[C0LLETTE]

THIS IS THE DAY....JUNE 5, 1833.

Ada Lovelace meets Charles Babbage and invents the first computer program


In an age when it wasn’t expected, Ada Lovelace learned history, languages, music, chemistry and mathematics. When she was barely a teenager, in the late 1820s, she wanted to learn to fly and studied birds for her book on “flyology,” as she put it. She never got off the ground but did take flight in another sense. On June 5, 1833, she met the brilliant polymath Charles Babbage, the Londoner who is considered the inventor of the first mechanical computer, the Difference Engine, and its more sophisticated successor, the Analytical Engine. Ms. Lovelace took the concept of Mr. Babbage’s computer to a new level, where she imagined it could create as well as merely calculate as it “weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.” When she was 27, she published what many modern-day computer scientists consider the first computer program, which would use Mr. Babbage’s Analytical Engine (never built) to calculate Bernoulli numbers, used in number theory. In her writings, she foresaw that "a new, a vast and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis.” Only in recent years has her pioneering contribution to the digital age been fully recognized.