It’s more than 160 years since the death of the computer pioneer Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage’s ‘enchantress of numbers’ and self-proclaimed ‘bride of science’. Not the least of Lovelace’s fascination is the way in which her reputation and the claims for her significance have fluctuated so wildly during that time.
She’s been hailed for her understanding of the potential of Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine and for her far-reaching vision of the role of the technology of the future. This has unfortunately led to her being credited with everything from the invention of the CD to the foundation of Silicon Valley. Alan Turing, no less, called one of his basic principles after her — ‘Lady Lovelace’s Objection’ — deriving from her crucial insight that artificial intelligence cannot originate anything. In the late 20th century, the US Department of Defense named a programming language in her memory, while one of Tom Stoppard’s most engaging creations, Thomasina, in his play Arcadia, an ill-fated, mathematical prodigy, was apparently inspired by her.
At the other end of the scale, Ada’s mathematical skills have been widely denigrated. She’s been dismissed as a charlatan and for being as mad as a hatter. She’s also been resurrected as a character in ITV’s execrable drama series Victoria.
Recently, a small group of Oxford mathematicians and historians of mathematics analysed Lovelace’s surviving papers, specifically the correspondence course she took with one of the leading mathematicians of the 1840s, Augustus de Morgan. They reached the conclusion that while Lovelace showed plenty of potential as a mathematician, her true strength lay in her extraordinary capacity to take on large, over-arching ideas and interpret them not only boldly but imaginatively. Among her many mercurial talents, Lovelace possessed the gift of what she described as ‘the combining faculty’, the ability to see points in common ‘between subjects having no apparent connexion, & hence seldom or never brought into juxtaposition’.
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