Ada Countess of Lovelace - St James's Square, London, UK
N 51° 30.451 W 000° 08.183
30U E 698720 N 5710153
This blue plaque is on the wall of a building at the north side of St James's Square.
Waymark Code: WME7BJ
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 04/13/2012
Views: 3
The plaque, by English Heritage, reads:
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English Heritage
Ada
Countess of
Lovelace
1815 - 1852
Pioneer
of Computing
lived here
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The SDSC website (visit
link) tells us:
"Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage
between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated
from Byron just a month after Ada was born. Four months later, Byron left
England forever. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece in 1823) and was
raised by her mother, Lady Byron. Her life was an apotheosis of struggle between
emotion and reason, subjectivism and objectivism, poetics and mathematics, ill
health and bursts of energy.
Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to
it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to
counter dangerous poetic tendencies. But Ada's complex inheritance became
apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. It
was mathematics that gave her life its wings.
Lady Byron and Ada moved in an elite London society, one in which gentlemen not
members of the clergy or occupied with politics or the affairs of a regiment
were quite likely to spend their time and fortunes pursuing botany, geology, or
astronomy. In the early nineteenth century there were no "professional"
scientists (indeed, the word "scientist" was only coined by William Whewell in
1836)--but the participation of noblewomen in intellectual pursuits was not
widely encouraged.
One of the gentlemanly scientists of the era was to become Ada's lifelong
friend. Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, was
known as the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine
that operated by the method of finite differences. Ada met Babbage in 1833, when
she was just 17, and they began a voluminous correspondence on the topics of
mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects.
In 1835, Ada married William King, ten years her senior, and when King inherited
a noble title in 1838, they became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. Ada had
three children. The family and its fortunes were very much directed by Lady
Byron, whose domineering was rarely opposed by King.
Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine (although
the Difference Engine was not finished), an Analytical Engine. His Parliamentary
sponsors refused to support a second machine with the first unfinished, but
Babbage found sympathy for his new project abroad. In 1842, an Italian
mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the subject of
the Analytical Engine. Babbage enlisted Ada as translator for the memoir, and
during a nine-month period in 1842-43, she worked feverishly on the article and
a set of Notes she appended to it. These are the source of her enduring fame.
Ada called herself 'an Analyst (& Metaphysician),' and the combination was put
to use in the Notes. She understood the plans for the device as well as Babbage
but was better at articulating its promise. She rightly saw it as what we would
call a general-purpose computer. It was suited for 'developping [sic] and
tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine [is] the material expression of
any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity.' Her Notes
anticipate future developments, including computer-generated music.
Ada died of cancer in 1852, at the age of 37, and was buried beside the father
she never knew. Her contributions to science were resurrected only recently, but
many new biographies attest to the fascination of Babbage's 'Enchantress of
Numbers.''"