Some lovelace inspiration for women

As the world marks the 200th birth anniversary of this computer visionary, in this excerpt from her biography, ‘Ada Lovelace – Bride of Science’ by Benjamin Woolley, read all about her fascination with “mathematical curiosities” and the algebra “fairies” that cast their spell on her

In 1840, Italy’s foremost scientists gathered together in the city of Turin to discuss the state of their nation’s scientific achievements. It was an occasion of some significance, since despite this being the country that gave the world the Renaissance, Italy’s scientific fraternity had yet to achieve the sense of identity and confidence that was so well developed in neighbouring France.

The organizers were anxious to make an impact, and so decided to invite a foreign guest of honour: Charles Babbage.…Babbage soon established himself in an apartment, stuck his plans and diagrams for the Analytical Engine to the walls and proceeded to receive a procession of the ‘most eminent geometers and engineers of Italy’, including [mathematician Giovanni] Plana himself and Captain Luigi Menabrea, a young military engineer who would go on to become Prime Minister of a newly unified Italy. …

Babbage quickly ran into difficulties demonstrating the significance of the Analytical Engine to his audience, even though it did include some of Italy’s foremost mathematicians and engineers. His engine would take the principle of mechanical calculation to a different level altogether, he told them.

Whereas the Difference Engine used one particular method or formula to solve mathematical problems, this machine could use any, and apparently decide which depending the results of earlier calculations. One baffled professor asked how it could do such a thing – for example determine which of several different possible approaches to a given mathematical problem to apply – when such a decision seemed to demand an act of judgement?

The professor’s question went to the very heart of the issue, and indicated the chief innovation that the Analytical Engine embodied: the ability to perform different mathematical functions using the same mechanism. …

A gigantic idea that astounds the imagination – perhaps it was this awed reaction to Babbage’s proposal that made Charles Wheatstone think of a particular name when he first saw Menabrea’s paper published in French in the October 1842 edition of the Bibliotheque Universelle de Geneve.

Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs had recently been founded to publish translations of interesting papers appearing in foreign journals, and Wheatstone had been retained to come up with suggestions. Menabrea’s article was an obvious candidate, and Wheatstone knew of just the person to translate it: Augusta Ada Lovelace.

When Wheatstone approached Ada with his proposal, she evidently snatched at it. This was surely what she had been waiting for, something that she could focus on that embraced her ‘peculiar combination’ of qualities. She immediately commenced work on the project, and a few months after the original’s publication delivered the result of her efforts to Wheatstone for submission to the Scientific Memoirs, anxious to know whether or not it would be accepted.

At around the same time, probably early 1843, she told Babbage what she had done. He had been ill, and knew nothing about her labours. ‘I asked why she had not herself written an original paper on a subject with which she was so intimately acquainted?’ he recorded in his memoirs. ‘To this Lady Lovelace replied that the thought had not occurred to her.

I then suggested that she should add some notes to Menabrea’s memoir.’ It was a startling proposal. Women rarely wrote papers for scientific journals. Mary Somerville was an exceptional case. The few women who wrote about scientific subjects (for example Maria Edgeworth, the novelist who was so admired by Annabella, or Jane Marcet, whose Conversations on Chemistry inspired the self-taught Faraday to take up chemistry) did so only on the basis that they were making ideas discovered by men available to a mostly female lay readership.

The sort of notes being proposed by Babbage would be for male readers – expert, scientific male readers. How could a woman, a countess whose only claim to fame thus far was that her father was a poet, possibly be the best candidate for such a task? In more contemporary terms, it would be like nominating Lisa-Marie Presley to annotate a study of quantum computation.

Ada, however, felt herself to be well prepared for the task. ….

For obvious reasons, Ada found the concept of imaginary numbers fascinating. They behaved slightly differently from real (i.e., normal) numbers, but could be manipulated using the same basic arithmetic. And, as various mathematicians had shown at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, they could be combined with real numbers, yielding ‘complex numbers’, the properties of which could be explored by plotting a graph, with one axis representing the imaginary component of the complex number, the other axis the real part.

This created a new form of two-dimensional geometry (a geometry that a hundred and fifty years later would be shown to have as one of its distinctive shapes that icon of chaos theory, the Mandelbrot Set). …

Imaginary numbers were not the only arithmetical phenomenon to lure Ada away from mathematics into metaphysics. Her struggles with certain aspects of algebra produced the same response, but more with an aim of escaping the drudgery of substitution and calculation than probing new intellectual frontiers.

The way one formula could be derived from another, for example, continued to perplex her, and she began to observe half-seriously how much algebraic expressions were like ‘sprites and fairies’, ‘deceptive, troublesome & tantalizing’ little creatures that could adopt any form they chose.

The fairies, in fact, fluttered into her mathematical work with increasing frequency. In her now chummy letters to Babbage, she even described herself as being one. ‘Science has thrown its net over me, & has fairly ensnared the fairy, or whatever she is,’ she wrote on one occasion. …

When it came to Babbage, this ‘fairyism’, as she dubbed her obsession, was evidently deployed to contrast her own more speculative approach to mathematics with his more down-to-earth one. It was her chance to indulge in ‘a little play & scope’, as she put it. But it also reflected a much wider issue.

(From Ada Lovelace – Bride of Science, by Benjamin Woolley; Publisher Pan Macmillan; 499)