Ada Lovelace: The World’s First Computer Programmer Was a Victorian Mother of

Spearheaded by Suw, the annual celebration of inspirational women in science, technology, engineering and maths has evolved from those 1,979 blogs being written in 2009 to full scale events now taking place around the world.

Does the name Ada Lovelace ring any bells? No? The (only legitimate) daughter of lothario poet Lord Byron, she lead a racy life including numerous affairs and an ambitious (and ultimately, damningly failed) attempt to create a mathematical model to ensure huge bets would reap profits. Because of funding issues, the machine was not built during her and Babbage’s lifetimes.

Ada Lovelace was a pioneering mathematician, the first female computer programmer and the daughter of Lord Byron, whose ancestral home was at Newstead Abbey.

The controversial and unusual figure nonetheless is hailed as the mother of computer programming and an icon for women around the world working in STEM.

For nine months, starting in 1843, Lovelace’s main duty was to translate a memoir by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea, which was expressly on Babbage’s proposed automatic engine, and from there, come up with a set of notes to explain how it functioned: these notes were meant to engage the scientific community in Britain, who were mostly disinterested (or had no real understanding of) Babbage’s work, or its very utility to begin with.

A century before the first computer was developed, an Englishwoman named Ada Lovelace laid the theoretical groundwork for an all-purpose device that could solve a host of mathematically-based problems.

The exhibition contains a manuscript of her workings with Victorian mathematician Charles Babbage. Her notes were crucial in inspiring Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.

Lovelace’s potential was perhaps never fully realised, as she died in 1852 at the tender age of 36. This becomes even more impressive when you realise that she wrote the first ever line of code in 1842.

In a recent BBC Four documentary, UCL mathematics lecturer Dr Hannah Fry said Ada Lovelace had had a “leap of imagination” when thinking about what the Analytical Engine could do.

The Science Museum will host the Ada Lovelace exhibit until March 2016.