Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (London, December 10, 1815-id., November 27, 1852), registered at birth as Augusta Ada Byron and commonly known as Ada Lovelace, was a British mathematician and writer, best known for her work on the mechanical general-purpose computer of Charles Babbage, the so-called Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognize that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation and to have published what is recognized today as the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine, which is why she is considered the first computer programmer.
Lovelace was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Anna Isabella Noel Byron. Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada's birth and left England forever four months later. He commemorated their farewell to him in a poem that begins: "Is your face like your mother's, my beautiful daughter? ADA! She is the only daughter of my house and my heart.” She died in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old.
He deduced and foresaw the ability of computers to go beyond simple number calculations, while others, including Babbage himself, focused solely on these capabilities.
Her social position and education led her to meet important scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday and the novelist Charles Dickens, relationships that she took advantage of to further her education. Among these relationships is Mary Somerville, who was her tutor for a time, as well as a friend and intellectual stimulus.Ada Byron referred to herself as a poetic scientist and as analyst (and metaphysics).
At an early age, her mathematical talents led to a long-term friendship with the English mathematician Charles Babbage, and specifically Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Between 1842 and 1843, she translated a paper by the military engineer Italian Luigi Menabrea on the machine, which he complemented with a large set of his own notes, simply called Notes. These notes contain what is considered the first computer program, that is, an algorithm coded for processing by a machine. Lovelace's notes are important in the history of computing. Other historians reject this view, pointing out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the earliest programs for the engine. He also developed a view of computers' ability to go beyond mere computation or crunching of numbers., while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities. His mentality of & # 39; poetic science & # 39; led her to ask questions about the analytics engine (as shown in her notes) examining how individuals and society engage with technology as a collaborative tool.
Biography
Childhood
Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Anna Isabella and the poet Lord Byron, who expected their child to be a boy and was disappointed when his wife gave birth to a girl. She was born on Sunday, December 10, 1815. The girl is named after Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, and she was named Ada by Byron himself. On 16 January 1816, by order of Lord Byron, Lady Byron went to her parents' house in Kirkby Mallory, Leicestershire, taking her five-week-old daughter with her. Although English law at the time granted full custody of the children to the father in cases of separation, Lord Byron made no attempt to claim parental rights from him, but requested that his sister keep him informed of Ada's well-being. In April 1816, her father left England, fleeing from his creditors and the scandal that hung over him due to rumors of incest. Months later, Annabella filed for separation. During the eight years that Lord Byron was away from his country until his death, he wrote frequently to Augusta and asked after their daughter. Lovelace was not shown the family portrait of her father until he was 20 years old.
Lovelace did not have a close relationship with her mother. She was often left in the care of her maternal grandmother Judith of hers, the Hon. Lady Milbanke, who adored her. However, due to the social attitudes of the time, which favored her husband in any separation, with the welfare of any child acting as a mitigator, Lady Byron had to present herself as a loving mother to the rest of society. This included writing anxious letters to Lady Milbanke about the well-being of her daughter, with an introductory note saying that she was to retain her letters in case she had to use them to show maternal concern.
Since she was a child, Ada aroused the interest of a society in which continuous scandals were experienced. Her mother tried very hard to protect her, but she only succeeded up to a point.
Lady Byron wanted to give her daughter a careful education, very similar to what she herself had received, but more demanding. Ada could not interact with other children without her mother's prior approval, so the eldest part of her childhood was spent alone or with adults. Her education began when she was very young; at the age of four she already had tutors and governesses. At the age of eight (in 1824) Ada's normal day began with a music class at 10:00 in the morning, at 11:15 a.m. French reading, at 11:30 arithmetic class, at 1:00 p.m. 30 did homework, at 15:15 music again and at 16:30 finished with French exercises. Lady Byron imposed a strict discipline based on a system of rewards and punishments, and she also sought intellectual stimulation with readings and relationships with intellectuals. She put a lot of effort into having her daughter learn mathematics, a discipline that she herself practiced. In this context, Ada meets the Scottish mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville, who was her tutor for a time. Somerville, as a woman scientist, becomes a major stimulus and influence in her life. Both, student and tutor, share scientific hobbies, establishing great complicity between them.
