I'm Nick Woodhouse.
I'm chair of the Clay Mathematics Institute.
And I'll explain in a second what we've got to do with today's event.
I get to introduce first of all, Ursula Martin and
Sauron Reese who are going to talk about Ada Lovelace, a scientist in the archives.
Sauron is a reader in computer science in London.
And he's rather on the mathematical end of computer science, but
he also has an interest in computer chess,
which I'm sure is something that Ada Lovelace would have enjoyed very much.
Ursula I'm sure is well known to all of you, I'll just make one remark
about something which isn't in her biographical notes in the program.
And that's that in 1992, she was appointed as the first
ever woman professor in any discipline at St. Andrews.
So this is 140 years after the death of Ada Lovelace.
I calculated that her appointment raised the rate of
appointment of women professors at Saint Andrew's from zero to 1.72 per millennium.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, this a mathematical institute.
Anyway, I am sure you're also aware that she's been the driving force behind
this afternoon, behind this whole event.
She's done an enormous amount of work.
She's gathered together some quite spectacular speakers.
So I think it's right that we should hear from her.
One of the things she is going to,
you're going to see a lot of in this talk are the mathematical
papers of Ada Lovelace which are held in the Bodleian Library.
You may have picked up if you've read the program very carefully is that
the Clay Mathematical Institute is undertaking a project to digitize these.
And they will very soon be available online in a watermarked form and
freely available for the whole community to see.
We're very grateful to the generosity of Lord Litton who has
allowed us to undertake this project.
Anyway, I think let's say no more,
but hand over to Ursula and to Sauron.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> [INAUDIBLE]
trying to say some of the things that I was going to say for me but
that won't stop me saying them again.
Why are we doing this in Oxford?
You see it's very interesting.
When male scientists have their 200th birthday, typically they belong somewhere.
[INAUDIBLE] belonged to Cork, Turing belonged to Oxford and.
Sorry, no he didn't, did he?
>> [LAUGH] >> Turing belonged to Cambridge in
Manchester, Darwin belonged to Cambridge.
Charles Dobson belonged to Oxford.
Now, Lovelace, was a woman.
She wasn't attached to an institution.
And suddenly there's no institution to invest a lot of time and
energy into celebrating her.
Well hang on, we better change that.
Why do we think we in Oxford are going to do that?
What do we have that's special?
Well we have this.
We have the Library, this is the new part of the Library,
where some of you are coming for a reception this evening.
And, as Nick said, we have the fabulous archives of the Miller,
Byron, and Lovelace families.
About 460 boxes deposited in the by, I know Lord Litton's coming later,
I'm not sure he's here yet.
But deposited in the by Lord Litton.
And another birthday present to Ada is those of you who have struggled
with the catalog online, or lack of the catalog online.
And have been working with the photocopies of a paper catalog
which seems to be drifting out there.
The has now put the catalog online, it's easier to find it by Googling
it than me giving you a 10 foot long URL but that's fantastic news for scholars.
They've also made it rather easier to access the papers.
If you were used to accessing the papers by a rather complicated process involving
letters of recognition and so on, that's also gone.
So that's the generosity of Lord Litton and the and I think that's a great
service to scholars, as is the digitization that Nick mentioned.
But because of the presence of this archive, I think
it was Becky Toole, who's sitting there in the front row who first of all said
to John who was here a bit earlier, who's the master of.
Well aren't you going to do something?
>> [COUGH] >> Or
did you say it's Richard Aldington or did you say it's both of them?
Anyway, by force of personality Betty made it so
that the agreed to have a display.
And the then looked around and
thought well there must be somebody in the Masters department or
the Computer Science department who'd like to help us with the display.
And I don't think I could duck fast enough.
>> [LAUGH] >> I didn't really know, had a sort of
general interest in history and the history of science, but I didn't know very
much more than anybody else about Lovelace before I embarked on this project.
But one of the things I rapidly realized was that although there is this remarkable
archive, many parts of it have not been studied in the depths that they deserved.
And in particular I made the remarkable discovery that well,
some people looked at Lady Lovelace's mathematics, like
Ben Nyman had written a short paper about Ada Lovelace's mathematics in the 70s.
No real historian of mathematics had done an in depth study of her
mathematical paper.
And so we were very fortunate to get funding to secure for Chris Haulings who's
just been appointed to a lectureship in history of maths here and Adrian Rice who
is the world expert on de Morgan to work through Lovelace's mathematical papers.
Particularly her 400 page correspondence course with Augustus de Morgan.
There's lots of exciting things to say there but
I'm not going to say them because Chris is going to say them tomorrow.
But I am going to say some other things.
