a year of marriage, Ada’s parents separated when she was a month old. Annabella could not abide her husband’s extreme lifestyle, which featured, among other perfidies, infidelity (allegedly with his half-sister, and, less allegedly, others), drunken rages, and, according to Annabella, insanity and sodomy. The latter was then a crime (and would be until 1967).
Following the couple’s split, Lord Byron would flee England forever, never again to see or communicate with his daughter. Annabella kept him posted on the child’s life, however, informing him, for instance, that Ada would not be studying Italian and music, as he had wished, but would concentrate instead on her “mechanical ingenuity.” This refers to preteen Ada’s obsession with imagined flying machines, manifested in remarkably detailed diagrams and notes documenting her avid dissection of dragonfly and bird wings.
Just as Ada’s intellect was blossoming under her mother’s watch, Lord Byron perished from fever in Greece. Ada was eight.
Annabella Millbanke was well up to the task of raising a child without a father around. A woman of means and high intellect, with supportive family, she had been privately tutored, and in her youth had exhibited mathematical skill. Lord Byron, an undistinguished student, once referred to his wife as “The Princess of Parallelograms.” To this day, she is famed among educators for establishing London’s progressive Ealing Grove School. Also a staunch abolitionist, she was one of the only women in attendance at the 1840 World Antislavery Convention.
Clearly, Ada’s maverick streak, arguably her cardinal trait, originated from both sides of her bloodline.
Headstrong Annabella, having borne witness to a great poet melting down before her eyes, was understandably concerned for her daughter’s mental health. In the hopes of tamping down any potential wildness inherited from Lord Byron, and in keeping with her own upbringing, Lady Byron arranged rigorous academic tutoring for her daughter, with a focus on what we now call STEM (science, technology, engineering, math).
To further ensure against any Byronic influence, Annabella would not reveal to Ada her father’s portrait until Ada was twenty.
Control freak or no, Annabella deserves props for assiduously placing her innately poetic child in the company of great minds, both mathematically-focused and otherwise. Among these were social reformer and early Unitarian William Frend. Frend introduced Ada to polymath Mary Somerville, one of two women in Britain earning her keep in math, publishing popular textbooks. Somerville presented Ada to both future mentor Charles Babbage, and Ada’s future husband, William King-Noel, who would become the 1st Earl of Lovelace, hence Ada’s married name.
King-Noel supported his wife’s mathematics obsession. He often copied articles for her in the library, as women were not allowed admittance. She would bear him three children, all while intensely studying advanced math.
Despite her mother’s efforts, throughout her life, Ada would wear her paternal lineage with pride, ultimately referring to herself as an “analyst and metaphysician.” In an undated letter to her mother, she wrote, “You will not concede me philosophical poetry. Invert the order! Will you give me poetical philosophy, poetical science?”
Lady Byron need not have worried for her daughter’s state of mind. Ada’s deep fascination with math was set, albeit entwined with an intense yearning to express it poetically. As she entered her twenties, her drive to understand ever more complex math did not abate. She continued what her mother had begun, employing famed mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan as a tutor.
Decades on, after all of them had passed on, “De Morgan’s Law” would become essential to circuit design at the dawn of the 20th century, and, ultimately, crucial to software design. Of all her teachers, De Morgan influenced her the most. Their relationship was entirely epistolary.
Communicating via the written word had started in Ada’s childhood. In the early years, Annabella, frequently absent, had commanded nannies and tutors to send Ada’s self-written progress reports via post. This reportage would continue into Ada’s brief adulthood. As with much letter-writing, the medium was also a way for Ada to work out her ideas in real time, with ink.
When Ada’s education advanced under her own steam, work and conversation continued via fountain pen and stationery, as face-to-face instruction was unfeasible, not to mention inferior to well-wrought words on the page. It all transpired like correspondence courses of yore, or even remote learning of today.
Ada’s work with Babbage on the design of his Analytical Engine, the insight for which she is most renowned, included an extensive appendix to an article on Babbage’s machine, which existed only on paper and in their heads. Ada had translated the article from French and got carried away. Her appendix was three times as long as the article itself, and took a year to create. In it, using frequently poetic language, she presented an algorithm for running Babbage’s engine, arguably the first. She articulated that operations, i.e. the punch cards that would instruct the machine, were not the same as data and results. The machine would do more than compute.
Ada described a view on a vista in which a machine could perform like the imaginative, generative parts of the human mind, or as she would say, the spirit. For such a performance she supplied provable math.
The hardware necessary to enact her vision would not be built for another century.
Around the time she was working with Babbage, Ada Lovelace wrote: “Imagination is the Discovering Facility … Mathematical Science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use & apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious. Imagination too shows what is, the is that is beyond the senses.”
Today, we take for granted the abstract world within the circuitry of our computers, our satellites and smartphones and tablets, all of it animated by math, and producing immeasurable quantities of our culture, from the poetical to the profane to the utilitarian. Almost two-hundred years ago, Ada Lovelace used both her imaginative gifts and a defiant confidence to articulate that space, and vault the concept into a world that was not yet ready.
two woids: duck buttah!!!