Luigi Menabrea
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- The only contemporary account of the Analytical Engine
- Nationality
- Italian
The Italian officer whose paper on the Analytical Engine became the text Ada Lovelace translated, annotated and tripled in length.
Babbage travelled to Turin in 1840 and gave what turned out to be the only lectures he ever delivered on the Analytical Engine. In the audience sat Menabrea, a military engineer and mathematician, who was asked to write the notes up. The result appeared in French in October 1842 in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, and remains the only detailed contemporary description of the machine to reach print. Babbage never published one himself.
The following year Ada Lovelace translated it into English and appended seven notes, A through G, together roughly three times the length of the original. Note G contains the step-by-step scheme for Bernoulli numbers usually called the world's first computer program. Menabrea went on to become a general, a diplomat and Prime Minister of Italy from 1867 to 1869, and is now remembered almost entirely for the short assignment he can only have regarded as a digression.