Ada Lovelace: developing the Babbage analytical engine (part I)

Ada Lovelace, aka Ada Byron, daughter of the English poet Lord George Byron, was an extraordinary girl for her time. She is the author of a detailed description of a device that was ahead of its time – an analytical machine capable of performing complex operations, but never implemented during the lifetime of its creators. Some call Ada Lovelace the first programmer, she introduced such terms as "cycle", "working cell", and developed her own program for the device, based on the ideas of the English mathematician Charles Babbage.

In 1833, Ada Lovelace met Charles Babbage in person. By that time, the inventor had one unrealized project behind him – a difference machine, which they tried to build for several years. After the end of funding, work on the device stopped. It all started again in 1842, when Babbage arrived in Turin to conduct a seminar, presenting the idea of creating an analytical engine to students. Among the students, the young engineer Luigi Menabrea (who became the future Prime Minister of Italy) listened with special attention to the words of the inventor. He took notes on the lecture in French, and the text was eventually published as an article.

Ada Lovelace took up the translation, adding her own comments. As a result, the finished article was much more extensive than the original version – Ada's additions alone filled 52 pages. In one of the comments, you can find a detailed description of the algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers. It is thanks to this part of the work done that Ada Lovelace is called the first programmer, although the analytical engine was never built during her lifetime. She was sure that a fairly sophisticated computer would be able to write pictures and music. In 1975, the us Department of defense began work on a programming language named after the nineteenth – century mathematician "Ada".