Ada's Algorithm

August 11, 2014
Behind every great man, there’s a great woman; no other adage more aptly describes the relationship between Charles Babbage, the man credited with thinking up the concept of the programmable computer, and mathematician Ada Lovelace, whose contributions, according to Essinger (Jacquard’s Web) in this absorbing biography, proved indispensable to Babbage’s invention. The Analytical Engine was a series of cogwheels, gear-shafts, camshafts, and power transmission rods controlled by a punch-card system based on the Jacquard loom. Lovelace, the only legitimate child of English poet Lord Byron, wrote extensive notes about the machine, including an algorithm to compute a long sequence of Bernoulli numbers, which some observers now consider to be the world’s first computer program. Essinger’s tome is undergirded by academic research, but it is the author’s prose, both graceful and confident, that will draw in a general readership. Readers are treated to an intimate portrait of Lovelace’s short but significant life—she died at age 36 from uterine cancer—along with an abbreviated history of 19th-century high-society London. A quick denouement and preface add contemporary context and further Essinger’s argument that Lady Lovelace “had seen the computer age clearly ahead... was never allowed to act on what she saw.” Agent: Diane Banks, Diane Banks Associates, U.K.

October 1, 2014
The story of Ada Lovelace (1815-1852), the brilliant mathematician and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who likely wrote the first computer program in the early 1840s. Due to her gender, however, her research was overlooked, and another two centuries passed before computers became a reality. Despite the fact that Ada was Lord Byron's only legitimate daughter, her mother deemed him unfit to raise her and left him when Ada was just 1 month old. Her father's reputation made Ada famous by association, and throughout her life, this recognition connected her with some of the era's most interesting and accomplished people, including the mathematician Charles Babbage. As a child, Ada was fascinated by mathematics and demonstrated an "imaginative approach to science." Through sheer force of will, she managed to obtain an education rarely available to women in the 19th century and was therefore able to recognize the profound potential in Babbage's lifelong obsession, a machine he called the "Analytical Engine," designed to make calculations. Babbage considered his invention to be purely mathematical, but Ada realized that the possibilities were much grander-that the machine could be capable of "weav[ing] algebraical patterns," a sophisticated idea that did not yet exist at the time. In her writings, she clearly laid out these early concepts of computer science, but because she was female, she was essentially ignored. Essinger (Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling, 2007, etc.) presents Ada's story with great enthusiasm and rich detail, painting her life as one that was rich with opportunity and access but stifled by sexism. Ada continues to inspire, and by using her own voice via letters and research, the author brings her to life for a new generation of intrepid female innovators. A robust, engaging and exciting biography.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.