Bluestocking Oxford

By Helen Dominic

The controversy associated with the statement “Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer” reveals more about modern attitudes towards women in STEM than it does about Lovelace’s achievements. Ada Lovelace was born in London on the 10th of December 1815 to a recently married socialite couple. Her father, Lord Byron, who went down in history as one of the greatest Romantic English poets, was a man she never met. Her mother, Lady Byron, was quite the opposite– educated, religious and a rather proper woman. A wealthy heiress, she was also an avid ‘Princess of Parallelograms’, as Byron named her, for her own fascination with mathematics. When Ada was just five weeks old, Byron moved abroad never to return.

Afraid Ada might take on her father’s erratic temperament and supposed madness, Lady Byron insisted Ada be taught in everything non-imaginative. Mathematics was encouraged whilst reading her father’s poetry was forbidden. Yet, Ada inherited much of his wild spirit and perhaps something of his unstable genius. She channelled it towards science, later as an adult declaring “I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst (& Metaphysician); for with me the two go together indissolubly”.

As a girl born into the Victorian era, young Ada would be barred from receiving formal schooling. However, highly valuing her daughter’s education, Lady Byron ensured Ada was studying whatever she herself was working on or what her tutors insisted upon. As Suw Charman-Anderson has pointed out, there was consequently “no carefully constructed syllabus designed to build her knowledge by introducing concepts in a logical order.”

It was through one of her tutors, Mary Somerville, that Lovelace met Charles Babbage at an exhibition in 1833. He was presenting a model of his Difference Engine– an automatic brass calculator, intended for tabulating higher-order polynomial functions utilising the method of differences– alongside a dancing ballerina automaton. Captivated by the “gleaming cogs of the calculating machine” as described by Richard Holmes, – rather than the dancing ballerina most guests were drawn to– an unlikely friendship commenced.

While mechanical calculators existed long before Babbage, such machines were still curiosities in the Victorian era and were unreliable for everyday practical usage. In 1834, Babbage envisioned the Analytical Engine, which could execute an entire list of operations in an arbitrarily programmed sequence. Remarkably, he utilised punched cards to control the computation steps, similar to the ones implemented for indicating weaving patterns on looms.

While Babbage was met with little support from the English government, his ideas gained popularity elsewhere, and in 1840 he was invited to lecture on the Analytical Engine in Turin. In this lecture, notes were taken by a certain army engineer, Luigi Menabrea, who would later become Italy’s prime minister.

And this is where Lovelace comes in. When Lovelace read through Menabrea’s French notes in 1842, she resolved to translate them so that they could be published in a British publication. She also decided to append a series of notes to her translation– including footnotes and her own thoughts. No one could have known that Lovelace’s notes would run much longer than the original work itself (twice as long to be precise), or that they would include the code for the first computer program in the world.

To this end, over the winter of 1842-1843, Lovelace exchanged letters almost daily with Babbage, despite sometimes having other, as she would write, “pressing and unavoidable engagements”. Notably, she already had three children.

Her notes, which are stored in Oxford at the Bodleian Libraries, commence crisply, explaining that unlike previous engines which computed a particular set of operations, the Analytical Engine can perform any sequence of operations. As Lovelace herself formulates, “The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations. The Difference Engine is the embodying of one particular and very limited set of operations…” A little later, she outlines how the Analytical Engine is controlled by punched cards and makes the infamous statement: “the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

She then summarises how a sequence of computations would work on the Analytical Engine; with “Operation Cards” to define the operations to be calculated, and “Variable Cards” to define the locations of values. Lovelace discusses “cycles” and “cycles of cycles, etc”, known to contemporary programmers as loops and nested loops. She gives a mathematical notation for them, which comprises the first instance of a recorded software loop.

She then moves on to Note A, wherein she portrays an extraordinary concept of a general-purpose computing machine– a simply unparalleled vision. It was the desire to create mathematical tables free from human error that had driven Babbage to design the Analytical Engine. This was not simply a question of perfectionism, but a matter of saving lives, by reducing mathematical errors in navigation. No interest lay in applying the Analytical Engine to realms outside of the immediate mathematical challenges it was designed for.

However, Lovelace envisioned that machines like the Analytical Engine did not have to be limited to numbers, but could act on any objects “whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine.” Thus, she states that the machine “might act upon other things besides numbers […] the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music.” As Doron Swade expresses, Lovelace realised numbers “could represent entities other than quantity”, therefore, they could be utilised to store pictures, text and sounds. According to Swade, the significant transition from calculation to computation is marked by “the fundamental transition from a machine which is a number cruncher to a machine for manipulating numbers according to rules”. Tracing history to find that transition, it was made explicit by Lovelace in her 1843 Notes.

While extrapolating from existing knowledge to future possibilities is certainly exceptional, envisioning an entirely new class of machines took things to a completely new level. Babbage’s design for the Analytical Engine was doubtlessly impressive, but no one seemed to grasp its unparalleled potential for universal computation. That is, except for Lovelace.

Finally, Lovelace wrote Note G, which would become the most famous part of her publication. The letter this Note seems to have arisen from commences as follows: “I am working very hard for you; like the Devil in fact; (which perhaps I am)”. After requesting specific references, she concludes, “I want to put in something about Bernoulli’s Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an implicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head & hands first.”