This research has been really at the heart of what we've been, what we've done.
It is very exciting to be able to do new research in an area that appears to be so
well worked over.
But it's also motivated other things that we've done some of which we heard about
this morning.
The partnership with the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley,
who were doing a digital version of our display in
a group at Queen Mary University of London produce a magazine called CS for Fun.
You should all have a copy in your plastic bag.
They've done an Ada-themed issue.
Just before tea, and that's why we must all keep even me.
Just before tea, we're going to have a prize giving for
the National Museum of Computing's Write a Letter to Ada competition.
So there's been a huge amount of other stuff happening locally,
and nationally as well.
So I think what I want to talk about is our thinking in putting together
the display and use that to pick up some of my own reactions to the archive and
to as a science in an archive for the first time working on a scientist archive.
All right, so we sat down to plan the display.
We being Maddie Slaven, who is the Director of Exhibitions at the Bodleian,
and then Maddie recruited a bunch of people to help and advise.
Becky Claw came over and gave us her, must have been about a year ago,
wasn't it, Becky?
>> Last October.
Chris Hollings and Adrian Rice.
But somehow, I did mention not ducking fast enough,
a lot of the work, the more detailed work,
I had the privilege of working with Mary Clappingson on this display.
If you're a sharp eye, you saw Mary Clappingson's name there.
Mary, is Mary here?
I don't think so.
Anyway, so Mary is at the heart of many, many works to do with the Lovelace papers.
It's when these papers arrived in the from the Litten family in the 1970s,
it was Mary who cataloged them.
And Mary is credited at the front of many of the biographies, or
the biographies are dedicated to Mary for
her extraordinary help she's been able to give people.
So it was a real privilege working with professionals on designing a display.
And something else I've never been involved in before either,
and I kept saying no you can't have so much mass.
>> [LAUGH] >> Does anybody else
get what that was about?
No, oh, well.
So, what did we do, how did we plan it?
Well, given the interest, given, of course, there's 460 boxes.
[LAUGH] There's a lot of stuff to choose from.
We had long list, a long, long list, a short long list.
And then the final decision certainly came right down
to the wire in thinking about the layout of the case and so on.
It's a tribute to the extraordinary resources that there are In Oxford.
But here's our display, I hope some of you can see it.
Only one item in that actually belongs to the.
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]
>> The rest of it is, well,
many of the papers of course belong to Lord Lytton.
Some of the items in the middle belong to the Oxford's Museum of the History of
Science, you were hearing a bit about that from this morning.
The daguerreotypes belong to Jeffrey Bond,
who I'll say a bit more about the daguerreotypes in a minute.
And some of the other items belong to Summerville College
from the Mary Summerville archive.
And we planned it, we sort of thought about three things.
We were thinking mainly about Ada Lovelace's scientific life,
her mathematic life.
We started over on the left with items related to her childhood,
in the middle with items related to Babbage and the work on the engine and
on the right with items to do with her mathematics.
We were fortunate to be able to get ahold of portraits that people haven't seen.
These are distorted aren't they.
>> Yes, yes.
>> Does anybody care to fix that?
I don't know how to.
I'm sorry they're distorted.
This is a portrait of Ada as a child that belongs to Somerville College.
Now those of you who read Ada's childhood writings will know she was very
fond of cats.
And you see she is actually holding a little chapbook with picture of,
it's obviously a long, long time before Beatrix Potter but
they're a little bit like Beatrix Potter cats.
They're all dressed up.
But her mother ensured that she had a mathematical education.
This is one of her childhood mathematical exercises.
And people often comment on her skill at abstract thought,
at pulling out the principles of things.
Now here she's doing a sort of childhood mathematical exercise.
And what's she doing, well you look at the top of the right hand column.
Two times five plus three plus four equals 22.
Two times five is ten, plus three times four equals 22.
But what she's saying in the words before
is that she'd initially been thinking of it the wrong way around.
I had been wrong, as I thought you did five times two is ten,
to which you add three is thirteen and then multiply the whole lot by four.
So she spotted the principle of the thing.
She spotted, it's rather
charming thing to have in an archive and be able to put up.
When we were thinking about Babbage,
we talked to the Museum of the History of Science.
We had to have a copy of the famous program.
That's bottom right.
If you've been to the Caesar display, you'll spot that's not quite
the famous program was reproduced in Taylor's Magazine.
It's a different type setting of the famous program
from the archive in the Museum of the History of Science.
And I think that we haven't actually had time to go through it and
see if it's had any of the typos corrected.
Maybe, maybe some of the people working on this have.
We also had some bits of different hanging up there.
Some of these bits that Lauren showed us, too.
