Her father was Lord Byron, the acclaimed English poet. Her mother, a mathematician, was called the ‘princess of parallelograms’ by her father. And she, their daughter, was the first computer programmer in the world: Ada Lovelace.
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When she was 17, in 1833, Lovelace made her debut at a flamboyant party full of London socialites. There, she met an English widower and inventor, Charles Babbage, who intrigued her with his excitement about a new device that could make reliable calculations with the turn of a handle. Before the end of the party, Lovelace promised she would write to Babbage about her mathematical studies and he, in turn, promised to keep her updated about the progress of his prototype.
If you were to take a computer course in university or study it at school, you would definitely hear of Babbage, who is often called the father of the computer. Over a period of 40 years, he developed a device called the analytical engine – the forerunner to modern-day computers – for which Lovelace would go on to write the first ever computer program.
Lovelace wrote the program only as a woman could. She was a woman with vast interests: horse riding, playing the harp, studying poetry, and fashion. Her inspiration for the code was, in fact, rooted in the fashion of the times – it was based on the design of the Jacquard loom. She is known to have said: “The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” For her imaginative and creative insight into mathematical processes, Babbage would fondly call her ‘Lady Fairy’.
Her influence on propelling Babbage’s invention into the future has not gone unnoticed. In the 1970s, the US Department of Defense developed a software language called Ada, which synthesises and brings together a number of different programming languages. Since 2009, she has been recognised on Ada Lovelace Day, every October 15 – a day that is also in celebration of women who are often overlooked in the fields of maths and science.
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