Ada Lovelace

6 Mar, 2008 000 Computer science, knowledge and systems

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century mathematician Ada Lovelace. Deep in the heart of the Pentagon is a network of computers. They control the US military, the most powerful army on the planet, but they are controlled by a programming language called Ada. It’s named after Ada Lovelace, the allegedly hard drinking 19th century mathematician and daughter of Lord Byron. In her work with Charles Babbage on a steam driven calculating machine called the Difference Engine, Ada understood, perhaps before anyone else, what a computer might truly be. As such the Difference Engine is the spiritual ancestor of the modern computer.

Ada Lovelace has been called many things - the first computer programmer and a prophet of the computer age - but most poetically perhaps by Babbage himself as an ‘enchantress of numbers’.

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Guests

  • Patricia Fara 17 episodes
    Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge
  • Doron Swade No other episodes
    Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University
  • John Fuegi No other episodes
    Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University

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Programme ID: b0092j0x

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0092j0x

Auto-category: 004.092 (Biography of computer scientists)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. Deep in the bowels of the Pentagon is a network of computers.