Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren Bogabam Here. If you're surprised that the first computer programmer in the world was a woman, just wait. Her story gets even more interesting. Ada Lovelace was also the daughter a famous poet, Lord Byron, and accomplished her work during a time when women were rarely allowed to study mathematics and science. Lovelace was born Augusta Ada Byron in eighteen fifteen, the daughter of Lord Byron and the wealthy
Isabella Millbank. The two had a stormy marriage, and her father left the family almost immediately after her birth, never to see her again. Millbank was furious with her ex and insisted her daughter's steer clear of poetry, which she blamed for Byron's wanton and unstable behavior. Instead, Lovelace was highly encouraged to study science and mathematics, the latter being Millbank's own area of expertise. This was usual for wealthy young ladies at the time, who typically only pursued artistic
subjects such as music and painting. Unfortunately for Lovelace, she had an aptitude for math. When she was in her late teens, she met Charles Babbage, an accomplished mathematician and inventor. Babbage, known today is the father of the computer, had invented the difference engine, a machine that performed simple mathematical calculations. Now he was working on an analytical engine that would
be able to perform more complex computations. He showed Lovelace a small working section during their initial meeting, and she was fascinated. Soon Lovelace became Babbage's protege. Babbage would eventually
give her the nickname the Enchantress of Numbers. But in eighteen thirty five, shortly after the two began working together, Lovelace met and married a baron named William King, and the couple had three children in quick succession, causing Lovelace to temporarily halt her studies, and during this time her husband became the Earl of Lovelace and she the Countess, hence her surname. Not too long after their third child
was born, Lovelace returned to work with Babbage. One of the first things she did was translate an article on his analytical engine from French into English. The translation was published in an English science journal in eighteen forty three, but the work also included Lovelace's own extensive thoughts and ideas on the machine, a material that was three times
longer than the original article. Because her notes discussed how the machine could be programmed to calculate Bernoulli numbers, considered by some to be the first algorithm carried out by machine, a, Lovelace is viewed as the world's first programmer. More impressively, her notes contained visionary references to the concept that similar machines might also be used to create music, text, pictures, and sounds, essentially today's modern computer, while Babbage thought they
could only perform numerical calculations. Sadly, Lovelace out of cancer at the age of thirty six. Charles Babbage was the executor of Lovelace's will. She requested to be interred next to her father, Lord Byron, who also died at age thirty six, even though he hadn't seen her since she was an infant. Her computing ideas were so advanced that
they weren't recognized until the nineteen forties. Nearly a century later, in nineteen seventy nine, the U. S. Department of Defense named its new computer programming language ADA in her honor. Today's episode was written by Melanie rad Z Pie McManus and produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this months of other math magical topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
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