-
141 Byron, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
SUBJECT AREA: Electronics and information technology[br]b. 12 December 1815 Piccadilly Terrace, London, Englandd. 23 November 1852 East Horsley, Surrey, England[br]English mathematician, active in the early development of the calculating machine.[br]Educated by a number of governesses in a number of houses from Yorkshire to Ealing, she was the daughter of a hypochondriac mother and her absent, separated, husband, the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. As a child a mysterious and undiagnosed illness deprived her "of the use of her limbs" and she was "obliged to use crutches". The complaint was probably psychosomatic as it cleared up when she was 17 and was about to attend her first court ball. On 8 July 1835 she was married to William King, 1st Earl of Lovelace. She later bore two sons and a daughter. She was an avid student of science and in particular mathematics, in the course of which Charles Babbage encouraged her. In 1840 Babbage was invited to Turin to present a paper on his analytical engine. In the audience was a young Italian military engineer, L.F.Menabrea, who was later to become a general in Garibaldi's army. The paper was written in French and published in 1842 in the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève. This text was translated into English and published with extensive annotations by the Countess of Lovelace, appearing in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs. The Countess thoroughly understood and appreciated Babbage's machine and the clarity of her description was so great that it is undoubtedly the best contemporary account of the engine: even Babbage recognized the Countess's description as superior to his own. Ada often visited Babbage in his workshop and listened to his explanations of the structure and use of his engines. She shared with her husband a love of horse-racing and, with Babbage, tried to develop a system for backing horses. Babbage and the Earl apparently stopped their efforts in time, but the Countess lost so heavily that she had to pawn all her family jewels. Her losses at the 1851 Derby alone amounted to £3,200, while borrow-ing a further £1,800 from her husband. This situation involved her in being blackmailed. She became an opium addict due to persistent pain from gastritis, intermittent anorexia and paroxys-mal tachycardia. Charles Babbage was always a great comfort to her, not only for their shared mathematical interests but also as a friend helping in all manner of small services such as taking her dead parrot to the taxidermist. She died after a protracted illness, thought to be cancer, at East Horsley Towers.[br]Further ReadingD.Langley Moore, 1977, Ada, Countess of Lovelace: Byron's Legitimate Daughter, John Murray.P.Morrison and E.Morrison, 1961, Charles Babbage and His Calculating Engine, Dover Publications.Biographical history of technology > Byron, Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace
См. также в других словарях:
Machine development — Машинное проявление … Краткий толковый словарь по полиграфии
machine tool — machine tooled, adj. a power operated machine, as a lathe, used for general cutting and shaping of metal and other substances. [1860 65] * * * Stationary, power driven machine used to cut, shape, or form materials such as metal and wood. Machine… … Universalium
Machine learning — is a subfield of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the design and development of algorithms and techniques that allow computers to learn . In general, there are two types of learning: inductive, and deductive. Inductive machine… … Wikipedia
Machine à composer (imprimerie) — Machine de William Church En imprimerie, une machine à composer est une machine qui assemble les caractères en plomb destinés à imprimer un texte, en se substituant à la composition manuelle traditionnelle. Certaines de ces machines peuvent… … Wikipédia en Français
Development environment — may also refer to an integrated development environment. In hosted software (e.g., web site/application, database not shrinkwrap software) development, a development environment refers to a server tier designated to a specific stage in a release… … Wikipedia
Machine Age — is a term associated with the early 20th Century. Considered to be at a peak in the time between the first and second World Wars it forms a late part of the Industrial Age. It was ultimately eclipsed by the Atomic Age beginning in 1945.Artifacts… … Wikipedia
Machine-readable dictionary — ( MRD ) is a dictionary stored as machine (computer) data instead of being printed on paper. It is an electronic dictionary and lexical database.A machine readable dictionary is a dictionary in an electronic form that can be loaded in a database… … Wikipedia
Machine olfaction — is the automated simulation of the sense of smell. It is an emerging requirement of modern robotics where robots or other automated systems are needed to measure the existence of a particular chemical concentration in air. This technology is… … Wikipedia
Machine — This article is about devices that perform tasks. For other uses, see Machine (disambiguation). A machine manages power to accomplish a task, examples include, a mechanical system, a computing system, an electronic system, and a molecular machine … Wikipedia
Machine gun — [ thumb|200px|An illustration of later model 19th century Gatling gun. It was a multi barreled rotary machine gun fired via a manual crank, which mechanically loaded and primed cartridges from the hopper above the gun] : For other uses of the… … Wikipedia
Development of Japanese tanks in World War II — The Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) initially purchased foreign tanks for evaluation during World War I, and began developing its own indigenous designs during the late 1920s.Initial tank procurementNear the end of World War I, the IJA showed an… … Wikipedia
