However, she advocated his 'great, general and metaphysical insight', so she ended up suggesting to Babbage to take charge of everything around the machine so that he could focus 'on performing the work'. There is absolutely no argument about the work and the idea of the Analytical Engine.

Although it has recently been discovered that some of Babbage's writings prior to the publication of Lovelace's work contemplated her ideas, Ada Lovelace is still considered the first programmer, the visionary who established that 'The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves', a simile that has its roots in the punch cards that were used to program these early machines, but also in the difference between the Analytical Engine and the previous Difference Engine.Īda Lovelace was considered, in her exchange of letters with Charles Babbage an 'exhibitor' of the engineer's work. This is what led the celebrated figure of Ada Lovelace to be called the first programmer. And it stayed that way for over a century. Lovelace's notes ended up being longer than Menabrea's essay, and constituted the first public document in which the programming of a computer was exhaustively debated.

It was Babbage himself, amazed she had not written something original about a subject she knew firsthand, suggested she make notes in the essay with her own ideas. However, the 'Enchantress of Numbers' (nickname that Babbage gave Ada Lovelace during their long history of correspondence) is known as the first programmer precisely because of her contributions made in the theoretical creation of a computer that could free the human mind from intellectual burden.Īfter talks given by Babbage in Turin, Luigi Menabrea, engineer and mathematician who would later become the Italian Prime Minister, published an article in French that Ada Lovelace translated into English. This was an embryonic computer project that could never be carried out. At this event Babbage presented his first model of the Analytical Engine to Ada Byron and her mother. However, Augusta Ada Byron, who would become Countess of Lovelace after she married William King, ended up managing to merge the apparently antagonistic currents that flowed through her predecessors.Īda met Charles Babbage at a party, when he had not yet married. The most widespread romantic vision of this part of Ada Lovelace's life tells us that, jilted by the womanizer that Lord Byron was, her mother tried to bury the passions of letters under grids of numbers and formulas.

Her mother, whom Lord Byron affectionately called 'the princess of parallelograms', made sure that she received a solid mathematical education. This was approximately the same number of years since she had seen her father. When the philhellene Lord Byron died of fever in Greece, fighting for a romantic ideal, his only legitimate daughter was 8 years old.

Enchantress of numbers