He was a man of colorful metaphors; she was a woman of complex calculations. He was involved in numerous affairs and scandals; she was a faithful wife and mother. He was reckless and once famously dubbed "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." She was stable but with enough flair in her pursuit of mathematics to be called “The Enchantress of Numbers.” In many ways they were polar opposites, but they were also father and daughter.
Lord Byron was an accomplished poet and adventurer, a celebrity. No stranger to controversy, while in Parliament he supported the Luddites, a group violently opposed to the technological aspects of the Industrial Revolution. His political activism led him to help finance and join the Greek War of Independence. He would die in Greece, becoming for them a martyr and a national hero.
Augusta Ada Byron was only five weeks old when her mother Anna Isabella left Byron. Determined that her daughter would not grow up to repeat the “insanity” of her father, Anna Isabella immersed young Ada in math and science. Ada was an apt pupil, but the wild poetry of her father came out in the way she perceived numbers and applied scientific fact. This first became evident when she designed a flying machine at the age of thirteen. She grew up, married well, became the Countess of Lovelace, and mothered three children. Yet, the numbers kept calling her, and when her friend Charles Babbage produced the design for his Analytical Engine she was one of the few to see its true potential as what we would call these days a computer. She enthusiastically agreed to work on translating from French a memoir of the machine by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, attaching a set of notes that demonstrated how Bernoulli numbers could be used with the engine. The result is what most historians agree was the first computer program.
Father and daughter: separated by geography and lifestyle, right-brained and left-brained, and yet both pursued their paths with imagination and passion. Each died young, at 36, weakened by the common practice of blood-letting by well-meaning physicians. At Ada’s request, the two “opposites,” the flamboyant father and the dreaming child he would never get to know, were buried side by side.
For further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
Lord Byron was an accomplished poet and adventurer, a celebrity. No stranger to controversy, while in Parliament he supported the Luddites, a group violently opposed to the technological aspects of the Industrial Revolution. His political activism led him to help finance and join the Greek War of Independence. He would die in Greece, becoming for them a martyr and a national hero.
Augusta Ada Byron was only five weeks old when her mother Anna Isabella left Byron. Determined that her daughter would not grow up to repeat the “insanity” of her father, Anna Isabella immersed young Ada in math and science. Ada was an apt pupil, but the wild poetry of her father came out in the way she perceived numbers and applied scientific fact. This first became evident when she designed a flying machine at the age of thirteen. She grew up, married well, became the Countess of Lovelace, and mothered three children. Yet, the numbers kept calling her, and when her friend Charles Babbage produced the design for his Analytical Engine she was one of the few to see its true potential as what we would call these days a computer. She enthusiastically agreed to work on translating from French a memoir of the machine by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, attaching a set of notes that demonstrated how Bernoulli numbers could be used with the engine. The result is what most historians agree was the first computer program.
Father and daughter: separated by geography and lifestyle, right-brained and left-brained, and yet both pursued their paths with imagination and passion. Each died young, at 36, weakened by the common practice of blood-letting by well-meaning physicians. At Ada’s request, the two “opposites,” the flamboyant father and the dreaming child he would never get to know, were buried side by side.
For further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html
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