Before she rose
She spent her short life battling illness, the assumption that women could not do mathematics, and a society that saw her only as Byron's eccentric daughter.
She died at 36 of cancer. Her work was largely forgotten for a century. When Alan Turing was developing the theoretical foundations of modern computing in the 1940s, he encountered her 1843 notes and acknowledged she had been there first.
1815–1852 · London, England
She described the computer in 1843 — 100 years before it was built. No one believed her either.
The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
— Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine, 1843
London, 1843. Augusta Ada King — daughter of Lord Byron, mathematician, and visionary — is translating a paper about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine from French into English. Her translation is longer than the original. Because she has added her own notes. Those notes describe, in precise detail, how the machine could be programmed to calculate any sequence of operations. She has just written the world's first computer program. The computer itself won't exist for another 100 years.
Ada Lovelace's notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine (1843) are considered the first published algorithm intended for processing by a machine.
She described a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers — a process that required a sequence of operations, conditional branching, and looping. She described all of this in 1843.
She wrote to Babbage: "I have been working very hard for you. I think I may say that I have translated the article into English as well as translated it into sense."
He had designed the machine. She understood what it could do. She saw something he had not.
She wrote that the Analytical Engine could compose music if given the proper inputs — that it could process any kind of symbol, not just numbers.
She had, in 1843, described what we now call general-purpose computing. The concept would not be formally articulated again until Alan Turing in 1936.
She called herself "an Analyst and Metaphysician." She said the two were inseparable: understanding how things work and understanding why they matter.
That pairing — precision and imagination — is still the most powerful combination in any field.
What she taught us
The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.
— Ada Lovelace, Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine, 1843
Her story. Your life.
A question worth sitting with
Ada Lovelace described the computer 100 years before anyone could build one. What idea do you have — something that feels too strange, too early, too far ahead — that you haven't let yourself fully articulate yet?
Take sixty seconds. Just sit with it.
A letter from her — to you
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