Lord Byron’s daughter Lady Ada Lovelace is almost as famous now as her father. An entire industry has sprung up around her. There are Ada books, films, T-shirts, toys, games, and even a programming language named after her. Astonishingly, she has a four-page entry in the Dictionary of 19th Century Science British Scientists. The book gives her the same amount of space as George Boole and Augustus de Morgan, and not much less than Karl Pearson, who established the discipline of mathematical statistics.
Like them, Ada is called a ‘mathematician’. Yet there is no evidence that she obtained any novel mathematical results. She left no published mathematical papers. Nor are there manuscripts from her containing anything mathematically novel. What then is the source of her reputation?
Ada certainly wanted to think of herself as a mathematician. Her letters show that she was convinced she had inherited her father’s genius (her term). For years, she took lessons from the textbook writer Mary Somerville, and from Augustus de Morgan himself. Later on, Ada biographers who had no mathematical expertise, like Doris Langley Moore, read the correspondence between them and presumed they contained great numerical insight. Instead, they show the opposite: that Ada struggled for days to solve elementary problems after years of study. For example, a five-minute ‘substitute-rearrange-simplify’ analysis problem defeated her after 11 days of bafflement in November of 1842. There are many examples of this overstrain on her part.
Much of Ada’s scientific legend is based on her involvement with Charles Babbage, the father of the modern computer. Babbage was an embattled genius who, for his own purposes, fueled the idea that she was a mathematician. This gave rise to the idea that Ada was the world’s first computer programmer, which is not true either.
In the 1820s Babbage had invented, and then partially constructed, a mechanical ‘Difference Engine’ calculator for making accurate numerical tables. When this government-funded project foundered due to its mechanical complexity – running through grants of £17,000 in the process — he promptly switched to a mostly-theoretical ‘Analytic Engine’.
On paper the new device had all the functional elements of a modern computer, but would use moving metal components rather than electronics: cogwheels, pinions, spindles and the like. Punch cards, adopted from Jacquard looms, would allow you to program it and to load or output data by activating levers. Algebraic expressions, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, could be calculated. And moving the cards would allow for recursive loops.
The trouble was that Babbage raced ahead with new extensions and improvements to his design, but neglected to explain how the device would work. On a visit to Italy in 1840 he enlisted the support of Luigi Menabrea – an engineer who would later become prime minister of Italy and prosecute Garibaldi in 1868 after the insurgent was stopped by the French at Mentana. Menabrea wrote up Babbage’s private lectures and his succinct and meticulous article, written in French and published in 1842 at Geneva, covered all the key ideas. Programming using the card software was clearly explained.
Meanwhile Ada, already known to Babbage from the early 1830s, had been introduced to his ideas. He was gratified to hear that she had worked up a translation of the Menabrea article not long after it came out. Why not write her own article, he suggested. She demurred. So he suggested she compile a series of ‘notes’ about the paper instead. She could select from a series of standard algebraic examples that Babbage provided. These included Bernoulli numbers, trivial to a mathematician. As he later disclosed in his autobiography, he worked out the Bernoulli details, ‘to save her the trouble’. In truth, their correspondence shows that she had asked him to do this, because she was unsure if they would work on his engine.
Ada added enthusiastic imagination to her prolix notes, convinced that the machine could calculate any function of any kind. According to her, the Engine ‘weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.’ She added no ideas of her own to her notes beyond these verbal flourishes, and the worked examples were just more detailed versions of Menabrea’s .
Since the Analytical Engine was designed to execute programs, the first programmer of it was Babbage himself. Menabrea had described programming too. Ada worked on the English description: she did not invent any piece of the Analytical Engine or its programming.
In truth Babbage had at least two ulterior motives here.
Firstly, he wished to enlist Ada, as he had Menabrea, to promote and bolster his ideas, making them the subject of broader discussion by people of substance. Her celebrity as the offspring of Lord Byron would not be enough, so he presented her as a ‘mathematician’. He even dubbed Ada an ‘enchantress of number’ in a letter to her – which was surely calculated flattery.
Secondly, and closely related, Babbage wanted to involve Ada in a long-running dispute he had with the British government, which in 1842 finally found the gumption to nix further funding of his long-stalled Difference Engine. She was willing to maintain the absurd fiction in her notes that the two engines were somehow unrelated ideas, so that the (theoretical) second in no way implied the neglect of the (concrete) first. Meanwhile she distributed her annotated translation of Menabrea’s article, accompanied by letters extolling her own mathematical powers.
After this we have no substantial trace of Ada in the world of computing-on-paper, or of ‘mathematics’ in general. She turned her attention elsewhere, including a ruinous turf-betting scheme in which Babbage’s role cannot be deciphered. It is idle to speculate about what might have been had she not died of cancer at age 36. Aspirations are not achievements.
Babbage’s motivated flattery does not withstand scrutiny. If you want to claim Ada was a mathematician, you should show her work.
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