Ada Lovelace (d. 1852) lived a supremely Victorian aristocratic life: multiple estates, famous friends, and noble title? :check. Tragic illnesses that caused her to be bedridden and/or die young? : check. Relatives concerned with her propriety despite having an adventurous and spirited personality? : also, check.
Called “The Enchantress of Number” by her friend and most influential intellectual confidante, Charles Babbage, Lovelace developed an algorithm for Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” that constitutes one of the first computer programs. An even more significant contribution was her prophetic vision of computers as more than number-crunching machines. Rather, as she wrote, they might use numbers symbolically for other things with measurable relationships, for instance, music (or maps, or light systems, or etc etc etc). Perhaps Lovelace’s exposure to punchcards that were used to indicate woven patterns on the mechanical looms of her day gave her an associative leap of imagination for what the computer could do.
Had she lived longer than her 36 years, perhaps she could have carried out more of her ideas. She had great faith in science, and thought that the study of the brain might eventually be explainable through mathematics, and hoped to create “a calculus of the nervous system.” I like to imagine what such a big thinker as Ada Lovelace would make of the world today.
Source(s): Stephen Wolfram, “Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace, ” _Wired_, 12/22/2015. Wikipedia. Portrait image of Ada Lovelace at age 20 from _The New York Public Library_.
