Questions to ask Ada Lovelace

Who Ada Lovelace was

Augusta Ada Byron was born in London on 10 December 1815, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Her parents separated when she was a few weeks old; Byron left England in 1816 and died in Greece in 1824, and she never knew him. Her mother had her taught mathematics and science, partly to steer her away from her father's temperament. At 17, in June 1833, she met the mathematician Charles Babbage and saw a working section of his Difference Engine. She married William King in 1835 and became Countess of Lovelace in 1838.

In 1843 she published an English translation of an article by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea on Babbage's planned Analytical Engine, adding seven Notes (A to G) about twice as long as the article. She died of cancer on 27 November 1852, aged 36, and was buried beside her father at Hucknall in Nottinghamshire.

Ada Lovelace Day and how to use this list

Ada Lovelace Day, started in 2009, falls on the second Tuesday of October each year (12 October in 2027) and celebrates women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It is a common date for school projects, so this list is built to work for a short class interview as well as a longer report.

Pick questions from at least three of the groups. Her answers should sound like a 19th century countess who loved mathematics: confident, vivid, sometimes grand. To try them out loud, you can talk to an AI recreation of Ada Lovelace on Yuga, built from her letters and Notes. It can be wrong, so cite the Notes themselves, not the app. See also our guide to writing interview questions.

Childhood, illness and learning mathematics

Record: at about 12 she planned a flying machine and wrote notes she called “Flyology”, studying birds' wings. A bout of measles in 1829 left her weak and largely bedbound for a long time. Her tutors and friends included the scientist Mary Somerville and, from 1840, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan, who taught her calculus by letter; many of those letters survive in the Lovelace papers.

1. What were you trying to work out when you designed a flying machine at 12?
2. How did you keep studying while you were ill for so long?
3. What did Mary Somerville teach you, besides mathematics?
4. What was it like learning calculus from Augustus De Morgan by post?

Babbage and the Analytical Engine

Record: Babbage's Difference Engine was designed to calculate tables of numbers. His later Analytical Engine, never built, was meant to be programmable using punched cards borrowed from the Jacquard loom, which wove patterns in silk. Menabrea wrote his article in French in 1842 after Babbage lectured in Turin. Lovelace's translation, signed only “A.A.L.”, appeared in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs in 1843. Her letters to Babbage that summer show her insisting on her own wording.

1. What did you see when Babbage showed you the Difference Engine in 1833?
2. How is the Analytical Engine different from a calculating machine?
3. Why did you add Notes three times longer than you were asked for?
4. Why did you sign your work only with your initials?
5. Why did you refuse to let Babbage add his complaint about the government to your article?

Inside the Notes: what she claimed

Record: in Note A she compares the Engine to the Jacquard loom and suggests it could act on things other than numbers, for example musical notes, if their relations could be expressed in its notation. In Note G she sets out, step by step, how the Engine would calculate the Bernoulli numbers, with a table of operations and variables. Note G also contains her warning that the Engine cannot originate anything.

1. Why did you choose the Bernoulli numbers for your example?
2. How did you think the Engine could compose music?
3. What do you mean when you say the Engine cannot originate anything?
4. Did you write the first computer program?
5. What is “poetical science”?

The “first programmer” question: what historians say

Be careful here, because historians disagree. Babbage had sketched programs for the Engine in his own unpublished notes from 1837 onwards, and some writers (Dorothy Stein in 1985, for example) argued that he did most of the mathematics behind Note G. Others, including Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin and Adrian Rice in Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist (2018), use her correspondence with De Morgan to show she was a capable mathematician who understood the machine deeply. A safe statement: her Note G contains the first published description of a sequence of operations for a general purpose computing machine, and her Notes were the fullest account of what such a machine might do.

Family, fame and her last years

Record: she had three children between 1836 and 1839. In the late 1840s she ran up gambling debts, betting on horse races. She asked to be buried beside Byron.

1. How did you feel about the father you never met?
2. How did your mother shape the way you think?
3. How did you balance three young children and your mathematics?
4. What happened with the betting on horse races?
5. Why did you ask to be buried next to Lord Byron?
6. What would you want young women studying mathematics to know?
7. What do you hope people will make of the Analytical Engine one day?
8. What did you and Babbage argue about most?

Sample answers in her words

Q: How would you describe the Analytical Engine?

Q: Can the Engine think for itself?

Q: What was it like to be Byron's daughter and a mathematician?

Questions she couldn't answer

She died in 1852, so leave out electronic computers, the internet, artificial intelligence as we know it, and the programming language named Ada (after her) in 1980. She also never saw an Analytical Engine work: it was never built. You can ask a better version of the same idea: “What could a machine like this do in a hundred years, if someone built it?” Her Notes give her answer. Note too that a working Difference Engine No. 2 was built from Babbage's drawings by the Science Museum in London only in 1991.

Where to read her own writing

• Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, by L. F. Menabrea, with Notes by the Translator (1843). The full text, with all seven Notes and the Note G table, is free online at Fourmilab.
• Her letters, in Betty Alexandra Toole's Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (1992), which prints many of them.
• The Lovelace Byron papers, on deposit at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which include her correspondence with De Morgan and Babbage.
• Hollings, Martin and Rice, Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist (2018), short, illustrated and based on the Bodleian papers.

She also appears in our list of women scientists in history and in the Ada Lovelace Day article.