As Ada grew older, her mother spent time away from home, in spas or in the country.
He was in poor health, suffering from many of the childhood infections, and had frequent headaches. At the age of seven she contracted a serious illness, which kept her bedridden for months. At fourteen, she had rest for more than a year due to measles, which caused her to spend long hours studying and reading.
When Ada was 8 years old, her father's death was known in Greece in April 1824. Lady Byron was interested in strengthening ties with her in-laws. The new and sixth Lord Byron maintained a good relationship with Annabella; he had a young son one year younger than Ada. Annabella induced Ada to write a letter to her cousin in hopes of bringing the family back together.
Adolescence
In June 1826, Ada, then ten years old, traveled outside of England for the first time. She left with a whole group (including her mother) and the trip lasted 15 months, during which Ada enjoyed everything new that her eyes saw, everything she heard, discovered, etc In the autumn of 1827 she ended her journey and they settled directly at Bifrons, a country mansion well removed from the city. Nothing of Ada's interest happened in that palace; In addition, her mother was frequently away from home, so the girl dedicated herself to studying and letting her imagination run wild. That same year, Ada began training her in mathematics. At eleven years old she was obsessed with the idea of flying; she was determined to invent a machine that would allow her to move through the air. Her first step, in February 1828, was to build wings. She researched different materials and sizes. She considered various materials for the wings: paper, oil silk, wires, and feathers. She spent years studying the anatomy of birds to determine the correct proportion between the wings and the body, and creating sketches of her dream project. She decided to write a book, Flyology, illustrating, with plates, some of her findings. She decided what equipment she would need herself; for example, a compass, to "cross the country by the most direct path", so that she can overcome mountains, rivers and valleys. Her last step was to integrate Steam with the "art of flying" & # 34;.
In early 1829 she contracted a serious illness, possibly measles, which paralyzed her legs and forced her to stay in bed until mid-1832. This period marked her deeply, but she continued to study. The year of her recovery, he moved with her mother to Fordhook Manor, a mansion located in Ealing, a village 12 km from central London, very popular among the London aristocracy. During this time, Ada lived her first romance; she fell in love with a young man, the son of John Hamble, who helped her with her studies two hours a day. They lived the love story in secret for some time, but when Lady Byron found out about it, she forbade the young man to enter her house and associate with her daughter.
Adulthood
The year she turned eighteen, Ada began attending London high society parties. At one of her first events she met Charles Babbage, the only person who would share her fascination with matters of mechanics. Babbage was forty-four years old at the time and was known, among other things, for the project at hand: a mechanical calculator that worked without human assistance, called the Difference Engine.
At that time in England an advanced contraption became famous, the silk loom of Joseph Marie Jacquard, with which she was totally fascinated. She marveled at the possibility of devising and building machines, like Jacquard's, that would allow humans to control processes that were previously uncontrollable or erratic.
Ada and Babbage became friends. Their relationship stimulated her intellectually; she helped him advance her speculations on calculus until he conceived a brilliant idea: build a Jacquard loom applied to numbers, or in other words: a computer.
Babbage's difference engine had all the elements that Ada was excited about, and mainly it showed that machines would one day make flight possible. The friendship between the scientist and the young woman lasted her entire life; letters were written from her until her death.
In 1834 Ada was closely related to William King, whom Lady Byron had commissioned to guide her daughter morally; she also took it upon herself to teach him mathematics. It was during those classes that Ada realized that her passion was mathematics. She had already found the discipline to which she applied her extraordinary intelligence. In the summer of that year, Ada and her mother toured the North of England, the most important industrial area, visiting many factories, where they were able to see the Jacquard loom in operation. During this time, her mother and daughter were closely associated with Mary Somerville, the most famous mathematician in her country. Other acquaintances included scientists Andrew Crosse, Sir David Brewster Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday, and author Charles Dickens.
Ada was already a regular at the Victorian Court and began to attend various events in which she frequently participated in the balls and dazzled many of her attendees, who described her as a charming being. However, John Hobhouse, who had been a friend of her father's, was an exception to her, describing her as "a stiff and haggard young lady but with some trait of hers's friend, especially her mouth". The description was made after their meeting on February 24, 1834, in which Ada made it clear to Hobhouse that she did not like him, but this first impression did not last long and they subsequently became friends.
