⏳ History & Biography
Ada Lovelace and the First Program
Ada Lovelace, Notes on the Analytical Engine (1843)
The Modern Polymath@modern_polymath•2 min read
A Machine That Was Never Built1 / 3
In the 1830s Charles Babbage designed the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer. It was never completed, but Ada Lovelace understood what it could become better than almost anyone.
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Sometimes the clearest vision of an invention comes from someone who is not its inventor.
Note G2 / 3
In 1843 she translated an article about the engine and added notes three times longer than the original. In Note G she set out a method for the engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, often called the first published computer program.
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Explaining an idea carefully can turn it into something new.
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