CASE STUDY ADA LOVELACE, THE FIRST COMPUTER PROGRAMMER Ada Byron was the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and so Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music. But Ada’s complex inheritance became apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics that gave her life its wings. Lady Byron and Ada moved in an élite London society. There, Ada met her lifelong friend, Charles Babbage, professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Babbage was known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine that operated by the method of finite differences. Ada met Babbage in 1833, when she was just 17, and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects. In 1834, Babbage had made plans for a new kind of calculating machine – an Analytical Engine – although his Difference Engine was not finished yet. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Luigi Menebrea, published an essay in French on the subject of the Analytical Engine. Babbage Ada as translator for the essay and she worked on the article and a set of Notes she added to it. These were the source of her fame. enlisted enduring Ada understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage but was better at explaining its possible future uses. She rightly saw it as what we would call a general-purpose computer. For her, the machine was suited for developing and tabulating any function whatsoever. The engine was the material expression of any indefinite function. Her Notes anticipated future developments, including computer-generated music. Adapted from: https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html GLOSSARY : : to enlist incaricare enduring duratura 10. Answer the questions. What was Ada’s first design for? What was the Difference Engine? What was the Analytical Engine? How did Ada contribute to the Analytical Engine’s development? How would we define the Analytical Engine today? What did Ada realise the Analytical Engine was able to do? 11. Read the text and summarise it in four sentences. Ada’s Notes on the Analytical Engine: Note G Ada’s paper is most famous for the final appendix, Note G. This demonstrates the operation of the machine by giving the example of the calculation of the so-called Bernoulli numbers. The Bernoulli numbers are particularly fit for machine calculation because they are defined recursively. There are several different ways of calculating these numbers, and Lovelace did not choose the simplest. The paper contained a detailed explanation of how the various quantities involved in the computation of the Bernoulli numbers are fetched from the Store, used in calculation in the Mill, and moved back again, according to the instructions on the cards. The process is illustrated using a large table, whose columns represent the values of the data, the variables, and the intermediate results, as the engine carried out each stage of the calculation. This table is often described as “the first computer program”, though Lovelace wrote, more accurately, that it “presents a complete simultaneous view of all the successive changes” in the components of the machine, as the calculation progresses. In other words, the table is what computer scientists would now call an “execution trace”. Adapted from: https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/adalovelace/2018/07/26/ada-lovelace-and-the-analytical-engine/