Byron, (Augusta) Ada (1815–1852)
At the age of 17 she was introduced to Mary Somerville, a remarkable woman who translated Laplace's works into English, and whose texts were used at Cambridge (where a women's college is now named after her). It was at one of Mary Somerville's dinner parties, in November 1834, that Ada first heard of Charles Babbage's ideas for a new calculating machine, the Analytical Engine, and was immediately intrigued. In 1843, married and the mother of three children, Ada translated a French article about the Engine and showed it Babbage. He suggested that she add her own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original piece and included prescient comments about how such a machine might be used to compose complex music, produce graphics, and solve scientific problems. A regular correspondence ensued between Ada and Babbage, during which Ada suggested to Babbage a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers – a plan now regarded as the first computer program. In recognition of this, a software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named "Ada" in 1979. Like her father, she died at the age of 36, following a series of illnesses.
Related categories MATHEMATICIANS
COMPUTERS, ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, AND CYBERNETICS
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