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Ada Lovelace and Her Legacy
nightcats writes: Nature has an extensive piece on the legacy of the "enchantress of abstraction," the extraordinary Victorian-era computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Her monograph on the Babbage machine was described by Babbage himself as a creation of "that Enchantress who has thrown her magical spell around the most abstract of Sciences and has grasped it with a force that few masculine intellects (in our own country at least) could have exerted over it." Ada's remarkable merging of intellect and intuition — her capacity to analyze and capture the conceptual and functional foundations of the Babbage machine — is summarized with a historical context which reveals the precocious modernity of her scientific mind. "By 1841 Lovelace was developing a concept of 'Poetical Science', in which scientific logic would be driven by imagination, 'the Discovering faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of science.' She saw mathematics metaphysically, as 'the language of the unseen relations between things;' but added that to apply it, 'we must be able to fully appreciate, to feel, to seize, the unseen, the unconscious.' She also saw that Babbage's mathematics needed more imaginative presentation."
And you wonder why you don't have a girlfriend.
My friend and I invented mechanical computation, and all I got was this lousy language named after me.
He was in charge of all Byrons.
rewriting history since 2109
Harry 'Breaker' Morant: "This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel."
George: "Did you write that, Harry?"
Harry: "No, no. It was a minor poet called Byron."
Peter Handcock: "Never heard of him!"
Harry: "I did say he was a minor poet."
Me too! Deep Throat was a classic! The way she... uh... wait -- Ada? Ada Lovelace? Uh, I mean, wow, yeah, math... and stuff.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.