Ada Lovelace (person)
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Note G — the first published computer program
- Nationality
- British
The mathematician who in 1843 wrote what is generally counted as the world's first computer program — for a machine that was never built.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, worked with Charles Babbage on the Analytical Engine. She translated an Italian paper about the machine and added notes that ran to three times the length of the original. In Note G she set out, step by step, how the machine would compute Bernoulli numbers — an algorithm with a loop and a conditional.
More prescient was her observation that the machine could operate on anything representable by symbols, not only numbers. Babbage saw a calculating machine; Lovelace saw a general symbol machine. Note that the slug ada-lovelace in this wiki is Nvidia's GPU architecture, named after her.