Ada Lovelace
(Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace)
Basically the first computer programmer.
LifeAda Lovelace (born 10th December 1815) is thought to be the first computer programmer and is mostly known for her work on the Analytical Engine.
She was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, a famous poet, and Anne Isabella Milbanke.
Byron left Anne and buggered off to die in the Greek War of Independence when Ada was eight years old. Bc she was salty as fuck, Anne "prevented Ada from developing what she saw as the insanity" of Byron, which I assumes means she discouraged her daughter from poetry, and pushed her towards maths and logic.
Basically, Ada's mum was a bit of a cow. She dumped her daughter with her mother, pretended to care about Ada, referred to Ada as "it" and made her close friends watch Ada for any sign of "moral deviation". Great parenting.....
Ada was ill was ill a lot, she experienced headaches that affected her sight and even ended up paralysed after a bout of measles (1829). So her family forced her to stay in bed for a year and I have a feeling that that probs didn't help, but she did learn how to walk with crutches (1831), so she wasn't stuck in bed for life. So while she was ill
Her first step (February 1828) was to make wings. She studied different materials and proportion for the wings and the anatomy of birds. She even wrote a book, Flyology, that showed her findings.
She even had an affair with one of her tutors (1833) and tried to elope with him after getting caught. Ada's mother and her besties tried to cover up the scandal.
As an adult, Ada was able to make her own besties and befriended and became close friends with her tutor, Mary Somerville, who also introduced Ada to Charles Babbage.
She was presented to court when she was seventeen; which basically meant she was being shown off bc she was old enough to get married. She was v. popular bc because of her "brilliant mind."
On the 8th of July 1835, she married William 8th Baron King. They lived in Surry and had three children; Byron (12th May 1836), Anne Isabella (22nd September 1837) and Ralph Gordon (2nd July 1839).
Ada often seemed to be in some sort of scandal. From "casual relationships" with men who weren't her husband to forming a gambling syndicate with male friends and an attempt to create a mathematical model to successfully place large bets- it didn't work. This lead to her getting in debt and then giving said debt to her husband. Her mother assigned William Benjamin Carpenter to teach Ada's children, but he wanted to have an affair with her and she was like gtfo.
Ada died at the age of 36 from uterine cancer on the 27th of November, 1852. While she was ill, her mother decided to fuck her over once more by controlling who Ada saw, excluding her friends, made her have a religious transformation and forced her into repenting on her previous actions and even made her Ada's executioner. Her husband, William, buggered off for her to never see him again after she confessed something to him on the 30th of August. She requested to be buried next to her father at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
Work
In 1840, Ada's bestie, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. A young Italian engineer, who later became the Prime Minister of Italy, called Luigi Menabrea, wrote up the lecture in French. One of Babbage's friends, Charles Wheatstone, commissioned Ada to translate the paper into English. She added noted notes to the paper that were labelled alphabetically from A to G, in note G Ada describes an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. This is thought to be the first published algorithm specifically made for a computer, and is the reason why Ada is thought o be the first computer programmer.
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