Ada Lovelace
The First Programmer
Note G, and seeing what the machine could become
Rating
97Impact score
Domains
AlgorithmsAnalytical EngineComputing theory
Scouting report
Her 1843 notes on Babbage’s Analytical Engine ran three times longer than the paper she was translating and contained Note G, a step-by-step method for computing Bernoulli numbers that is generally read as the first published algorithm. More striking is that she argued the machine could act on things other than numbers, which nobody else did for a century.
Curator’s note
Understood what the machine was for before one had ever been built.
Portrait
Painted from a photograph of Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter, licensed Public domain.
Sources
- 01Ada Lovelace en.wikipedia.org
- 02Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes (1843) fourmilab.ch