Ada Lovelace — Wikipedia

There’s Lovelace , of its full name Augusta Ada King , Countess of Lovelace, born There’s a Byron the December 10, 1815 in London and dead November 27, 1852 In Marylebone in the same city, is a pioneer in computer science.

She is mainly known for having carried out the first real computer program, during her work on a ancestor of the computer: the analytical machine of Charles Babbage. In his notes, we find the first published program, intended to be executed by a machine, which makes Ada Lovelace the first person to have programmed in the world. It also glimpsed and described certain possibilities offered by universal calculators, going far beyond the digital calculation and what Babage imagined and its contemporaries.

It is fairly known in Anglo-Saxon countries and Germany, especially in feminist circles; It is less known in France, but many developers know the ADA language, appointed in its honor.

Family environment [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Ada was the only legitimate girl of the poet George Gordon Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke, an intelligent and cultivated woman, Cousin by Caroline Lamb, whose connection with Byron was the source of a scandal. Ada’s first name, Augusta, was allegedly chosen in tribute to Augusta Leigh, the half-sister of Byron, with whom the latter would have had incestuous relations ^{[ Swade 1 ]} . The first name Ada would have been chosen by Byron himself ^{[ Stein 1 ]} , because he was “Short, old and vocalic” ^{[ Wolfram 1 ]} . It was Augusta who encouraged Byron to marry to avoid a scandal, and he married Annabella forced ^{[ Ref. desired]} , in January 1815 . Ada was born in December of that same year. Following four attempted rapes in a state of drunkenness on the part of Byron ^{[ Swade 1 ]} , Annabella leaves Byron the January 16, 1816 , keeping Ada with her. On April 21, Byron signed the act of separation, then left the United Kingdom forever. He never saw them again.

Annabella adored mathematics. Byron even sometimes called him “the princess of parallelograms” ^{[ Swade 1 ]} . Annabella had the tutors of Ada gave him in -depth education in mathematics and sciences, which was completely unusual at the time in the education of a young girl of the nobility. In 1832, Ada meets Mary Somerville, an eminent researcher and scientific author of XIX ^{It is} century, which encouraged and helps him progress in mathematics. THE June 5, 1833 , Mary presents Charles Babbage to him, and Ada – then 17 years old – is immediately fascinated by her calculation machines. They become very close, Ada seeming to find the father she had never had in babbling ^{[ Collier 1 ]} . Among his other knowledge, there are David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone, Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday.

She married in 1835 with William King, first ^is Count of Lovelace. They will have three children: Byron, born on May 12, 1836 , Annabella (Anne Blunt) born on September 22, 1837 and Ralph Gordon born on July 2, 1839 . William was devoted to Ada and encouraged Ada’s tastes and activities in mathematics. The family lived in Ockham Park, in Okham (in) . His title and full name were during most of his life The very honorable Augusta Ada, countess of Lovelace . It is better known as There’s Lovelace or Lady Lovelace .

Letter from Ada Lovelace to De Morgan, about differential calculation.

The fragile health of Ada, put to the test by pregnancies, as well as her responsibilities as mother and mistress of the house, held her dismissed from her mathematical activities until 1839. On that date, she felt the need to resume The study of mathematics and asks Babbage to recommend a tutor to him: the famous mathematician Auguste de Morgan accepts this charge. The studies of Ada resume, and Morgan finds an enthusiastic and creative student in Ada ^{[ Swade 2 ]} . Ada takes confidence in her math abilities, encouraged by the positive feedback from De Morgan ^{[ Wolfram 2 ]} . The February 6, 1841 , Ada writes to her mother a letter where she talks about her tastes and aspirations: “I believe that I have a singular combination of qualities, which seems precisely adjusted to predispose to become an explorator of the hidden realities of nature” . She mentions her “Inexhaustible and insatiable energy” And think they have found meaning in his life ^{[ Wolfram 3 ]} .

In 1841, ADA again had health problems, but she returned to mathematics at the end of 1842. She therefore fully turned her work to the analytical machine in Babbage, and offered her services to continue development and promotion.

Memory on the Babbage Machine [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

In October 1842 , appears in French, in a Swiss newspaper ^{[ first ]} , a description of the analytical machine of Babbage produced by the Italian mathematician Louis-Frédéric Ménabréa (1809-1896). Charles Wheatstone offers Ada Lovelace, who has a good level of French, to translate this thesis for the newspaper Scientific Memoirs specialized in foreign scientific articles.

She spent nine months, between 1842 and 1843, on this translation. Babbage himself comes very little, being sick during this same period, and the translation was presented to him at the beginning of 1843 a bit like a “fait accompli” ^{[ Swade 3 ]} . He then asks Ada why she did not make a memoir presenting the analytical machine herself, to which she replied that the idea had not come to mind. Babbage then offers Ada to increase translation with notes developing and commenting on certain aspects of the Memoir, an idea immediately adopted with enthusiasm by Ada.