And this is where somebody
who's not used to this, you suddenly get things that you never get before.
In the process of planning this,
I got to go into the Museum of the History of Science and
pick up some of these things, you know, wearing special rubber gloves and all.
[LAUGH] I hadn't thought before, they're big bits of metal.
They're very heavy.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
the physicality of this machine, I've got somebody working for
me at the moment who keeps telling me how materiality is important.
Okay, that's news, I get it.
[LAUGH] The materiality of this, this wasn't numbers as abstract things,
you know, just in thing calculated on your phone.
This is, computing is a physical thing,
what do you think, as we were hearing this morning, the big clanking machines.
We also looked for some letters.
This is a letter, it's a bit hard to read but it's rather nice,
because this is the correspondence between Lovelace and had its own particular tone.
Being very flattering.
This is Lovelace writing to her mother.
And complaining that Babbage is so wretchedly disorganized.
If he does consent, basically she's saying, look, if he lets me be
his project manager, then we'll actually get this dratted engine built.
>> [LAUGH] >> Well,
Babbage wasn't having any of that.
But I think it's rather, he is beyond measure, careless and desultory.
Well I think we would, whoever put up the slides of his last attempts to write
an account of the analytical engine where he sort of writes two pages and
then starts doodling or something else.
He's beyond measure, careless and desultory at times.
I shall be willing to be his whipper in.
>> [LAUGH] >> Well that of course is
a metaphor from the hunting field.
The whipper in is the person who runs around the back and herds the hounds.
Isn't it?
Somebody who knows more about hunting than me?
>> Yeah.
>> Yes? >> [LAUGH]
>> Thank you.
>> [LAUGH] >> So
she was going to be Babbage's whipper in but it didn't quite happen.
Well in the third bay that was where we got to think about the mathematics.
And that was where I was told less is more, no, you can't have that one, Ursula.
No, nobody will understand it.
Oh, okay.
They were right, actually.
[LAUGH] They were right.
So what did we end up with?
Well, we had another image of Lovelace.
And, oh gosh, this is not distorted on my, sorry,
somebody can instantly see how to un-distort this.
But it's the same image,
if you look at your program, it's the image on the front of your program.
Now, the history of this image.
This image is actually reproduced in Doris Langley Moore's biography of Lovelace,
written in the 1980s, the one dedicated to Mary.
And so I read this book, Sylvia Nitch, and thought, oh, well that's nice.
Let me do a daguerreotype.
I wonder where it is.
And thanks to the power of the network, it turned out, I was only two away from it.
I asked the arbiter of all things Byron where it might be.
Drum and bone and he said well the expert on Byron portraiture is
Jeffrey Bond whose sitting at the back there, he might now.
And indeed he did know because he was sitting about two yards away from it at
the time he got the email, and Jeffrey has very kindly lent it for the display,
which you know the it's tiny.
It's tiny.
And he's allowed us to reproduce it and distribute it with appropriate credit.
And it is extraordinary, Doris Langley Moore had the wrong date, we've dated it,
it says on the box Claudette, Claudette was a the most
famous who set up shop in London in the early 1840s.
He was quite a pioneer daguerreotypist.
In particular he was a pioneer of using painted back drops.
And the painted back drop in this is exactly the same as the painted back
drop in a daguerreotype he made of Fox Talbot.
So we can, which is dated, so we can date it at about 1842,
43 which is about the time when she wrote the paper.
And I think it's amazing, I think it's amazing because she,
many of the of women of that period, well they were presenting a certain image.
It was a certain image,
they might be if they were having a portrait painted aristocrat women.
She looks intense, she looks fierce.
She's, you can't say it's because they had to
sort of sit in neck braces to have their taken.
Claudette had found a way of doing away with the neck brace, so
it's a remarkable image.
And thank you very much, Jeffery, for allowing everyone to see it.
It's quite remarkable.
But then another treasure.
I just get to talk about my fun treasures because I'm an amateur at this.
Now this was my wow moment in the archives.
So, okay lots of people put their hands up earlier and
said they were computer scientists.
Okay, computer scientists, what is this a picture of?
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Exactly.
Well you knew cuz I told you before.
[LAUGH] Was it you?
So but you know just imagine I'm an amateur to this archive stuff.
But the thrill of turning over the pages in this box of archives with Mary and
looking at this and thinking, wow,
I'm the first person to look at this box and to muse at what that was.
It's so exciting.
So [INAUDIBLE], what's that all about?
Well, this is a page where Lovelace and are doodling.
We don't really have a date on it but it includes
various things that they've talked about in letters at various times so, but
they were friends for a very long time.
So we don't know.
But Conisbrough is a problem.
