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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
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Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace, whose real name was Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, and daughter to the poet Lord Byron, is widely considered to be the world’s first computer programmer, at least in the theoretical sense. As a young woman, Lovelace befriended the mathematician Charles Babbage who wrote plans for the Analytical Engine, a clockwork counting machine. In 1843, Lovelace translated an article on the Analytical Engine by Italian Engineer Luigi Menabrea. Babbage asked Lovelace to expand upon the article in appendix notes—which eventually ran triple the length of the original piece. Those notes included an algorithm, steps the computer would take in solving certain mathematical sequences, which overtime has awarded her credit as the first computer programmer. Unfortunately, the machine was never built, so the program could never be tested.
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