Two centuries ago, She envisioned an intelligent computer--- Ada Lovelace

Born Augusta Ada Byron on the 10 December 1815 in London to the family of notorious poet Lord Byron and mother;Anne Isabella Milbanke. Her father was one of the greats of poetry, but his personality was unstable. Her mother was highly intelligent, had been well-educated by private tutors, and was particularly enthusiastic about mathematics and the sciences.
Ada was only one month old when her father abandoned his wife and daughter, leaving Britain forever. He died in Greece when Ada was eight years old. Ada never knew him.
Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, seems to have had little or no affection for her daughter and had very little contact with her. The young girl was brought up by her maternal grandmother and servants. Her grandmother died when Ada was just seven years old, and Ada herself suffered long spells of poor health in both childhood and later.




AGE 4

In those days, there were no places for girls in the United Kingdom’s universities.
However, girls from wealthy, aristocratic families could still be educated to a high level by private tutors. And this is how Ada was educated because one thing her mother insisted upon was that Ada get a high quality education.
Her mother wanted Ada to concentrate particularly hard on mathematics and science just to prevent her from following her father's path because of how negatively he behaved.



AGE 17

At age 17, she met with Charles Babbage which was the genesis of her passion for computer He invited them to see a small-scale version of the calculating machine he was working on called "the difference engine".

Babbage wanted people to have the ability effortlessly compute lengthy calculations, and his idea was to build an infallible steam-driven or hand-cranked calculating machine. Ada was completely captivated by the concept, but there was little she could do at the time to help Babbage with his work.

She sent a message to Babbage requested copies of the machine’s blueprints, because she was determined to understand how the machine worked.

In 1842, Ada Lovelace became aware of a work in French called Sketch of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, by Luigi Federico Menabrea, an engineer. Menabrea had listened to lectures by Babbage and written them up in French. By this time, Babbage had moved on from the difference engine to a much higher level computer concept, the analytical engine.

The analytical engine would be capable of much more sophisticated calculations than the original difference engine. Featuring an arithmetic logic portion, control flow by loops and conditional branching, and separate memory, all of this was to be built using mechanical parts and powered by hand-cranking or steam!

Ada Lovelace got hold of Menabrea’s work (MEMOIR) and translated it into English adding her own notes which served as the basis for the analytical engine. When the work was published, most of the work published was actually her own.

She died 27 November 1852 at age 36 from uterian cancer, married William King, the Earl of Lovelace, with whom she had three children between 1836 and 1839.

Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace,  http://www.famousscientists.org/ada-lovelace/ for more info........

HOW SHE DISCOVERED HER PASSION

Her passion stemed from the believe that a computer can do much more than just calculating and number crunching as prpounded by Charles Babbage and many others in the same field.

LIMITATIONS

Despite all the limitations she encountered (no father figure, little or no attention from her mother, discrimination against women education at that time), she was persistent and focused on achieving her dreams.

STEPS TAKEN TO TURN HER DREAMS INTO A REALITY

She partnered with Charles Babbage because of their similarities in interest (mentorship).

Self development in the field.

CONTRIBUTIONS

She translated the Memoir from french to English and added some notes to the translated Memoir, which later on became critical in the works of Alan Turing, father of theoritical computer science and artificial intelligence (modern computers)