Information about Ada Byron's Notes On The Analytical Engine

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (born Ada Byron) is renowned for her description and associated notes on Charles Babbage's design for a mechanical computer called The Analytical Engine. The analytical engine was never built, but Ada's notes are widely recognized as containing the first ever computer program.

History

In 1842 Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his analytical engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and future prime minister, wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève in October 1842.

Babbage asked Ada Lovelace to translate Menabrea's paper into English, subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the translation. Ada spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in The Ladies Diary and Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the initialism "A.A.L.".

Content

Her notes were labeled alphabetically from A to G. Note G is the longest of the seven. In note G, Ada describes an algorithm for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. It is generally considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and for this reason she is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.

Note G could possibly also be said to be the first expression of the modern computer phrase "Garbage In, Garbage Out". Lovelace wrote

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

External links

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (December 10, 1815 – November 27, 1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine.
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Charles Babbage FRS (26 December 1791 – 18 October 1871) was an English mathematician, philosopher, and mechanical engineer who originated the idea of a programmable computer. Parts of his uncompleted mechanisms are on display in the London Science Museum.
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computer is a machine which manipulates data according to a list of instructions.

Computers take numerous physical forms. The first devices that resemble modern computers date to the mid-20th century (around 1940 - 1941), although the computer concept and various machines
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The analytical engine, an important step in the history of computers, was the design of a mechanical general-purpose computer by the British professor of mathematics Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837, but Babbage continued to work on the design until his death in 1871.
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A computer program is one or more instructions that are intended for execution by a computer. Specifically, it is a symbol or combination of symbols forming an algorithm that may or may not terminate, and that algorithm is written in a programming language.
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University of Turin (Italian Università degli Studi di Torino, UNITO) is a university in the city of Turin in the Piedmont region of north-western Italy. It has 12 faculties and 55 departments.
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Federico Luigi, Conte Menabrea, Marquis of Valdora (September 4, 1809 – May 24, 1896) was an Italian general and statesman.

Biography

Menabrea was born at Chambery, then part of the Kingdom of Sardinia.
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Anthem
Il Canto degli Italiani
(also known as Fratelli d'Italia)


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engineer is someone who is trained or professionally engaged in a branch of engineering.[1] Engineers use technology, mathematics, and scientific knowledge to solve practical problems.
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French (français, pronounced [fʁɑ̃ˈsɛ]) is a Romance language originally spoken in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, and today by about 300 million people around the world as either
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English}}} 
Writing system: Latin (English variant) 
Official status
Official language of: 53 countries
Regulated by: no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1: en
ISO 639-2: eng
ISO 639-3: eng  
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Scientific Memoirs, Selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of science and Learned Societies and from Foreign Journals was a series of books edited and published by Richard Taylor (1781–1858) in London between 1837 and 1852.
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In mathematics, computing, linguistics, and related disciplines, an algorithm is a finite list of well-defined instructions for accomplishing some task that, given an initial state, will proceed through a well-defined series of successive states, eventually terminating in an
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In mathematics, the Bernoulli numbers are a sequence of rational numbers with deep connections in number theory. Although easy to calculate, the values of the Bernoulli numbers have no elementary description; they are closely related to the values of the Riemann zeta function at
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programmer or software developer is someone who programs computers, that is, one who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.
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Garbage In, Garbage Out (abbreviated to GIGO) is a phrase in the field of computer science. It refers to the fact that computers, unlike humans, will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output.
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