Celebrating Women's History Month: Ada Lovelace

As Women’s History Month takes place in efforts to showcase women’s contributions to society in the past and present, Codology is launching a four-article series highlighting women who have contributed extensively to the world of computer science, starting with the renowned Ada Lovelace. 

Born on December 10, 1815, as the daughter of Romantic poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron, Augusta Ada Byron, also known as Ada Lovelace, would become the first published computer programmer. Educated by mathematician-logician Augustus De Morgan, physician William King, social reformer William Frend, and astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville, mathematics and science were always emphasized in Ada's education, as supported by her mother's fears of her daughter becoming like her father. Thus, when Ada Lovelace came of age, her education and social status came to fruition as, in 1833, Charles Babbage, the father of the computer, selected the seventeen-year-old to attend his party.  

During the party, Ada Lovelace became acquainted with a small part of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that could erase human error. Coincidingly, her rare enthusiasm for the revolutionary machine earned her Babbage as a mentor and lifelong friend, also giving her way to become involved in the Analytical Engine. See, the Difference Engine never came to be due to a misunderstanding between Babbage and engineer Joseph Clement, causing him to return with the world's first programmable general-purpose computer in 1884: the Analytical Engine. 

And upon seeing the plans for the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace would pour years into learning everything she could about the machine. In 1843, she would even translate and annotate the French article “Notions sur la machine analytique de Charles Babbage” by military engineer and future Italian prime minister Luigi Federico Menabrea, showing her brilliance and insight into the potential of general computing, something Babbage had been unable to comprehend. She would publish her completed article in Scientific Memoirs, with section G proposing a code that could program the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers providing evidence for her title as the first published computer programmer.  

Though the Analytical Engine was never completed, Ada Lovelace's status as the world's first published computer programmer would be noted by historians as her contributions were found by the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, in the 1940s. Her notes would also resurface in B.V. Bowden's work Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines in 1953, with the US Department of Defense naming a computer science language "Ada" in 1980 after her. Ada Lovelace is also internationally celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, Ada Lovelace Day, in her memory and to recognize women contributing to STEM as she had. 

Ada Lovelace pioneered computer programming, and through Women’s History Month, we at Codology wish to help stories like hers be an inspiration for future generations to pursue computer science. Computer science is not just a field for men, as proven by Ada Lovelace and countless others, and we hope their stories reach those with the potential to reverse the gender disparities in the field.