{"id":5981,"date":"2015-12-13T04:13:38","date_gmt":"2015-12-13T04:13:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5981"},"modified":"2015-12-13T04:13:38","modified_gmt":"2015-12-13T04:13:38","slug":"untangling-the-tale-of-ada-lovelace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5981","title":{"rendered":"Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stephen Wolfram has written a nice long blog essay on Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace<\/a>. He tackles the question of whether Ada really contributed or was overestimated. He provides a biography of both Ada and Babbage. He speculates about what they were like and could have been. He believes Ada saw the big picture in a way Babbage didn’t and was able to communicate it.<\/p>\n

Ada Lovelace was an intelligent woman who became friends with Babbage (there\u2019s zero evidence they were ever romantically involved). As something of a favor to Babbage, she wrote an exposition of the Analytical Engine, and in doing so she developed a more abstract understanding of it than Babbage had\u2014and got a glimpse of the incredibly powerful idea of universal computation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The essay reflects on what might have happened if Ada had not died prematurely. Wolfram thinks they would have finished the Analytical Engine and possibly explored building an electromechanical version.<\/p>\n

We will never know what Ada could have become. Another Mary Somerville, famous Victorian expositor of science? A Steve-Jobs-like figure who would lead the vision of the Analytical Engine? Or an Alan Turing, understanding the abstract idea of universal computation?
\nThat Ada touched what would become a defining intellectual idea of our time was good fortune. Babbage did not know what he had; Ada started to see glimpses and successfully described them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephen Wolfram has written a nice long blog essay on Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace. He tackles the question of whether Ada really contributed or was overestimated. He provides a biography of both Ada and Babbage. He speculates about what they were like and could have been. He believes Ada saw the big picture … Continue reading Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-foundations-of-computing","category-history-of-computing-and-multimedia","category-programming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5984,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5981\/revisions\/5984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}