There follows a period of frantic work on these notes, in close collaboration with Charles Babbage which annotates the drafts, corrects the misunderstandings while encouraging and congratulating Ada of his work ^{[ Swade 4 ]} . To this article, she adds seven notes, labeled from A to G, representing almost three times the volume of text of the original article. The G note relies on a real very detailed algorithm to calculate the numbers of Bernoulli with the machine ^{[ 2 ]} . The resulting program is often considered to be the first real computer program in the world ^{[ 2 ] , [ Woolley 1 ]} , because the algorithms described until then were not described with a formalism, in a language truly intended to be executed on a machine. In addition, this program includes Catherine Dufour according to Catherine ^{[ 3 ]} The first conditional loop, a real computer concept, unlike the sequential programs that had been done before by Babbage, or in the Jacquard looms.

We do not know exactly to what extent Ada Lovelace has programmed this algorithm itself ^{[ Toole 1 ]} , having been in constant and narrow relationship with Babbage. What seems certain is that ADA had the idea of ​​giving an example of the machine programming using the calculation of Bernoulli’s numbers, and that Babbage provided ADA at least the basic mathematical formulas. According to Betty Tole, Ada was entirely able to carry out the program herself, having shown a deep understanding of the machine in its translation and its notes, and letters between Babbage and Ada seem to indicate that the role of baby is indeed limited to providing mathematical formulas ^{[ Toole 1 ]} . On the other hand, Bruce Collier, one of the best specialists in the Babbage machine, takes the following severe judgment: “This would only be a slight exaggeration to say that the notes of the brief have been written by Babbage, and that – for their own reasons – he maintained the idea in the mind of Ada Lovelace, and in the mind of the public, that these notes were of it ” ^{[ Swade 5 ]} .

Algorithm for calculating the coefficients of the product of two polynomials, by Charles Babbage (1838), written before Lovelace, but simple sequential program.

According to Stephen Wolfram, Babbage documents and publications have never been found, as complex and clean as that underlying the program to calculate Bernoulli’s numbers. Babbage, at the end of his life, had compiled a list dated 446 possible calculations with his analytical machine ( 446 Notations of the Analytical Engine ), all dated from 1830 to mid 1840, the date after which there are no longer any baby work on algorithms ^{[ Wolfram 4 ]} . These elements suggest that ADE Lovelace has designed this program, with the simple benevolent supervision of Babbage ^{[ Wolfram 5 ]} .

In other notes, Ada Lovelace shows a perception of the potential of the machine that Doron Swade considers as “Visionary, even from a modern perspective” ^{[ Swade 6 ]} . Babbage had a vision of its machine as turned towards digital calculation, with the extensions to the algebraic calculation with the possibility of manipulating symbols rather than figures. But he did not publish anything going in this direction, and he has not deepened this possibility, even going so far as to imagine another type of specific machine for algebraic calculations ^{[ Woolley 2 ] , [ Swade 6 ]} . On the other hand, Ada Lovelace explicitly describes possibilities going beyond a mathematical context, as the hypothesis that “The machine could compose scientifically and developed music pieces of any length or degree of complexity” .

Another passage of the notes of Ada, quoted by Doron Swade, illustrates this vision of universal calculator:

“Many people […] imagine that because the machine provides results in a digital form, then the nature of its processes must necessarily be arithmetic and digital, rather than algebric or analytical. This is a mistake. The machine can arrange and combine digital quantities exactly as if they were letters, or any other general symbol; In fact it can give results in algebraic notation, with appropriate conventions. »»

It was not until the 1930s with Alan Turing to formalize such a notion of universal calculator which manipulates general symbols, and abandon the notion of purely digital calculator.

Ruin and death [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

In the hope of subsidizing the Babbage projects, which had not obtained funding from the British government, Lady Lovelace began to play. She worked on a system that should allow her to win the bets of the Epsom derby but only led him into the accumulation of debts.

She died at the age of 36 of uterus cancer, in horrible suffering. She left two sons and a daughter. The latter, Anne Blunt, is known to have traveled in the Middle East and for having raised Arab horses.

She was buried in accordance with her wish near her father that she had never known, at the Sainte-Marie-Magdalene church in Hucknall, in Newstead Abbey, in the county of Nottingham.

Posthumous notoriety [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

Fallen into oblivion, Ada Lovelace and her work was exhumed with the advent of computer science. And it is in his tribute that we called Ada the programming language designed between 1977 and 1983 for the Department of American Defense (DOD) by a team from CII Honeywell Bull led by French Jean Ichbiah. The idea of ​​choosing the name ADA is attributed to Jack Cooper, of the Naval Material Command, and dates back to July 1978 ^{[Ref. necessary]} .

