First Computer Programmer?

Who was first computer programmer?

Ada Lovelace, "Enchantress of Numbers"

Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer in history. She was born 200 years ago, 10th December 1815.
In 1843, Lady Lovelace showed, that's incredible, that girls can program! Not only! The first human being to write a computer program, even when there were no computers, she was a woman! Have you understand, girls and women of all ages?

But who was this talented woman?

Augusta Ada Byron, better known as Ada Lovelace, name that she assumed  after marrying William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of famed Lord George Gordon Byron and his wife Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke Byron, passionate about mathematics, in which she was particularly versed.

Lord Byron was a poet and a politician, who lived in a turbulent and dissolute way. Lady Byron schooled Ada in science and mathematics and discouraged literary study: probably she had felt that an education in mathematics and logic would have counteracted any possible inherited tendency towards Lord Byron's insanity and romantic excess.

Ada, as well as having been the first person to write a computer program, was also the first to realize the potentiality of computers to go beyond the simple numerical calculation.
Although she reached a series of results, considered impressive for anyone, especially for a woman in the 19th century, Ada Lovelace is best known for her collaboration with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine, created by him and left unfinished until today.

But, although Babbage did not build the hardware, Ada Lovelace wrote the software!

Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37, and was buried beside the father she never knew. Though her life was short, Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think is brand-new computing.
Her contributions to science were resurrected only recently, but many new biographies attest to the fascination of Babbage's "Enchantress of Numbers."

In 1979, the United States Department of Defense, in order to unify programming languages, created the programming language Ada, named in honor of the first programmer.

Relevant links for deepening

► http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
► https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/love.htm
► http://www.g4tv.com/techtvvault/features/27659/Ada_Lovelace_Countess_of_Controversy.html
► https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRmEYMiphoU&feature=youtu.be
► https://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/12/10/ada-lovelace-science-religion-letter/

► Image: Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (Portrait by Alfred Edward Chalon, 1840)

#history_of_mathematics, #AdaLovelace, #computing, #programming_language, #mathematics