ada the enchantress of numbers by betty alexandra toole

This paper complements our work on Lovelace's studies with Augustus De Morgan in 18 (Hollings et al. This underpins our challenge to influential claims by Dorothy Stein, based on assessments of Lovelace's correspondence with Mary Somerville, that she was mathematically weak, and by Doron Swade, that in 1834 she lacked the background to have studied Lardner's article on Babbage's Difference Engine. In the final section (Analysis) we emphasize that Lovelace's mathematical education spanned the transition from an earlier practical tradition to a more analytic approach based on continental mathematics.

In the third section we consider Lovelace's eclectic mathematical education before 1840, indicating the focus on practical mathematics and synthetic geometry, coupled with an interest in mechanical devices, and wide reading of the science writing of the day. In the next section we review assessments of Lovelace's mathematical ability, and their reception in technical and popular writing. In her lifetime she was famous as the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, brought up by her mother following her parents’ acrimonious separation shortly after her birth: subsequently her life, as much as her scientific work, has inspired numerous biographies and creative endeavours.

In the two hundred years since her birth, opinions of Lovelace's ability have ranged from ‘genius’ to ‘charlatan’. (De Morgan Citation1882, 89) In 1840–41 Ada, by now the Countess of Lovelace, Footnote 2 studied calculus and higher mathematics with Sophia's husband, Augustus De Morgan, and in 1843 published the paper for which she is now famous: her translation, with extensive appendices, of Luigi Menabrea's Notions sur la Machine Analytique de M. Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.

Ada the enchantress of numbers by betty alexandra toole