LYCOS RETRIEVER
Ada Lovelace
built 185 days ago
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Annabella Millbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Ada's mother left her husband after a month of marriage and Ada never saw her father. Born in London, she was educated privately, studying mathematics and astronomy in addition to the more traditional topics. She seems to have developed an early ambition to be a famous scientist. Her correspondence... with Mary Somerville and Augustus De Morgan, two of her informal teachers, show that her formal skills were very limited. De Morgan saw her as a talented beginner who could have become an original mathematician if given the chance to receive a rigorous formal Cambridge-style training.
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Ada Lovelace was one of the most charismatic characters in computer history. Ada was born December 10, 1815 the daughter of the poet, Lord Byron and his wife Annabella Milbanke. Five weeks later after Ada birth, Annabella Milbanke asked for a separation from Byron, and she was given sole custody of Ada who she brought up to be a mathematician and scientist. Annabella was terrified that Ada might end up being a poet like her father. In spite of Annabella’s programming, Ada did not sublimate her poetical inclinations. She hoped to be "an analyst and a metaphysician".
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Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace had another common interest besides computers. Together, they had come up with what they considered an "infallible system" for beating the odds at the horse races. Babbage needed money to fund the construction of his engine; Lovelace was simply a compulsive gambler. Their system did not work, and both of them were disgraced by massive gambling debts and associations with "shady" bookmakers.
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In the early 1840s, Ada Lovelace became the world's first computer programmer by writing a program to calculate Bernoulli numbers using Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine. In Babbage's design, the Analytical Engine manipulated a mechanical calculator through programs encoded on loops of punch cards, a method of data storage and transfer that Babbage had borrowed from the Jacquard loom. Punch cards permitted ongoing calculations to inform subsequent operations. Recognizing the significance of this logical structure, Lovelace was able to develop several key features of modern programming languages, including looping, branching, conditional logic, and sequential control.
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At 18, Ada Lovelace met Charles Babbage, who invited her to study his difference engine. By observing what Babbage had designed and by asking him questions, she soon became an expert on the inventor's work. When Babbage changed his plans and began to design his analytical engine, Lovelace saw tremendous potential in the machine. She understood it better than most other people older and more experienced than she.
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Ada Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815. She was raised by her mother, for her mother separated from her father when she was five weeks old. Her mother did not want Ada to grow up like her poet father, so she taught Ada mathematics and science. When she was 19, she met Babbage, a man working on a calculating machine that would later give rise to today’s personal computer. The two became friends and began corresponding with each other. In 1841, an Italian named Menabrea wrote an article in a French magazine about Babbage’s inventions.
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