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I wanna dedicate this presentation about

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Ada to her daughter Anabella,

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later Lady Anne Blunt.

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I wanna start at the end and then, move to the beginning.

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A year before Ada died, she was, of course, already very, very ill.

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And she was supposed to go to a hunting ball.

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And she asked her daughter to take her place.

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Now, Ada was, despite the bad press, a magnificent mother.

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How do I know that?

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Well, in her letter to her daughter

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Annabella she jokes just like Byron jokes,

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and also later Lord Liten jokes.

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And this is part of a letter that Ada wrote to Annabella.

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Mrs. Burr sends her love to you and

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is very busy about her fancy ball.

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And we are deciding on the weighty matter of trust for you.

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You are, I believe to be, a young Spanish lady in

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and as the dress is entirely black and

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not at all gay we do think it may meet with your demure approbation.

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We had an idea of you're being the Infanta Isabella,

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daughter of the Isabella of Castille.

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But we found her dress so hideous, so

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like a hag in armor, that we gave it up in horror.

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Can you possibly imagine how Annabella, a teenager,

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felt seeing her mother waste away and die?

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What Annabella did was her correspondence to Ada,

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and why I'm dedicating this speech to her.

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Was wonderful.

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She sent her mother puzzles and riddles.

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One of the riddles she sent her

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mother was why is a wise man wise?

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The answer, he asked lots of whys and

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that is why a wise man is wise.

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I am actually going to talk about five of

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the questions that Ada asked throughout her life.

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Not just about the analytical machine, but every aspect of her life.

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But I'm gonna relegate my discussion to her mathematics,

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her correspondence with Babbage and

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why I think she is a pivotal single parent in computing today.

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The first question which I didn't like, is what is the question?

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I learned a vital lesson when I was a teenager graduate,

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undergraduate student at the University of Chicago,

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which was based some of it on the model of Oxford with tutors.

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But the big thing was it was based on reading original sources.

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And in physics, which I had to take.

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I just wanted the textbook.

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Give me the end.

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I don't want to have to read to Ptolemy,

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Copernicus, Kepler, all the way up to Einstein.

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That was to this day, I have never read

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a textbook discussing these heroes of science

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that come close to what they actually wrought.

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What I learned is each one of them had a mindset.

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And as a result of the mindset, they asked questions.

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For example, Ptolemy was, I'm the center of the universe,

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therefore, everything goes around me, all the way up to Einstein,

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who realized that the observer has an effect on what is observed.

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Ada was very, she lived in the Victorian era but

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her thinking was just like Einstein.

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In a letter Dorothy Stein asked the question,

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not question was Ada a good mathematician.

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That wasn't my question.

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My question was how did Ada understand mathematics?

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There is a pivotal letter which was in my first article,

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which Sir Drummond added in, and it was about

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Ada's difficulty in understanding a functional equation.

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What she couldn't get was really absorbing a point and

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a line and a wave at the same time.

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So she wrote to Morgan, these functional

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equations are the willow of the wisp to me.

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That as soon as I feel I got hold of it, it totally vanishes.

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And that metaphor of tangibility and

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her explanation is just the way

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modern physics use mathematics.

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Ada's, how we're first introduced to something

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I'd fall in love with him instantly and that sets the tone.

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Ada met Babbage in 1833,

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in November and December of 1834.

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Just, right, actually I'm gonna

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talk about a letter that was written December 15, 1834,

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which was a rainy night.

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It was a night when Babbage was so

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upset that they have pulled funding for his difference engine.

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He paced back and forth, he took a piece of

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paper binding Mrs. Somerville's yarn.

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Oh color, this is a good way to explain things.

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And then, when he decried having the funding pulled he then said well,

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no matter, I have an idea for a new machine,

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which he described years later in passages.

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How he got the idea of a machine that could

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not only foresee but act on that foresight.

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When Ada got home, she told her mother about the evening.

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And we know this from Lady Byron's journals.

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In that journal Lady Byron said, oh, Babbage has another idea.

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It's the whim of the moment.

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But Ada used that word which was used a lot this morning.

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And that was, his idea what's universal.

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And so from the beginning before,

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she, nine years before she wrote the note.

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That question, what is this machine about?

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Was in a way, already set in her mind.

