Ada Lovelace was born in 1791 to a family of prominent mathematicians. She was the youngest of six children but only got an education after she married Henry James Lovelace in 1807. On June 19, 1822, at age 27 her husband died. Her name became part of the surname after her death.
In the 1830s, with the invention of the telegraph, women had gained greater access to higher education, and some even received degrees from universities. Ada went on to earn two other degrees: one from Cambridge in 1840, and one from Harvard University in 1847.
At this time it was not possible for women to obtain these degrees for free because it was difficult to get funding. Instead, Ada would have to find a job for herself in order to support her studies. So she worked in partnership with Jonathan St. Clair, who helped him pay his way through university.
Eventually he left to study there himself. St. Clair took over managing Ada’s finances and started preparing her for school. He also taught math, and so when she attended Cambridge, he followed her.
When they were both young women, Ada’s father gave them money to give to each of their sisters and that allowed all of them to go to university. By now, they had several years of schooling under their belt. They studied both mathematics and philosophy at Oxford and Cambridge. Ada spent about three years studying for a degree at Cambridge and then returned to Oxford. She would return to England again when she was 30 or 31, and had another semester there in her second year. During this period, she would come across several students during which time she was able to gain more practical experience using computing resources.
While studying there, she wrote and published papers and articles which became very popular with people around the world. One was The Elements of Number Theory (1844), written by Charles Babbage, later created in full by Charles Darwin. This paper explored the concepts behind calculus, algebra and number theory and had been read by hundreds of thousands of readers. Ada had found that for everyone to comprehend the ideas in the book, they had to understand how the text was put together.
But there were many people reading the papers and only a few people could use the information and apply it to their own problems. For example, the idea that the sum of all numbers is equal to 0 was extremely useful in real life (as well as helping calculate the volume of an object). It also made sense to many economists, who then used the results to predict the rate at which interest rates would change.
While working on this paper, Ada began collaborating with John Napier, a fellow student in mathematics. Together, they designed a new mathematical device called decimal fractions, and developed a method for solving mathematical equations by replacing variables and terms with decimals.
These decimals, while being larger than ones that are currently used, would eventually be rendered useless because we now have computers with a number of decimal places (so there won’t be any need to create them in the future) and so the same calculation will be done more efficiently. It wasn’t until Charles Babbage’s design of the analytical engine was complete that it was finally widely accepted. Charles Babbage’s machine, which used punched cards, became the key to developing systems based on logic and probability (which can be applied to today’s modern computers).
At the end of the 1800s, Charles Babbage invented the concept of computer memory, and with it came the first programmable digital computer model. Using different sets of weights and biases (or, if you want to keep your programming simple, what is commonly referred to today as keywords) and programming code to perform calculations, this type of computer was able to execute functions on instructions that would be fed into it as well as provide an output.
Because computers are so complex, it is impossible for anyone, including computer scientists, engineers and software developers, to fully understand all of their components. However, it has become increasingly easier to learn what functions and instructions do, as well as how those functions and instructions are implemented into hardware and software.
As the ability to develop programs increases, programmers start creating algorithms and computer code to solve different types of problems. Engineers start researching ways to improve their designs and begin developing completely new models. Most importantly, scientists develop methods and tools for data analysis.
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