WORLD OF SCIENCE
Poet's daughter
DR. T. V. PADMA
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At the age of five, Ada Byron could add six rows of figures.
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ILLUSTRATION: V.K. SUBRAMANIAN.
Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the daughter of British poet George Gordon, Lord Byron. Ada's mother was an unusual woman for the times. She was a scholar, and preferred visiting museums to attending parties. She encouraged Ada to study maths and science.
At age five, Ada could add six rows of figures. Before she was 13, she began to study geometry. In 1883, Ada met an inventor called Charles Babbage. In the course of his work, Charles had discovered many errors in the mathematical tables he was forced to use when solving polynomial equations. This spurred him to design a machine operated by cranks and gears that could compute and print out mathematical tables. Ada was fascinated by his invention, which he called the "Difference Engine".
Of the future
Charles envisioned building a machine that would work like a punch card controlled loom, to perform more complicated mathematical functions. He called this an "Analytical Engine". The original machine that Charles Babbage had designed worked using a decimal number system. Ada realised that this was inefficient. She came up with an idea to make the machine work faster and better. Her idea was to make this "analytical engine" use a binary system. She wrote the first ever computer program, in which everything was represented using ones and zeroes. Using this base 2 system instead of a base 10 system, the computer could solve more complicated problems. Ada also predicted the computers of the future, saying that someday, their machine would be able to do much more than just calculate. She said, it must be "programmed" to think, by its human inventors.
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