In the spring of 1835 Ada met William, Lord King. The aristocrat was from a very influential family from the political, social, intellectual and religious point of view. He owned several important estates and the title of lord was over a century old, so Lady Byron approved of their relationship. On July 8, 1835, they were married, making her Lady King. Her residence became a large estate in Ockham Park (Ockham, Surrey), along with another on Torridon Fjord and one in London. She spent her honeymoon at Worthy Mansion, located in Asley Combe, Somerset, which had been built in 1799 as a hunting lodge and which King himself expanded for her honeymoon. Later the house would become her summer retreat after being enlarged again.
The couple had three children: Byron, the heir, born May 12, 1836; Anne Isabella (called Annabella, later lady Anne Blunt), born 22 September 1837; and Ralph Gordon, born July 2, 1839.
Immediately after Annabella's birth, Lady King experienced "a painful and prolonged illness that took months to heal." Between 1843 and 1844 her mother charged William Benjamin Carpenter with the task of educating Ada's children and acting as a "moral instructor" to her own daughter.
In 1837, William King became a baron to Viscount Ockham and took another title, Earl of Lovelace. From then on, Ada would always be signed as Ada Lovelace.
In their first years of marriage, Ada was very happy, but her husband's lack of ambition ended up tiring her, so she took refuge again in mathematics. She decided that she needed to find a good mentor to guide her in her intellectual work and in the summer of 1840 her mother found one of her own: the famous mathematician and logician Augustus de Morgan. With her help, Ada made rapid progress, but De Morgan had a problem as a teacher. He informed Lady Byron that her daughter was not content to learn lessons like any lady; Her questions went far beyond what they dealt with in class and he didn't want to encourage that attitude. De Morgan believed (like almost all of society at the time) that women were not made to study the fundamentals of mathematics and other sciences. Ada's questions, according to him, were unwomanly. Ultimately, he was concerned that her student thought like a man. But Lady Byron and Lord Lovelace ignored the Professor's warning and she continued to study her.
During this time in which she was forced to juggle her role as wife and mother, the exchange of letters with her former tutor and friend, Mary Somerville, represents a great relief for Ada. In this correspondence, Lovelace shares with her friend her frustration after motherhood and the difficulties in continuing her studies.
In 1841 Ada's mother told her daughter and Medora Leigh that their father was Lord Byron himself, and on 27 February Ada wrote to her mother: 'I am not even surprised. In fact, she has simply confirmed to me what, for years, I had not the slightest doubt, but would have considered improper on my part to have insinuated in any way what I suspected ». Ada did not blame her father for her incestuous relationship but Augusta Leigh: "I fear she is inherently more evil than he ever was." This did not prevent Ada's mother from trying to destroy the image that Ada had of her father, but rather made her do it with greater intensity. Despite what changed her life after they were married, Ada and Babbage remained friends; he visited her and her husband frequently. In the fall of 1840, Babbage returned from his stay in Italy concerned about his project; he found it increasingly difficult to build the fully operational prototype of the analytical (or differential) engine. He did not have enough resources to finance it, but he was optimistic because a renowned Italian scientist was going to write an article about his project.
Education
Throughout her illnesses, she continued her education. Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the follies she accused Byron of was one of the reasons that she Ada learned mathematics from an early age. William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted scholar and author of the 19th century, educated her in mathematics and science. One of her later tutors was the mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan. Beginning in 1832, when she was seventeen, her mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated most of her adult life. In a letter to lady Byron, De Morgan suggested that her daughter's ability in mathematics might lead her to become "a research mathematician, perhaps of first rate eminence."
Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions by integrating poetry and science. While studying differential calculus, he wrote to De Morgan:
- I can point out that the curious transformations that can suffer many formulas, the unsuspecting identity for a seemingly impossible beginner of extremely different forms at first sight, I think it is one of the main difficulties in the first part of mathematical studies. I often remember certain elves and fairies that you read about, that are now on the elbows in one form, and the next minute in a very different way.
Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to the effective application of mathematical and scientific concepts. He valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, seeing it as a tool for exploring "the unseen worlds around us."
Work
In 1841, Ada writes Babbage a letter making it clear that she is interested in collaborating with him. Babbage liked the idea, so she began by translating the article by the Italian scientist, Luigi Federico Menabrea. With the translation of the text, she had two objectives: to make her friend's valuable work known and to fulfill her dream of achieving an intellectual life that would elevate her above the demands of motherhood and marriage.[ citation required]
He finally called his work Notes, which consisted of his own study on the analytical engine, and as an annex, the translation of the article from Italian. Babbage advised her, but Ada was the entire author of that work.
Ada spends a large part of her study describing in highly technical language how the Analytical Engine would work, but she also offers a series of observations that make her theoretical contribution clear. She clearly distinguished between data and processing; this thought was revolutionary at her time. Ada aspired to create computing, which she called the science of operations. She became aware of the practical applications of the Analytical Engine and even glimpsed the possibility of digitizing music. He wrote in the Notes: «Suppose, for example, that the fundamental relations between sounds, in the art of harmony, were susceptible to such expressions and adaptations: the machine could compose pieces of music as long as and complex as desired. Ada had a clear idea: the analytical engine and the Jacquard loom come to do the same thing. A key phrase where this is expressed is: "It can be said that the first weaves algebraic drawings, in the same way that the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves." Ada clearly expresses the three functions that Babbage's invention could fulfill: processing mathematical formulas expressed with symbols, making numerical calculations (her primary objective of hers) and giving algebraic results in literal notation.
Babbage and Ada conceived of the Analytical Engine in very different ways. The former was not too interested in its practical consequences. Ada, on the other hand, was obsessed with the applications of the invention. She was the first to sense what Babbage's invention meant for technological progress. She understood that the technology used in the Jacquard loom and the analytical engine could be applied to any process that involved processing data: in this way she opened the way to a new science, that of information computing.
Contribution to Computing
In 1840 Charles Babbage traveled to Italy to explain the concept of the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. Among the audience was the military engineer and mathematician Luigi Menabrea, who will publish the lecture notes later, in French. Ada was asked to translate Menabrea's writing into English, and in doing so she added a longer appendix that was an article in itself, consisting of seven notes labeled alphabetically A through G. Ada were published in the journal Scientific Memoir in September 1843, under the title "Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage", which he signed with his initials A.A.L.
In these notes, Ada wrote:
We finished these notes by following in detail the steps through which the machine could compute the Bernoulli Numbers, being this (in the way we will deduce it) a rather complicated example of its power.Ada Lovelace.
This algorithm to calculate the Bernoulli numbers, a series of fractions with different applications in mathematics, has been considered by many as the first program/algorithm in history. Consequently, many profiles of the figure of Ada Lovelace celebrate him as the first programmer in history. However, controversy over Babbage's degree of involvement in the making of Lovelace's notes has raged for years. It is a complicated controversy due to the fact that Ada's contribution has been taken as "a gender issue" in recent years and the increasing attention to the promotion of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
It is now proven that Babbage was the first person to make what is understood as a program, as he wrote similar algorithms 6-7 years before the publication of Lovelace's article in 1843. There are 24 such 'programs' and have identical features to those of Lovelace's G note. The general idea that she wrote the first computer program in history is just a myth when it was really a team effort with Babbage.
In contrast, Ada's contribution to computing was even more important: with a broader vision than Babbage's, she deduced and foresaw the ability of machines to go beyond simple calculations of numbers. Ada saw the practical applications of the machine, and rightly believed that in the future she could even compose music and make graphics:
Suppose, for example, that the fundamental relations between sounds, in the art of harmony, were susceptible to such expressions and adaptations: the machine could compose musical pieces as long and complex as it would be.Ada Lovelace.
He was the first person to realize that the numbers stored inside the Analytical Engine could represent other things beyond the magnitude of said numbers, that is, the symbolic character of the internal numerical representation of the machine. He also provided a first idea of what the software would be:
The Analytical Machine has no pretensions create Nothing. You can do it. anything we can order you to do.Ada Lovelace.
