Significant Female Mathematicians in History – Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852)

Augusta Ada Byron (later Countess of Lovelace) never knew her father, the poet Lord Byron, who left England due to a scandal shortly after her birth. Her overprotective mother, wanting to daughter to grown up as unemotional—and unlike her father—as possible, encouraged her study of science and mathematics.

As an adult, Lovelace began to correspond with the inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage, who asked her to translate an Italian mathematician’s memoir analyzing his Analytical Engine (a machine that would perform simple mathematical calculations and be programmed with punchcards and is considered one of the first computers).

Lovelace went beyond completing a simple translation, however, and wrote her own set of notes about the machine and even included a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers; this is now acknowledged as the world’s first computer program.

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Posted by Zeeshan Gohar on May 2 2012. Filed under World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.