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So the next question is, what is the source of information?

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With Babbage's difference engine in 1833 she didn't want to bother him.

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She went to the lectures of Damascus Lardner.

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She got the blueprints from Herschel Babbage.

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She went to see the machine.

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But through the years, from 1834

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till the time Babbage went to Turing.

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She had conversations with him, and

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she really relied directly on him for

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her information about the analytical engine.

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She started thinking, and this is surprisingly, nobody's quoted this yet.

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She knew the issues Babbage was dealing with, and

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she wrote Babbage a letter about a game called solitaire.

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And that game is not the card game we play but

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rather a board game like Chinese checkers where you leave,

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how you win is you get rid of all the checkers or

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what have you and she wrote him.

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What if she said

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we take the board and this is what she wrote.

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What if we number the pegs.

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Wow, that sounds obvious, but it isn't obvious,

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and it is a way of tracing every move.

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And she said, for instance, we could write out if peg number 19,

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the center one, is taken out to begin with then peg 6 may

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hop over Peg 12.

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The real boards, she said, are not numbered.

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And then she went on to say, I hope you are bearing me in mind.

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I mean my mathematical interests.

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This is the greatest favor anyone can do me.

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Perhaps no one can estimate how great.

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Who can calculate to what it might lead?

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So she already, years before,

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was caught really deeply thinking about

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Babbage and his analytical engine.

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The next step is what is the source of information.

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Today the last cut counts.

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That's what everybody,

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it's rare for people to go to original sources and

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make up their own mind about information.

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They just take it off the internet or what have you.

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And this, then, becomes the new truth.

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Ada always, what I did is I had to sit there and

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I sat at the Bodleum for three years.

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And another thing was, at that time, they didn't let me bring a computer.

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So, what I had to do was hand transcribe the information.

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And naturally I'm in debit to Mary Clapinson who organized the files.

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But I also listen to another Byron friend, William St.

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Clair, who one day, I went to visit him, and

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he was working on his book, The Godwins and the Shelley's,

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and I looked in his bedroom and it was a mess.

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There were piles of papers and what have you.

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And I said William, how do you figure anything out in this chaos?

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He said it's easy.

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It's random access.

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And after a year of going through each file.

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I did random access.

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And that's when I came across that little

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scrap of a blue paper in which Ada wrote

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to her mother if you cannot conceive me

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poetry can you conceive me, poetical science?

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Well, that, for me, was the organizing theme

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of who Ada was about, that she was both her father,

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the poet's daughter, as well as her mother's daughter.

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The mathematician.

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Ada after she wrote this solitaire

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letter she wrote about imagination,

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that it should be more important.

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For scientists and let's say computer

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specialists to have imagination then it is for anyone else.

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It's primarily the discovering facility.

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What happened with her notes is that

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we do believe it was Weed Stone who her

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encouraged her to translate the article

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which you've heard a lot about by.

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And when Ada did that and added notes,

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her notes to me are far more important than whether or

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not she was the first programmer.

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Because when she looked at the machine, it was not something out there.

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It was something in which a human being had a relationship to.

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It wasn't just the designs of the variable cards or what have you.

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She saw her vision was fraught,

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people say she was manic.

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If she was, I hope all of us are manic.

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Because in this world, where it is so digitized,

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it is critical that we have a broad vision.

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We've already heard a lot of her broad vision.

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First of all, how was it expressed?

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Yes, it was expressed in number and she saw

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how giving it a language expanded its possibilities.

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She also saw what if,

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which is the next one of the questions.

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She could then prophesize once she saw the true meaning of the analytical engine.

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That it wasn't old wine in new bottles.

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But it was new wine and new bottles.

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It was totally a different concept from the difference engine.

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She, many people were annoyed that over and over and

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over again, she discussed the difference between these two machines.

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So she projected it, it could compose music.

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She also saw that it could

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weave algebraic patterns.

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But we come to Turing, who a hundred years later read what he wrote.

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And Professor Roberts at Stanford just alerted

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me to a phrase that Turing wrote about what Ada did,

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saying, this is how we know about Babbage's analytical engine.

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What Turing is famous for is he took issue

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with what Ada wrote, when she wrote,

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this engine does not originate anything.

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It only knows what we know how to order it to perform.