Lovelace’s choice to demonstrate the unparalleled potential of the Analytical Engine through the computation of Bernoulli numbers was an interesting decision; probably rooted in the fact, that they are not an explicit y=f(x) type calculation, and that they are more complex than Fibonacci numbers because all previous Bernoulli numbers are required to generate the next one. Hence, upon utilising numbers to represent entities such as pictures, text and sounds– the possibilities for what a computer can do become endless. The algorithm she wrote for the first computer program was so advanced, that it was still utilised in record-breaking computation of Bernoulli numbers in 2008.

At this point, the question of the subsequent impact of the Notes arises. Before the Analytical Engine was completed Lovelace fell extremely sick. Lovelace’s health had been problematic since her childhood, and after having delivered three children she started suffering from cancer. Terminally ill, she asked her friend Charles Dickens to read her an account of death from one of his books, and on the 27th of November, 1852, her nursing pioneer and friend, Florence Nightingale announced that “they said she could not possibly have lived so long, were it not for the tremendous vitality of the brain, that would not die.” She died at age 36, the same age her father died. The Engine was never completed, Lovelace’s program could never be tested and her Notes were all but forgotten.

During her lifetime, she was held in high regard by her peers. Her initial calculus tutor, Augustus De Morgan, described her as more promising than any first-class Cambridge maths student. Michael Faraday supposedly referred to her as “the rising star of Science”. Babbage expressed his admiration for her by famously addressing her as “Enchantress of Number” in one of his letters.

Over the next two centuries, mechanical computers continued to be developed, gradually giving way to electromechanical ones, and eventually to electronic ones. When computer programming started to be understood in the 1940s, Lovelace’s Notes were rediscovered and their significance was grasped for the first time. Her Notes predated modern examples by almost a century! Written in 1842, they were utilised by mathematician Alan Turing in 1946 to conceptualise the first computer. Lovelace inspired and laid the foundations for Turing’s more celebrated programming achievements, a century before he was born. While her Notes would have been understood by very few of her contemporaries, they remain more than relevant almost two centuries later.

Yet, by the 20th century, the knives were out. Multiple biographers excoriated Lovelace’s abilities, which gave rise to the absurd question of the ‘real’ author of the Notes by the advent of the internet age. These biographies were not often without disturbing errors. A favourite is the mention of “the problem of three bodies” in Babbage’s letters, which supposedly reveals a romantic triangle between Babbage, Lovelace and her husband– despite this actually signifying the three-body problem in celestial mechanics.

Arguments utilised to discredit Lovelace range from assertions that her mathematical abilities must have in reality been too poor for her to write the Bernoulli program– claims which have been proven false, to the fact that she published mathematical errors– an argument rarely utilised to question a male mathematical scientist’s competency as a whole, all the way to unwarranted and personal accusations such as Lovelace being  insane or having too high an opinion of herself. 

Ada Lovelace serves as a testament to the indomitable spirit of women throughout history. As her story shows, there is a great degree of brilliance which resides within the minds of diverse women– concealed and overshadowed by the actions of their male counterparts. Despite correcting Lovelace’s achievements in the academic record, her authorship is still challenged in popular depictions of her work, undermining Lovelace herself and women in general. The significance of revealing these extraordinary women cannot be overstated. The history of women in traditionally male-dominated domains proves women are equally capable of great success and provides an invaluable inspiration for aspiring young girls.

References and Further Reading

Aiello, Luigia Carlucci. “The Multifaceted Impact of Ada Lovelace in the Digital Age.” Artificial Intelligence, vol. 235, June 2016, pp. 58-62, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2016.02.003. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

Charman-Anderson, Suw. “Ada Lovelace: A Simple Solution to a Lengthy Controversy.” Patterns, vol. 1, no. 7, Oct. 2020, p. 100118. ScienceDirect, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.100118. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

Fuegi, J., and J. Francis. “Lovelace & Babbage and the Creation of the 1843 ‘Notes.’” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 25, no. 4, Oct. 2003, pp. 16-26, https://doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2003.1253887. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.

Hammerman, Robin, and Andrew L. Russell. Ada’s Legacy. New York City, Association for Computing Machinery ; Morgan & Claypool, 2016.

Hollings, Christopher, et al. “The Lovelace–De Morgan mathematical correspondence: A critical re-appraisal.” ScienceDirect, 2017, pp. 202-31. Elsevier. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

Holmes, Richard. “Computer Science: Enchantress of Abstraction.” Nature, vol. 525, no. 7567, Sept. 2015, pp. 30-31, https://doi.org/10.1038/525030a. Accessed 26 Apr. 2024.

Lovelace, Augusta Ada. “Sketch of the analytical engine invented by Charles Babbage, by LF Menabrea, officer of the military engineers, with notes upon the memoir by the translator.” Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs 3 (1843): 666-731.

Stein, Dorothy. Ada : a Life and a Legacy. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1987.Wolfram, Stephen. “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace.” Stephen Wolfram Writings, Wolfram Media Inc., 10 Dec. 2015, writings.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace/. Accessed 28 Apr. 2024.