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First Computer Geek |
Charles Baggage was a 19th c. London scientist, mathematician and inventor, who sought to create a method to calculate mathematical tables mechanically so as to remove the high rate of human error of calculators. He is the father of computer we now know (it is programmable) and his brain is on display in the London Science Museum.
Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, was the daughter of the Lord Byron during his short-lived marriage with Baroness Wentworth. Early on her parents separated and, fearful that Ada would inherit what her mother considered her father's "insanity," the baroness pushed for the rational of mathematics on her only child. Like her mother (who was a patron for Baggage) Ada was an admirable mathematician and, in 1842 started working on Baggage's Analytical Machine - a machine programmed with coded punched cards. For it, from 1842 to 1843 over a 9 months period, she translated mathematician Luigi Menabrea's sequence of Bernoilli numbers into punchcard code. If the machine had functioned at the time this would have been the first functioning computer process, with the computer solving the mathematical sequence. Ada's work was the first algorithm specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, in other words the first program.
That is all to say that the first computer programmer was a woman with half of her genes rooted in romanticism.