(Words in italics are by Ada herself.)
Currently, it could be said that Ada Lovelace was the first software engineer, something more important than being a programmer, since she studied, developed and created the documentation on a certain automatic processing system.
From a modern point of view, as it is understood what it means to be a programmer (the one who uses an intermediate language to tell a computer to interpret and execute a series of orders), the first was Alan Turing, when he developed his Turing machine. Furthermore, there are major differences between Babbage/Lovelace's development and Turing's: whereas the Analytical Engine was a specific-purpose machine (the differential engine), Turing's was general-purpose programmable.
Babbage and Ada developed the great idea of separating operations and data from the machinery, and that the operations could be coded on cards that would direct the behavior of the machinery. But they did not go further. Turing's proposal is that of a universal machine (that is, a machine that guarantees the execution of any function that can be described in terms of the machine itself), and a uniform representation of data and operations, both stored in the machine itself.
Beyond numbers
In his notes, Lovelace emphasized the difference between the Analytical Engine and previous calculating machines, in particular its ability to be programmed to solve problems of any complexity. He realized that the device's potential extended far beyond mere number crunching. In her notes, she wrote:
[The analytical machine] could act on other things besides the number, objects were found whose fundamental mutual relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and they should also be susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operational notation and the mechanism of the engine... Assuming, for example, that the fundamental relationships of sounds in the science of harmony and musical composition were susceptible to such expression and adaptations, the engine could compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or measure.
This analysis was an important development of previous ideas about the capabilities of computing devices and anticipated the implications of modern computing a hundred years before they were realized. Walter Isaacson attributes Lovelace's idea of the application of computing to any process based on logical symbols to an observation about textiles: "When he saw some power looms that used punch cards to direct the weaving of beautiful patterns, it reminded him of how the machine Babbage used punch cards to do calculations."[citation needed] This view is considered important by writers such as Betty Toole and Benjamin Woolley, as well as by programmer John Graham-Cumming, whose Plan 28 project aims to build the first complete Analytical Engine. According to computer historian and Babbage scholar Doron Swade:
Ada saw something Babbage in a certain sense could not see. In the world of Babbage, their machines were limited by the number... What Lovelace saw - what Ada Byron saw - was that that number could represent different entities besides an amount. Then, once you had a machine to manipulate numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which the number was an example, according to the rules. This is the fundamental transition of a machine that is a number processor to a machine to manipulate symbols according to the rules. It is the fundamental transition from computing to computing—computation of general purpose—and looking back from the current superiority of modern computing. If we are looking for and examining the history of that transition, then that transition was explicitly made by Ada in that 1843 document.
Controversy about his contributions
Although Lovelace is known as the first female computer programmer, some computer biographers and historians claim otherwise.
Allan G. Bromley, in the 1990 article Difference and Analytical Engines:
All but one of the programs mentioned in his notes had been prepared by Babbage between three and seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she detected a “error” in her. Not only is there no evidence that Ada has ever prepared a program for the analytical engine, but his correspondence with Babbage shows that he did not have the knowledge to do so.
Bruce Collier, who later wrote a biography of Babbage, wrote in his 1970 Harvard PhD thesis that Lovelace "made a considerable contribution to publicizing the Analytical Engine, but there is no evidence that he has advanced design or theory in any way.”
Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole consider Lovelace to be the first computer programmer "incorrect", since Babbage wrote the initial programs for his analytical engine, although most were never published. Bromley looks at several dozen sample programs prepared by Babbage between 1837 and 1840, all of which substantially predate Lovelace's notes. Dorothy K. Stein considers Lovelace's notes to be "more a reflection of the author's mathematical uncertainty, the inventor's political purposes, and, above all, the social and cultural context in which they were written, than a plan for scientific investigation." ».
In his book, Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram defends Lovelace's contributions. Although he acknowledges that Babbage wrote several unpublished algorithms for the Analytical Engine before Lovelace's notes, Wolfram argues that “there is nothing as sophisticated—or as clean—as Ada's computation of Bernoulli numbers. Babbage certainly helped and commented on Ada's work, but she was definitely the driver of it." Wolfram then suggests that Lovelace's chief achievement was to distill from Babbage's correspondence "a clear exposition of the abstract operation of the machine, something Babbage never did."
