The very first programmer in history

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The very first programmer in history

Ada Augusta Lovelace (1815 - 1852, British Empire) was an English mathematician. The project is famous for creating a description of the calculating machine (computer) created by Charles Babbage. Created the world's first program for this machine. He is the first programmer in history who introduced the terms "cycle" (repetitions) and "work cell" into use.

Unwelcome baby girl

Before the birth of his daughter Ada, her father Lord Byron expected his child to be a "good boy" and was devastated when his wife Anna Isabella gave birth to a daughter on 1815 December 10. On January 16 of the following year, by order of the Lord, Anna Isabella took her five-week-old daughter with her and went to her parents' house. Although British law at the time gave the father full custody of the children in the case of a divorce, Byron did not even try to claim the child for himself, but asked his sister to be aware of his daughter's affairs.

Leonardo da Vinci in a skirt

Ada's mother worried that her daughter would inherit her father's penchant for writing and grow up to be just as eccentric and quick-tempered. Therefore, from a young age, he did not welcome the girl's passion for reading prose and poetry, and in every way focused her attention on concrete sciences. In particular, the mathematician Augustus de Morgan was invited by Mrs. Byron to teach her daughter. As a result, at the age of 13, Ada had already created several drawings of flying machines.

A meeting of fate

It is known that Ada was familiar with famous people of his time, such as the prose writer Charles Dickens, the physicist Michael Faraday, and David Brewster (inventor of the kaleidoscope). However, there was a meeting that largely determined his life path. He met the famous mathematics professor Charles Babbage. A few years earlier, he had invented a logarithmic machine capable of performing calculations up to twenty digits. It was this machine that would later be recognized as the world's first computer.

The very first software

Ada Lovelace is called the world's first computer programmer because of her work, which consists of an English translation of an article describing Babbage's invention.

It was Ada who introduced computer terms such as loop and cell when describing Babbage's machine. He also compiled a set of operations for calculating Bernoulli numbers on this machine. It is this set of operations that is recognized as the first computer program in history. Babbage never built his own machine, it was collected after his death and is now kept in the Science Museum in London.

Memory

Ada Lovelace died on November 1852, 27, aged 37. His father also died at this age. He was buried in the family cemetery alongside the father he never knew.

In his honor, in the 1980s, the US Department of Defense created a programming language called Ada.