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And it was called the Lovelace objection, and

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of course all of us have heard about the Lovelace test.

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In Ada's correspondence to Morgan, and

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I do want to touch on that because what does that mean?

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Having taken a lot of statistics, the most, and I'm so anxious to hear.

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The talk tomorrow on the De Morgan correspondence.

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But the first thing you have to do when you see the Lovelace, Barne collection,

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the Babbage Collection at the British Library is,

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you have to ask what does this sample represent?

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Ada's correspondence to De Morgan,

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which I include some in my book, but didn't include the equations.

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And two weeks ago, Stephen Wolfram has gotten

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those letters with With the algebraic notation.

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But what did they represent?

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Ada was not paying De Morgan and she felt so

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guilty about it that every letter ended why didn't he come for a visit.

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Why don't you, we have some chickens?

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Take the chickens.

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And if you are studying by mail from such an illustrious and

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wonderful professor Estam Markham was,

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you can ask him what you know.

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No, you're gonna ask him what you don't know.

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So the literary remains of the De Morgan correspondence are a skewed sample.

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They summarize what Ada didn't know.

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Yesterday, Miranda Seymour justifiably said,

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that Ada would repeat over and

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over again, I don't understand this.

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And that was another one of her traits.

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Explain it again.

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What do you mean?

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How was it derived?

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How was it got?

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Unless I know the assumption it's based on,

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I don't know what it means.

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As Ada was proceeding along with the notes,

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and Duran said they started in February.

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The actual notes in the collection are really six to eight weeks long.

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And it's kind of amazing that she wrote 50

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pages of letters that we know of, she probably wrote more.

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And she also wrote these notes in a period where

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her mother was badgering her to take care of her supposed half sister's maid.

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She was hemorrhaging.

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She was probably on laudanum some of the time, and

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yet she still managed to do this.

254
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Well, Babbage and Ada had a very good relationship,

255
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definitely not romantic, because they tease one another too much.

256
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But Babbage was furious still

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that his funding had been pulled.

258
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So at the very end, he wrote a preface

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on how bad the British government had been to him.

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And he inserted it in front of the article that Ada wrote.

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She blew and

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she then wrote Babbage a 14 page letter sort

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of somebody said she wrote Faraday 11 pages.

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But that letter, August 14th,

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I think is one of the most important letters.

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It took a long time to describe, and

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the late Andrew Nicholson checked it to make sure it was right.

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And in it, she says to Babbage, what you're doing,

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Babbage, is just really for fame and glory.

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That isn't what this is about, this whole thing.

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If the way I do things, she says,

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is for the benefit of mankind.

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And that now, is something I

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think all of us need to remember,

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is that what Ada is not a symbol.

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She is not the mother, Statue of Liberty, a community.

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She is, she was, a human being.

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And the best review I ever got of my book was a letter

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from the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling,

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whose Difference Engine came out before my book.

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And what he said is, if my book had come out first.

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He never would have written the different sunshine because what my book

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did, is he showed me Ada was a human being.

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And once I saw she was a human being

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I could no longer make a stereotype of her.

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I think that in structuring

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the history of computing and

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the beginning, which I believe

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was with Charles Babbage and Ada.

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There is no way that Ada could have ever printed

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anything unless the structure of Babbage's machine.

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Was similar to many of the components of modern computing.

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In Chinese history there is a philosopher called,

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I don't think I'm pronouncing his name correctly.

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Liang Chow Chi, and before the Chinese Revolution

296
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in the early 20th century.

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Liang Chow Chi went and looked at Confucius,

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and rewrote who Confucius was,

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that Confucius was a great revolutionary.

300
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And that was sort of to give a basic

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rework of what needed to be done in Chinese society.

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Prophetically Ada's writings

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reveal a deep understanding of how

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much computing will change our society.

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In 1843, she once again implored Babbage and she did it in many ways.

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Stop being so tied up with this machine.

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It isn't really just about you.

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When we think about the future of computing, we need to

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ask ourselves whether we are using these

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amazing machines to create a better world.

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Just like there's a Turing test, I think there should be a Lovelace

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test that underscores that question.

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How are these machines being used?

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Are they being used to benefit mankind.

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Origin stories are important because, and

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we all know it, with an origin story we structure

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the future in the context of our understanding of the past.