Doron Swade, a computer historian known for his work on Babbage, discussed four claims about Lovelace during a lecture on Babbage's analytic engine:
- She was a mathematical genius.
- She made an influential contribution to the analytical engine
- She was the first computer programmer
- She was a prophesy of the computer age
According to him, only the fourth claim had "any substance at all." He explained that Ada was just a "promising beginner" rather than a math whiz, that she began studying basic math concepts five years after Babbage conceived the analytical engine so she couldn't have made any major contributions, and that she only he published the first computer program instead of actually writing it. But he agrees that Ada was the only person who saw the potential of the analytical engine as a machine capable of expressing entities other than quantities.
Last years
In the late 1840s, Ada became addicted to horse racing and along with some of her friends tried to create a mathematical model that would help them win big bets. The attempt was a complete failure, netting Ada thousands of pounds in debt and causing one of the group to blackmail her into informing her husband, which she was eventually forced to confess. In the last period of her life she suffered continuous financial hardships.
In the summer of 1852, Ada's health took a serious turn for the worse. She had suffered from nervous exhaustion and general weakness for years, but it was not until that year that the first symptoms of uterine cancer appeared. The illness lasted several months, during which her mother took control of her personal and medical appointments. Under the influence of her mother, she decided to stop being materialistic and adopted religious ideas that led her to regret her previous life.
Finally, she died at the age of thirty-six on November 27, 1852, accompanied by Lady Byron and William.
She was buried, at her request, with her father, in the parish church of the Nottinghamshire village of Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey.
Legacy
He suggested the use of punched cards as a method of inputting information and instructions to the Analytical Engine. He also introduced a notation for writing programs, mainly based on Ada's mastery of Luigi Menabrea's 1842 text (which commented on personally completing it with annotations that are longer than the text itself) on the operation of the Jacquard loom as well as Babbage's analytical engine. It is also noteworthy his mention of the existence of zeroes or neutral state in the punched cards, since the cards represented decimal and non-binary numbers for Babbage's machine (8 perforations would equal then to 8 units).
He also introduced the possibility that the Analytical Engine was not only capable of performing mathematical calculations, but also of, among many other things, "producing art" and composing music, literature... in fact, he claimed that the invention would be capable of doing anything asked of it, as long as we knew how to order it.
Acknowledgments
The Ada programming language, created by the United States Department of Defense, was named after Ada Lovelace. The language reference manual was approved on December 10, 1980, and the United States Defense Standard for Language MIL-STD-1815 was given the number of the year of her birth.
In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing inaugurated its Ada Lovelace Award. Since 1998, the British Computer Society (BCS) has awarded the Lovelace Medal and in 2008 launched an annual competition for female students. BCSWomen sponsors the Lovelace Colloquium, an annual conference for college women. Ada College is a higher education college in Tottenham Hale, London, focused on digital skills.
Since 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded the Lovelace Medal in her name, and in 2008 they launched an annual competition for female computer science students. In the United Kingdom, the BCSWomen Lovelace Colloquium—an annual conference for university students—also bears her name, Ada Lovelace.
Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event held on the second Tuesday in October whose goal is to raise the profile of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (the STEM fields). It aims to make visible, give recognition and support to women who work in any of these fields, as well as their discoveries and inventions, introduce younger women to the world of science and technology and create new female references. This international day, which began to be celebrated in 2009 thanks to Suw Charman-Anderson, includes the organization of conferences, workshops, competitions... all over the world. The most representative event is Ada Lovelace Day Live!, held in London. Events have included Wikipedia editathons with the aim of improving the representation of women on Wikipedia in terms of articles and editors to reduce the unintended gender gap in Wikipedia. Wikipedia.[citation required]
The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the participation and dedication of women in free culture and open source movements.
Building B of the Escuela Politécnica Superior de la UAM, where the degrees in Computer Engineering and Engineering of Telecommunication Technologies and Services are taught, is called Building B - Ada Lovelace. Likewise, the Ada Byron building is located at the University of Zaragoza, where the same degrees are taught as at the UAM.
