Who Will Design the Future?

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who lived in the first half of the 19th century. (She was also the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who invited Mary Shelley to his house in Geneva for a weekend of merriment and a challenge to write a ghost story, which would become Frankenstein.) In 1842, Lovelace was tasked with translating an article from French into English for Charles Babbage, the “Grandfather of the Computer.” Babbage’s piece was about his Analytical Engine, a revolutionary new automatic calculating machine. Although originally retained solely to translate the article, Lovelace also scribbled extensive ideas about the machine into the margins, adding her unique insight, seeing that the Analytical Engine could be used to decode symbols and to make music, art, and graphics. Her notes, which included a method for calculating the Bernoulli numbers sequence and for what would become known as the “Lovelace objection,” were the first computer programs on record, even though the machine could not actually be built at the time.¹

Her contributions were astonishing. Though never formally trained as a mathematician, Lovelace was able to see beyond the limitations of Babbage’s invention and imagine the power and potential of programmable computers; also, she was a woman, and women in the first half of the 19th century were typically not seen as suited for this type of career. Lovelace had to sign her work with just her initials because women weren’t thought of as proper authors at the time.² Still, she persevered,³ and her work, which would eventually be considered the world’s first computer algorithm, later earned her the title of the first computer programmer.

Lovelace was an imaginative and poetic mathematician, who said that the Analytical Engine “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” and called mathematics “poetical science.” She arrived in the field educated but also unshackled by conventional training, and so was able to envision that this new type of computing machine could be used for far more than just numbers and quantities.

Ada Lovelace took us “from calculation to computation,” and nearly two centuries later, her visionary insights have proved true. She received little recognition for her contributions at the time and didn’t receive an official New York obituary until 2018, when the  decided to go back and eulogize the many women and people of color the newspaper had overlooked since 1851. She was able to see the vast potential of the computer in the mid-19th century, and her creative and unconventional approach to mathematical exploration has much to teach us about the power of diversity, inclusion, and multidisciplinary, cross-pollinating intelligence.