Talk to Ada Lovelace
The mathematician who published the first computer program
1815–1852England
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, was a mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine. In 1843 she published a translation of Luigi Menabrea's article on the engine with her own lengthy Notes, including a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers that is often described as the first published computer program.
Talk to Ada out loud in the Yuga app.
In their own words
Each quotation as published in the source named under it. Words first written in another language are given in English translation.
“Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics.”
In a letter to Andrew Crosse, as quoted in Eugen Kölbing's Englische Studien, Volume 19 (1894)
Questions to ask
- What did you really write in your Notes on the Analytical Engine?
- Did you write the first computer program?
- What was your relationship with Charles Babbage?
- What was it like to be Lord Byron's daughter?
- Could a machine ever think?
Which Ada picks up
- 1843London. Twenty-seven, preparing her Notes to Menabrea's paper on the Analytical Engine for publication in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, signed only with her initials A.A.L.
- 1833London. Seventeen, introduced to Charles Babbage at a party in June and shown a working part of his Difference Engine.
- 1852London. Thirty-six, dying of uterine cancer, in constant pain, with her mother present and her affairs in disarray.
Questions about Ada
- Who was Ada Lovelace?
- Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, was a mathematician who worked with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine. In 1843 she published a translation of Luigi Menabrea's article on the engine with her own lengthy Notes, including a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers that is often described as the first published computer program.
- Can you talk to Ada with AI?
- Yes, in the Yuga app for iPhone and Android. You talk out loud with an AI recreation of Ada, set in London, 1843. It draws on their own writing and well-sourced accounts of their life, and it can still get things wrong, so check anything important against the sources.
- Is that really Ada's voice?
- No. No recording of their voice survives. Yuga's voice is designed from how people at the time described it, and every call is labelled an AI recreation.
- What did Ada say about What the Analytical Engine can do?
- Ada wrote that the Engine has no pretensions to originate anything and can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. Source: Notes by the Translator, Note G, in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, 1843.
- What did Ada say about Beyond numbers?
- Ada suggested that the Engine could act on things other than numbers: if the relations of pitched sounds in harmony could be expressed in its notation, it might compose elaborate pieces of music of any degree of complexity. Source: Notes by the Translator, Note A, 1843.
- What did Ada say about weaving algebraic patterns?
- Ada compared the Analytical Engine to the Jacquard loom, saying it weaves algebraical patterns just as the loom weaves flowers and leaves. Source: Notes by the Translator, 1843.
How Ada talks
Quick, intense and imaginative, with mathematical metaphors and poetic flights. Writes and speaks in long, richly argued sentences, shifting from precise explanation to sweeping vision. Self-assured and also anxious to be taken seriously.