The computer center in the town of Porlock, near where Lovelace lived, is named after him. Ada Lovelace House is a council-owned building in Kirkby-in-Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, near where Lovelace spent her childhood; The building, which previously housed the local district council offices, now provides high-quality office space for a number of local start-up companies.
She is also the inspiration and influence of the Ada Developers Academy in Seattle, Washington. The academy is a non-profit organization that seeks to increase diversity in technology by training women, trans and non-binary people to be software engineers.
The Ada Byron Research Building is located at the University of Malaga, inaugurated in 2014 and dedicated to computer technology. On November 10, 2009, one of the streets of the Gijón Technology Park, in Asturias, was renamed Ada Byron in her honor.
In 2014, the University of Deusto awarded for the first time an award called the Ada Byron Award to the Woman Technologist, in honor of computing. This is an award given to women technologists to make visible the trajectory of female characters in this field. The winners are women whose references are women scientists and technologists, who have been contributing to the world for centuries, such as the one who gives the award its name, Ada Byron.
The Ada Byron Award stands out for valuing the empowerment of women technologists and its positive effect on development and sustainable growth worldwide.
In 2017 Cardano's ADA cryptocurrency was launched in his tribute.
In 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for Ada Lovelace.
On July 27, 2018, Senator Ron Wyden introduced, in the United States Senate, the designation of October 9, 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day: "To honor the life and contributions of Ada Lovelace as a leading woman in science and mathematics." The resolution (S.Res.592) was considered and agreed upon without amendment and with a preamble by unanimous consent.
At the Universidad del Rosario, in Bogotá, Colombia, there is the Lovelace room, in his honor, of the Applied Mathematics and Computer Science program. It is a modern computer room where you can see programming courses, algorithms, data structures, among others.
On the 197th anniversary of his birth, Google dedicated its Google Doodle to him. The doodle shows Lovelace working on a formula between images showing the evolution of computers.
The Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano dedicated the chapter "Ada's Ages" to her in his book Espejosː una historia casi universal (2009), highlighting her pioneering role as the first programmer of the history.
Twenty-seven publishes a revolutionary job. Don't sign with your name. A scientific work signed by a woman? This work makes it the first programmer in history: it proposes a new system to dictate tasks to a machine that saves the worst routines to the textile workers.Eduardo Galeano
Bicentennial
The bicentenary of the birth of Ada Lovelace was celebrated with a series of events, including Ada Lovelace Day: Celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths.
- Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Lectures in computing, Institute of Advanced Studies of Israel, December 20, 2015 - January 31, 2016.
- Ada Lovelace Symposium, University of Oxford, 13-14 October 2015.
- Ada.Ada., a woman's show on the life and work of Ada Lovelace (using an LED dress), was premiered at the Edinburgh International Science Festival on April 11, 2015 and continues its international tour to promote diversity in STEM in technology conferences, companies, government and educational organizations.
Special exhibitions were shown by the Science Museum in London, England and the Weston Library (part of the Bodleian Library) in Oxford, England.
In the episode "Spyfall Part 2"' from season 12 of the series Doctor Who, "the Doctor" meets computer pioneer Ada Lovelace.
Posts
- Lovelace, Ada King. Ada, the numbers witch: a selection of the letters of Lord Byron's daughter and his description of the first computer. Mill Valley, CA: Strawberry Press, 1992. ISBN 9780912647098.
- Menabrea, Luigi Federico; Lovelace, Ada (1843). "Analytic engine sketch invented by Charles Babbage... with notes from the translator. Translated by Ada Lovelace». In Richard Taylor (ed.). Scientific memories. 3. London: Richard and John E. Taylor. pp. 666-731.
Publication history
Six copies of the 1843 first edition of Sketch of the Analytical Engine with the notes by Ada Lovelace have been located. Three are held at Harvard University, one at the University of Oklahoma, and one at the United States Air Force Academy. On July 20, 2018, the sixth copy was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for £95,000. A digital facsimile of one of the copies at the Harvard University Library is available online.