Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was an English mathematician, commentator on Babbage’s Analytical Engine and writer.
The Lady, today known as Ada Lovelace, lived In London 1815-1852. She was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.
Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician. She commentated on Babbage’s Analytical Engine and wrote the program of the engine’s calculation of Bernoulli numbers. This program is regarded the first computer program in the world.
She had a strong interest in safe betting systems and music. She gave her name to the assembler language ADA and the Lovelace Medal.
Copying nautical or logarithmic tables is tedious work and even more prone to errors. The English mathematician Charles Babbage therefore suggested to the British Admiralty to build a machine for this purpose. Inspired by the new mechanical looms and by the development of automata in the emerging watchmaking industry. He combined rollers and cams in order to apply mathematical operations, which always remained the same, to different initial values with constant precision. He thus created the first, still purely mechanical calculators in the 19th century. They are the precursors of today’s computers. Ada Lovelace developed the programs to run these machines. s are created that can also reproduce irregular movements as well as forward and backward movements. Babbage clocks are, in a sense, ‘non-linear’ clocks. Their microprocessors open up elements of complex rules (algorithms) to modern haute horlogerie, that we know otherwise from computers.
