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Ada Lovelace
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Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who, in 1843, published an extensive set of notes on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, an unbuilt mechanical general purpose computer, including what is widely described as the first published algorithm intended for execution by a machine, a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers. She is often called the first computer programmer for this reason, though the description is debated among historians: Babbage's own working notes contain earlier program fragments he never published, and some scholars argue Lovelace's principal contribution was less the algorithm itself than her broader insight, stated in the same notes, that such a machine could manipulate symbols generally and not only numbers.
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Algorithm, Concepts Lovelace's 1843 notes on the Analytical Engine included what is widely described as the first published algorithm intended for execution by a machine.
Algorithm, Concepts Why this is disputed. Ada Lovelace's 1843 notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine are widely described as containing the first published algorithm intended for execution by a machine (a method for computing Bernoulli numbers), and she is often called the first computer programmer for it. This attribution is genuinely disputed by historians: Babbage's own working notes contain earlier, unpublished program fragments of his own, and some scholars argue Lovelace's principal originality lay less in the algorithm itself than in her broader published insight that such a machine could manipulate symbols generally, not only numbers.
Her 1843 published notes on the engine include what is widely described as the first computer program; the correspondence between Babbage and Lovelace describing the engine is the first documented computer architecture.
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Associated With: Algorithm
A minority but persistent strand of scholarship holds that Charles Babbage, not Ada Lovelace, deserves primary credit for the Bernoulli-number algorithm published in her 1843 notes. Babbage's own surviving working papers contain program fragments and calculating sequences for the Analytical Engine that predate the notes' publication, and correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage during the notes' preparation shows him supplying mathematical guidance and corrections. Proponents of this view do not dispute that Lovelace wrote and published the notes, including the algorithm and her own broader remarks on the machine's general symbol-manipulating potential, only that the algorithm's underlying mathematical work may have originated substantially with Babbage rather than being Lovelace's independent invention.
A dissenting reading, from Historians crediting Charles Babbage as primary author of the algorithmWalter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Simon and Schuster, 2014
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