Countess Of Lovelace Research Paper

Throughout history women have been held back by society’s expectations. They have been over looked and taken for granted; as if they were inferior to men. For hundreds of years women have been expected to only bare children and take care of things in the household. Often times women were not allowed to receive an education. Despite all that there have been a few that managed to defy the odds, break expectations and have truly made a difference in the world. A true genius, Augusta Ada Byron Countess of Lovelace was one of the few, and one who changed the mathematical landscape forever. Augusta Ada Byron Countess of Lovelace better known as Ada Lovelace was born in London, England on December 10, 1815. She was born to

Many great minds were known to be living in this area; such as the likes of men who spend their time researching botany, geology, or astronomy. While living there at only 17 Ada met one of the many great scientist of the era, Charles Babbage, who would go on to become Ada’s lifelong friend. They studied a lot together on many topics like mathematics and logic and eventually all topics. Ada married at age 19 in 1833 to William King. King eventually inherited a noble title in 1838 which made them the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. Together they had three children. Despite all this Lady Anne was still very much a part of Ada’s life as she directed the family and its fortunes with little opposition by King. It is often believed that the reason for Lady Anne’s handling of the family fortune was due to Ada’s gambling behavior. Ada was once forced to pawn the Lovelace family’s diamonds to gain the money back that was lost from her gambling. It is known that Ada once lost £3,200 betting on a losing horse at a derby. In 1834 Charles Babbage made plans for a never before heard of kind of calculating machine, an Analytical

Although her work was recognized during her time it was in 1953 when it gained wider recognition after being published in B.V. Bowden’s book named, Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. As computer science flourished in the 1950’s Ada began gaining fans. Ada has often times been called the first computer programmer. Ada was the first to write a machine algorithm for a computing machine which existed only on paper. This was a remarkable task because not only was she a women but she was a women in the 1840’s a time when women were extremely oppressed. Ada was a visionary she showed the understanding of numbers and realized they could be used to represent more than just quantities as put by her “might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of [mathematical] expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”(Klein, 2015). She also realized that a machine that manipulated numbers might also be used to manipulate data represented by numbers. Not only was Ada the founder of