Ada Lovelace: A Gateway to Her Life, Ideas, and Legacy

Ada Lovelace: A Gateway to Her Life, Ideas, and Legacy

In 1843 Ada Lovelace wrote one sentence about what Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine could not do: it could not originate anything. In 1950 Alan Turing named it Lady Lovelace's Objection, and the question it raised is still open.

Lord Byron's only legitimate child, she learned higher mathematics largely by post, translated an account of Babbage's engine, and added notes of her own that grew longer than the article. They explained how the engine would work, set out step by step a table for computing the Bernoulli numbers, and argued that a machine built for arithmetic might act on other things besides number, perhaps even music.

She has since been called the Enchantress of Numbers, the first computer programmer and a prophet of artificial intelligence. In the backlash she became an amateur whose reputation owed more to Babbage than to her own mathematics. This book tests each portrait against her letters and the printed page, and treats the famous title with care.

It is also a book about how minds work: where new ideas come from, why people see a mind in a machine, and how credit drifts towards famous names and away from women. In an age of machines that appear to create, her distinction between following instructions and originating an idea is still useful.

Inside, you will discover:

A childhood shaped by an absent poet, a watchful mother and a pair of paper wings Higher mathematics by post, in letters that record her progress and her gaps The summer of 1843: corrections both ways, a grave mistake caught in Babbage's working, and a quarrel over whose paper it was The Bernoulli table, and the small word only that later crept into her famous sentence What the record shows in the first computer programmer debate, from Babbage's sheet of 1837 to her critics and defenders Lady Lovelace's Objection today: Turing's reply, the Lovelace Test, and why machines seem creative to us How she became an icon for women in computing, and what the legend leaves out Part of Pioneers of Human Behaviour — gateway books on the minds that shaped us.