Published in the March 16- 29, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Marty Cheek
March 2 was Dr. Seuss’s birthday, celebrated across the country with the annual Read Across America Day. That morning I was presented a picture book titled “Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine” and guided by a young El Toro Elementary School lad to a classroom of third graders. The children rested cross-legged on the floor as I sat on a child’s chair in front of them while we read the book together and discovered one of history’s most remarkable engineers.
The book was written by Laurie Wallmark and contains illustrations by April Chu. It shares an inspiring story of the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the world’s first computer programmer. It’s an especially remarkable feat considering she lived in a period long before the invention of the mechanical marvels that have grown into such a prominent convenience of our modern-day lives.
Lovelace’s father was the English poet Lord George Gordon Byron and she was his only legitimate child. Lovelace’s mother, Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke Byron, was a remarkable woman in her own right. A math whiz called by her husband “the Princess of Parallelograms,” Lady Byron set up a rigorous study for building the young girl’s mind with logic and reasoning skills through mathematics and science. For women in 19th-century England, mathematics was an unusual course of study.
About the age of 12, Lovelace began to dream of flying machines. Like Leonardo da Vinci centuries before, she studied the anatomy of birds and looked at materials to make a winged flying apparatus. She wrote to her mother: “I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to make an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.”
In 1833 when she was 17, Lovelace met a man at a party who would later serve as a father figure for the pursuit of science. His name was Charles Babbage and he demonstrated a segment of an enormous automatically-run mechanical calculating machine that he called a “difference engine.” Babbage’s invention was so complex that it was never truly built in his Victorian time. Nevertheless, he is known as “the father of the computer” and there is a model of his remarkably prescient contraption at the Computer Museum in Mountain View.
Ten years after meeting Babbage, Lovelace translated from the French an article on the analytical engine written by an Italian engineer named Luigi Menabreato. Ada added extensive notes of her own and published the article. Her notes include what many historians consider the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving mathematical problems. These notes are how Ada has come to be known as the world’s first computer programmer.”
The article also includes statements by Lovelace that seem visionary. She speculated that Babbage’s machine “might act upon other things besides number … the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” This idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols according to a set of rules and that numbers could represent entities other than quantity shows a fundamental shift from mere calculation to actual computation. Ada’s prophetic ideas were the first time anyone had considered the potential capabilities of a “thinking machine” outside mathematics.
Last year was the bicentenary of Ada Lovelace’s birth, and it seems to have gone by without much fanfare — especially here in the Silicon Valley region where there are so many computer programmers. Starting in the 1950s, there were many women pioneers in the field of computer science, including the notable Grace Hopper who, under U.S. Navy research, was the first person to create a compiler for a programming language. Historically, women played a vital role in the early days of computer evolution. That all started to change in 1984, a period when personal computers started to become prominent in the market.
During the mid-1980s, the proportion of women in the United States working toward an undergraduate computer science degree peaked and began a decline. In 1984, 37.1 percent of computer science degrees went to women in the United States. By 2011, fewer than 12 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science were awarded to women.
By the year 2020, about 1.4 million new computer science-related jobs will be available in the U.S. Right now, however, there are only enough computer science graduates to fill about 32 percent of those jobs. This field is an outstanding opportunity for women and minorities. President Barack Obama recently included $4 billion in the budget for states to expand their K-12 computer science curriculum. At several Morgan Hill elementary and middle schools, computer programming courses are merging into the curriculum, teaching young people the basics of logic and reasoning skills.
As for Ada Lovelace, her work on computer programming combined in the 1970s with her imagination of mechanical flight. The U.S. Department of Defense developed a high-order computer programming language for the military. In 1979, it was named “Ada” in honor of the mathematician. Ada is still used around the world in real-time systems for health care, transportation, finance — and aviation and space industries.
