Lord Byron’s daughter is taught maths to save her from becoming like her father

The major highlights in the history of the computer are perennially linked with the names of four men: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. However, it was a young woman who only lived to 36 whose contribution to the invention of the computer, and its eventual evolution into something beyond a mere number-crunching device, was arguably as important as any of these. She is also credited with having written the first-ever computer program way back in 1842, before the first machine recognisable as a computer had even been built. And it all occurred because her mother feared she might be infected by what she considered to be her father’s streak of madness.

Augusta Ada Gordon came into the world on 10 December 1815, six months after the Battle of Waterloo. She would be the only child of the three (or possibly four) sired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron to be born in wedlock. Her father and mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke (the 11th Baroness Wentworth and known as Annabella), separated a month after Ada’s birth. She never saw her father again. Byron became ill and died in 1824 while playing a part in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Annabella was bitter about the way she had been treated by her husband, their marriage having lasted for just a year before he had compelled her to leave their home (he had just started an affair and wanted her out of the way). She was also horrified at his sexual escapades – which included an incestuous relationship with his half-sister – and his volatile behaviour. She was determined to bring her daughter up in such a way that she would, in adulthood, exhibit none of her father’s flaws: he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, to quote Lady Caroline Lamb’s famous summation of him.

As a highly intelligent woman who was a particular devotee of mathematics, it was natural for Annabella to cocoon her daughter in a protective programme of maths, logic and science lessons – about as far from the flighty and capricious world of poetry as she could imagine. She employed the best-possible tutors to instruct her daughter, and it must have been a source of great satisfaction to her when Ada started exhibiting a passion for anything that involved engineering. At the age of 12 she would spend her time designing flying machines powered by steam, a full 15 years before such a design was actually patented by William Henson and John Stringfellow. She was also fascinated by scientific journals with their illustrations of the inventions that were helping to power the Industrial Revolution.

In 1835, at the age of 19, she married William King. When her husband was made Earl of Lovelace three years later, she became Lady Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. She is known today as Ada Lovelace, which is something of a mutilation of the correct form of her name.

However, although her marriage was a happy one that resulted in the birth of three children, an arguably more significant event occurred in her life when she was just 17. In June 1833, she was introduced to a man named Charles Babbage by her mentor, Mary Somerville, herself a very gifted mathematician and astronomer. Babbage, who was 42 at the time of his meeting with Lovelace, was an inventor and the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. He and Ada, drawn together by their admiration of each other’s mind, soon became firm friends.

Babbage was working on the design of a machine he called a Difference Engine, which would be able to work out logarithms and trigonometric functions. Despite acquiring very generous government funding for his research, he abandoned his attempts to construct such a contraption in order to concentrate on a far more complex device he named the Analytical Engine. On paper, this was the forerunner to the modern-day computer. It contained a component that could carry out calculations; a form of memory; and a means of programming (using punch cards). Unfortunately, it only ever remained on paper – Babbage spent the rest of his life improving the Analytical Engine without ever actually building it. No one – Babbage included – knew the workings of this ever-evolving theoretical machine to such a deep and forensic level than Lovelace.

In 1842, an Italian mathematician called Luigi Menabrea wrote a brief paper based on notes he had taken when Babbage had given a lecture on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. Lovelace was asked to translate the paper into English (from French). Since her understanding of the machine was so much deeper than Menabrea’s, she ended up correcting a lot of the paper. The following year she shared her work with Babbage. He was thrilled with what he read and asked her to carry on developing it. She promptly wrote twice as much again.

What is most astonishing about the paper Lovelace came up with is just how far ahead of its time it was. She set out in it the first computer programs ever to be published, even though the computer they were intended for had not been built. Indeed, it would not be until 1943, a century later, that the world’s first programmable, electronic, digital computer – Bletchley Park’s code-breaking Colossus – would see the light of day. Lovelace’s programs were not as unsophisticated as one might imagine, either. For instance, one of them would have enabled the Analytical Engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a series whose very definition goes way above the head of anyone not deeply immersed in the intricacies of higher mathematics.

Furthermore, while those few scientists who had concerned themselves with such machines had seen them as little more than number-crunching devices, Lovelace predicted that they could be used for a much wider range of applications, including the composition of music ‘of any degree of complexity’, the generation of graphics and the manipulation of symbols. This last capability is precisely what permits modern computers to carry out enormously complicated calculations. Her paper explains:

The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred, and the Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere “calculating machines”. It holds a position wholly its own; and the considerations it suggests are most interesting in their nature. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.

It’s a tragedy that one so evidently brilliant died so young. She contracted uterine cancer and spent many months in pain, nursed by her mother, until her death on 27 November 1852 at the age of 36.

In a letter to Michael Faraday, Babbage declared that Ada was ‘…that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force which few masculine intellects could have exerted over it…’

Although the young Ada clearly also possessed an exceptional natural talent as a mathematician and a logician, because of her sex the conventions of her day would ordinarily have seen these gifts quashed in favour of pursuits deemed more ladylike. Indeed, in the early 1800s it was unusual for girls to receive anything approaching a formal education as we would know it today. The highly exceptional circumstances of her upbringing nurtured and developed that talent.

Nearly a hundred years after she wrote the paper on the Analytical Engine, a mathematician, logician and cryptanalyst called Alan Turing came across it. Lovelace’s exploration not only helped shape Turing’s ideas on the development of computers but also influenced his work on the cracking of the Enigma Code. As such, one could argue that not only was Ada Lovelace the world’s first computer programmer, she also helped the Allies win World War II.

Given her obvious genius and importance in the world of science, it may be difficult to understand why Ada Lovelace isn’t a household name. Aside from the usual misogyny that routinely undervalues the achievements of women while exaggerating those of men, Lovelace’s reputation has been tarnished because she is her mother’s daughter. Annabella Milbanke has been repeatedly smeared by Byron’s fans and biographers, who have preferred to view their hero as the victim of the relationship and Annabella as the bitter and scheming wife. Ada simply became guilty by association. ‘Lovelace’s story is so often printed on paper made from her parents’ dirty laundry,’ as Suw Charman-Anderson so adroitly put it.

Charman-Anderson is the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, a celebration that occurs on the second Tuesday of October each year. After a century and a half of neglect, it’s only right that we should honour the woman who may have been saved from replicating the wild passions of her father, but whose wild passion for mathematics, logic and computers has had such an impact on the modern world.