Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelacewas an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. Her notes on the engine include what is recognised as the first algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. As a result, she is often regarded as the first computer programmer...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMathematician
Date of Birth10 December 1815
imagination science unseen worlds
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.
may want matter
I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc.
genius study feels
The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.
expression numbers musical
The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
may want fractions
Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.
brain shows mortals
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.
numbers world forget
Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans-- everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.
real discovery imagination
Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently ... It is that which feels & discovers what is, the REAL which we see not, which exists not for our senses... Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things... Imagination too shows what is ... Hence she is or should be especially cultivated by the truly Scientific, those who wish to enter into the worlds around us!
giving give-me ifs
If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science?
truth order analysis
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. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with.
religious intellectual together
The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.
essentials minimum completing
One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.
powerful mean purpose
A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.
simple reality differences
The Difference Engine can in reality (as has been already partly explained) do nothing but add; and any other processes, not excepting those of simple subtraction, multiplication and division, can be performed by it only just to that extent in which it is possible, by judicious mathematical arrangement and artifices, to reduce them to a series of additions.