Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) is celebrated today by Google, with a doodle already acclaimed by several tech publications around the world wide web. For those of you unfamiliar with Ada Lovelace’s work and achievements, she is known for translating from French to English, and annotating, Luigi Menabrea’s description of the Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician Charles Babbage.
Her annotations deserve world-wide recognition, and are considered the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. Today, Ada Lovelace is widely considered the world’s first computer programmer. Google couldn’t miss the opportunity to make her achievements known to the world. The following doodle celebrates the her life and career:
Google doodle celebrates the 197th anniversary of Ada Lovelace’s birthday.Today’s Google doodle shows Ada Lovelace writing her program with a quill pen, the evolution of computer devices since the first built to present, ending with a modern laptop and tablet, that play music, thus fulfilling Ada’s prediction that computers might be used to write music:
“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,” words attributed to Lovelace are as she wrote them.
The legitimate daughter of Lord Byron with Anne Isabella Byron was one of the first people to foresee the capability of computers to go beyond number-crunching. Although her role as the first computer programmer in history is a matter of debate (mainly because the computer in question was never built), her role in computing history is undeniable.
The modern computer programming language Ada ( a structured, statically typed, imperative, wide-spectrum, and object-oriented high-level computer programming language) is named in her honour.
