Lady Ada Lovelace is one of the most mysterious figures of the 19th century. An amazing woman with an extraordinary mind and outstanding ability in mathematics. During her lifetime, she was credited with mystical abilities and was suspected of communicating with evil spirits. In the modern world, Lady Lovelace is called the first programmer.
Augusta Ada Byron was born on December 10, 1815 in London, UK. She was the only legitimate child of the poet George Byron. The father saw the girl only once, a month after birth. In April 1816, Lord Byron officially divorced his wife Anna Isabella and left England for good.
Ada Byron received an excellent education, which was the norm for that time period. However, poetry was completely excluded from the girl's education. This was done specifically at the insistence of her mother, in order to protect the girl from the influence of her father and his poems.
Ada's mother, Anna Isabella, was passionate about mathematics, which undoubtedly had an impact on the girl. Mrs Byron invited her former teacher and mentor, the Scottish mathematician Augustus de Morgan, to teach her daughter. From this moment, the formation of Ada's love for mathematics begins.
At the age of 17, Ada Byron began to go out into the world, and quickly gained fame as an angel with a devilish mind. There were no gentlemen in society capable of conducting conversations with her about mathematics at the proper level. At the same time, Miss Byron meets Charles Babbage, a Cambridge professor and one of the prominent mathematicians of the time.
The scientist interested Ada with his invention - a computer working on specially compiled programs. This idea interested a young girl. At the same time, Ada Byron married Lord William King, in the future Earl of Lovelace.
According to the recollections of contemporaries, this marriage was for love and very happy. The couple had three children. At the same time, Countess Lovelace never forgot and did not abandon her passion for mathematics and Babbage's ideas. It was in her comments to the book by Luis Menebrea that one can first find a description of the prototype of a computer.
For such a machine to work, a specific program was required, and Countess Lovelace would write one in 1843. She will base her program on the algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers. In her letter to Charles Babbage, she writes: “I am a devil or an angel. I work like the devil for you, Charles Babbage; I sift you Bernoulli numbers."
This is how the world's first computer program was created. Lady Ada Lovelace's name has been inscribed in the history of mathematics. Unfortunately, she did not have time to see the computing machine created with her help. The first working versions of the machine were completed after the Countess died in 1852.
In honor of this amazing woman, who was far ahead of her time, in 1975 one of the first programming languages "Ada" was named. Nowadays, computer scientists celebrate dates as holidays: July 19, when Lady Lovelace wrote the first program, and December 10 is the birthday of Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace.
