Long before Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, a young Englishwoman published what is widely regarded as the first algorithm written for a machine. Ada Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Her mother had mathematical training and insisted that Ada study mathematics too, an unusual education for a girl at the time. At seventeen, Ada met the inventor Charles Babbage and was captivated when he demonstrated a small working section of his calculating engine to her.
In 1843, she translated an article about the Analytical Engine from French into English and added notes of her own, labelled A to G, which ran to more than three times the length of the original. The last of them, Note G, set out step by step how the engine could calculate Bernoulli numbers. Babbage supplied the mathematical formulas, and Lovelace turned them into a table of instructions and spotted an error along the way. Because the engine was never built, her program was never run in her lifetime. Even so, it is why she is so often called the first computer programmer.
What makes her notes remarkable is the vision around the algorithm. Lovelace understood that a machine built to handle numbers could handle anything that could be expressed in symbols. She wrote that the engine “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” and that it “might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music.” She was also careful, noting that the engine had “no pretensions whatever to originate anything.” She died in 1852, aged 36, a century before modern computers existed. Today, when a machine writes a tune or draws a picture, it is working out an idea she described in 1843.