Ada Lovelace is considered by computer historians as the first person in history to have programmed ^{[ 4 ]} . You can see its portrait in particular on the Microsoft products authentication holograms.

The NVIDIA company has also decided to appoint its new graphic architecture under the name of Ada Lovelace, for its new series of RTX 4000 graphics cards.

Asteroid (232923) Adal -cell bears his name.

The Cardano cryptocurrency also bears its name in tribute, the token is called Ada and the smallest indivisible fraction is called a Lovelace.

• ADA is one of the main characters in alternative history The Difference Machine by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, who describes a world in which the Babbage machine would have been produced industrially and where the computer era would have started a century earlier.
• The film Conceiving Ada  (in) (1997), produced by Lynn Hershman Leeson, establishes a parallel between the existence of a contemporary Briton and the biography of Ada Lovelace (interpreted by Tilda Swinton).
• The character of There is , a little girl gifted in mathematics, in comics Name , by Egger and Thierry Smolderen, is a nod to Ada Lovelace.
• The character of There is enigma , free and independent young girl, in the homonymous series, by Vincent Dutreuil and François Maingoval, owes her name at a nod to Ada Lovelace and the Enigma machine.
• The name of Ada Byron was chosen by the 37 ^{It is} Promotion (2007-2008) of the students attached responsible for the processing of information from the IRA (Regional Institute of Administration) of Lille.
• ADA is the name of artificial intelligence that co -pilot the Jehuty robot in video games Zone of the Enders , ADA’s synthetic voice having a female range.
• Lady Ada Lovelace is an expert in calculation machine and an emeritus thaumaturge in the Steampunk role -playing game Castle Falkenstein de Mike Pondsmith.
• Lovelace (Lovey) is an artificial intelligence, a full -fledged character of the novel One year’s space , de Becky Chambers.
• Ada Lovelace, first presented by her young girl name Ada Gordon (because the action concerning her takes place in 1834), appears in episode 2 of season 12 of Doctor Who , The fall of spies: part 2 . She accompanies the doctor through various eras (hers, 1943 and the present) to fight in the face of a global crisis led by the master.
• ADA, presented as a programmer, is one of the main characters in the trilogy Arena 13 by Joseph Delaney.
• His character appears in the 2 ^{It is} Episode of season 2 of the television series Victoria . It is interpreted by Emerald Fennell.
• It is the subject of a portrait in the comic strip The Forgotten of Science by Camille Van Belle (Alisio Sciences, 2022).

Bibliography [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• (in) Benjamin Woolley , The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason, and Byron’s Daughter , McGraw-Hill, 1999 :

• (in) Dorothy Stein , Ada: A Life and a Legacy , Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1985 (ISBN  0-262-19242-X ) :

• (in) Doron Swade , The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer , Penguin (Non-Classics), 2002 :

• (in) Betty Toole , Ada and the first computer , Scientific American, 1999 ( read online ) :

• Jean-Paul Soyer, ADA of Lovelace and IT programming , ed. du Sorbier, Paris, 1998, 31 p. (ISBN  2-7320-3539-4 )
• Dorothy Stein, Ada Byron: the comet and the genius (trad. by Ada Byron, a life and a legacy , by Maurice Gabail), Seghers, Paris, 1990, 367 p. (ISBN  2-232-10145-2 )
• (in) Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada, the enchantress of numbers, prophet of the computer age : a pathway to the 21st century , Strawberry Press, Mill Valley (Calif.), 1998, 323  p. (ISBN  0-912647-18-3 ) (Contains a selection of his correspondence)
• Catherine Dufour, ADA or the beauty of numbers: the pioneer of computer science , Arthème Fayard bookstore, September 4, 2019 , 244 p. (ISBN  2-213-71279-4 )
• Jean-LUCE DOASETT, ADA 1.0 Byron’s daughter launches the first computer program , Jeanne d’Arc editions, 2021
• Anne Manager, Claire Gaudriot, 2022, Ada Lovelace, the visionary , At Pas de Loups Éditions, 2022 (ISBN  978-2-93078-78-31 ) .

Related articles [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

external links [ modifier | Modifier and code ]

• “Code first name: ADA” , Scientific conversation , France Culture, August 22, 2021.
• “Ada Lovelace, the great ordinator” , The scientific method , France Culture, September 26, 2019.
• (in) Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq. with notes from translator Ada Augusta, countess of Lovelace, published in Scientific Memoirs , vol. 3 (1842)

Databases and dictionaries [ modifier | Modifier and code ]