Ada Lovelace - the visionary of computer science

Two centuries ago, there were no cars, no airplanes, no electricity in homes. Steam engines were only beginning to appear. But there was of course a lot of navigation. The nautical and astronomical tables used to determine the position of ships were calculated by hand. These calculations took days, weeks and even months, and many mistakes were made. As a result, there were a lot of navigational accidents, for example boats that ran aground on reefs. The very great mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage then wanted to build a calculating machine that could do all these calculations faster than humans and without errors. But Babbage himself did not see the full potential of his machine. The person who will see all this revolutionary potential is Ada Lovelace, born in 1815. At age 12, Ada wants to understand how birds fly, and she tries to imagine a way to allow humans to fly. She analyzes the shape of birds and the connection between the size of their body and their wings. She then makes plans to build her own wings. At 17, Ada visited Babbage's laboratory and discovered his calculating machine. She's fascinated, falls in admiration in front of the machine and asks Babbage to borrow some plans. Years later, after further studies in mathematics, she will begin to work with Babbage. She will then write the first sophisticated computer program in history, a program that calculates the famous Bernoulli numbers, which are crucial for performing all kinds of complex operations. For this purpose, she invents certain computer concepts, such as operation cards, variables, loops, loops within loops, and so on. But that's not all. Ada sees beyond simple calculation. She imagines the future possibilities of such a machine as an aid to human creativity to compose music or create works of art, just as we do today with artificial intelligence. Here is her portrait transposed by computer in the style of Van Gogh, then in the cubist style, with music also composed artificially. And all this calculated in a few tens of seconds. Specifically, here is what she wrote. If the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony were amenable to abstract operations, then the engine could use them to compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent. But Ada sees even further. She hopes one day to be able to understand how the brain works mathematically. She says she wants to put cerebral phenomena into equations. This caused the calculus of the nervous system. And where did all this lead her? Nowhere. She died at the very young age of 36 from cancer of the uterus. But today, 200 years later, we recognize and admire her imagination and flamboyant creativity. The U.S. Department of Defense has even named the programming language Ada in her honor. In short, very young, Ada wanted to fly. Why? Maybe to go very high and see further than everyone else, in order to be a visionary.