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And celebrating the 200th birthday of Ada Byron,

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we honor a computing pioneer, whose vision still touches us today.

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By insisting as she did.

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That the power of computing be harnessed for most effective use of mankind.

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We ensure not only that the memory of Ada Lovelace lives on,

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but that our species does as well.

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Thank you.

325
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>> [APPLAUSE]

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[INAUDIBLE]

327
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>> We have, I think,

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about five minutes for questions to Betty.

329
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Sit down and relax.

330
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That very interesting talk through there of Ada, not so much,

331
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well, from computing to humanity and the future of humanity.

332
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Any questions, or any observations?

333
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Yes, please?

334
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>> [INAUDIBLE] >> What?

335
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>> Machines for a better world, is that an actual quote?

336
00:30:16,220 --> 00:30:19,865
>> Machines for a better world, is that an actual quote?

337
00:30:19,865 --> 00:30:24,926
>> Are you actually quoting what Ada said?

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Yes, for the benefit of mankind.

339
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It's in the letter- >> [INAUDIBLE]

340
00:30:32,972 --> 00:30:39,180
>> Oh, it's a 12, 14 page letter.

341
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In the letter, she sermonizes Babbage,

342
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which is amazing, this young woman sermonizing this.

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What you do is for fame and glory.

344
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What I do and why I'm doing all of this

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is I want to see what if this thing is for

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the benefit of mankind.

347
00:31:06,670 --> 00:31:12,000
It's not about you or me or writing a book or selling a book or what.

348
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:15,470
Oh, I forgot the last line.

349
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And that is thank you, Richard, where is it.

350
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In my e-book, I start with an activity.

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Which I did at the University of California,

352
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when I taught history of science.

353
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The ending of the book, the activity is to build a kaleidoscope.

354
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When I started in 84 and came here I had a kaleidoscope in my purse.

355
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I did not know Ada's connection to Fiscot's

356
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so David Brewster, who invented the kaleidoscope, and

357
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towards the end of my research I was looking for

358
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evidence of gambling, so I looked in the bank books.

359
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Guess what? I didn't find any evidence of gambling,

360
00:32:19,986 --> 00:32:27,513
but I found Ada's last purchase in life was a kaleidoscope,

361
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and to me, it's such a metaphor,

362
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because every turn of the wheel is a different picture.

363
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And Ada was somebody called it a relational,

364
00:32:43,909 --> 00:32:51,910
her style of thinking was poetical science, was relations.

365
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And what a kaleidoscope is, it's distinctly human,

366
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every turn gives you a new look.

367
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>> Anybody else?

368
00:33:07,984 --> 00:33:12,560
Can I just perhaps pick up the 14 page letter for a second?

369
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Because the 14 page letter is one of the pieces of evidence that those who

370
00:33:17,340 --> 00:33:19,848
call her manic use, isn't it?

371
00:33:19,848 --> 00:33:27,060
>> Right, and personally, Sir Drummond, I think we should all be manic.

372
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Because if manic means having a broader vision of what is going on,

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rather than a narrow vision of a computer.

374
00:33:39,710 --> 00:33:44,080
I was going to quote the young woman who won the award,

375
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who wrote a beautiful, her last line was beautiful.

376
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As the same time, she, I read that,

377
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my son send me an email about the Lovelace Test,

378
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and he wrote, computers Should work with us.

379
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As Walter Isaacson pointed out, we're in synergy.

380
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But not define us.

381
00:34:10,390 --> 00:34:13,404
>> Any other thoughts?

382
00:34:13,404 --> 00:34:18,560
Otherwise we'll move on.

383
00:34:18,560 --> 00:34:23,620
>> I would like to say something about Richard [LAUGH] Holmes,

384
00:34:23,620 --> 00:34:28,490
and that I think >> It's one, after Richard speaks,

385
00:34:28,490 --> 00:34:33,380
we're all going to celebrate the human beings' 200th birthday.

386
00:34:33,380 --> 00:34:40,410
And I'm looking forward to somebody as knowledgeable about

387
00:34:40,410 --> 00:34:48,310
imagination to show the process of Ada's thinking, thank you.

388
00:34:48,310 --> 00:34:50,864
>> Thanks very much.

389
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[APPLAUSE]