Conisbrough is a problem all about, you've got a river and bridges.
And what you want to do is to walk on a circuit, starting, let's say bottom-left,
walk around, cross over all the bridges and come back to where you started.
Well, more materiality, look at that.
The river and the bridges are drawn in that really smudgy ink.
It was probably a quill pen that hadn't been sharpened.
Somebody told me that.
I mean, who knows about these things.
But the walk, you see is pencil, and it has been done while the ink is wet.
And so as it's dragged along, it sort of dragged through the ink.
More materiality, whatever was going on here, of course,
what we would really love to know is what's going on with these dots.
You know, wouldn't we all love to think it was an algorithm for something.
Well, a jigsaw puzzle remains and thanks to the digitization that Nick announced,
this image will be on the web and we can all have a go at cracking the puzzle.
Another element and I've been walking around full of glee showing this to people
and I showed it to a friend of mine
who's an expert in a different part of recreational mathematics.
And he spotted something I hadn't spotted.
And now, just to keep the audience on its toes,
Soren is gonna come up and explain what's going on with that.
Some of you have guessed what that is, Soren.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah.
Yeah.
>> So what we have there is what in modern terminology is called a magic square,
as you can see.
And what struck me when I saw this document, but
also, the magic square there, is that it shows that Ada Lovelace was
also a mathematician, but it also show her as a computer scientist.
And let me explain that.
If you look at the numbers in this square,
you will notice if you add them up along each row or
column you get the same results, 15, that's why it is called a magic square.
So the numbers add up to the same thing but
the thing is that this is not just numbers produced by some trial and error process.
It's actually, you can see from the context which [INAUDIBLE]
from this document here you can see,
this part of the document you can see that she's actually following an algorithm.
What we today we'd call an algorithm.
This is a procedure of simple steps and
that procedure is in putting the numbers in place.
So, let me illustrate this idea that some
slightly different example but also from square.
And this is something that is wonderful to teach children.
So the algorithm itself.
It's very easy to understand.
That's exactly what an algorithm is, every step just follows from simple rules.
So I'm not going to go into detail with the procedure I'm following,
I'll just fill in the numbers here.
But essentially what I'm doing is I'm going up and
to the right all the time and when I get to the end here,
I follow a rule that is telling me that I have to come in from the other side.
So you have four here, five here, and now I bump into one.
I'm stuck.
And there's another rule telling me then you just go one down.
You continue up to the right, up to the right here.
Get out of the paper here, so I continue down here.
I get out in of the paper according to rule at come in on this side, the 10.
I bump into something I follow another rule it tells me I go down,
the rule from before, continue.
Make sure I bump into the corner, again I am stuck.
So I go one down 16, 17, come up here, come down 18, 19, 20.
Bump into a number, go down.
21, 22, 23, 24, come in here and come in here, 25.
And that's- >> [APPLAUSE]
>> The amazing thing here is that
this is indeed very amazing because
if you add up the numbers here along each row you get 65.
65, 65, or think of 65 as sums here, 65, 65, 65.
The diagonals add up to 65, the other diagonal to 65.
You can even add up the corners and the one in the middle.
You get 65.
You take the middle points here, add up, you get 65.
There's lots of Mendican properties here.
But, of course, from the computer science perspective I
would say that the magical thing is that this algorithm is perceived to work.
Why does it work?
So, we have two aspects.
We have the procedure itself, you can teach children, it has a wonderful way to
introduce children to the mystery of mathematics and algorithms.
On the other hand it really takes a mathematician
like Ada Lovelace to work out why these kind of
implements and procedures of the work.
So Ursula, continue, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Well,
Ada Lovelace retained her interest in mathematics.
And, one has to pause and
think about mathematics in the cultural context of the day.
It was the age when people were starting to.
Why was Babbage building his engines, building his engines to compute tables?
Why were they computing tables?
Because they were seeing the power of mathematics in collecting data,
modeling data.
They were producing data tables for insurance, tables for
time, tables for plant growth.
That was the age of people collecting data,
sending it in to organizations like the Society will correlate, organize it.
Write papers, all of that kind of thing was starting to happen.
And William Lovelace, Lovelace's husband became
rather interested in scientific approaches to agriculture, and
he wrote several lengthy papers addressing this sort of point.
Which is as far as we know, Lovelace's only other published work, his footnotes,
to these papers criticizing various possible models for plant growth.
But I think to have another footnote, which shows her broad scientific interest.
This one, she's actually talking about photography,
not from the point of view of having her photograph taken, like a grand lady,
which she was, but the paraphotography in instrumentation.
If you're trying to measure light levels, measure clouds.
So scientists like Herschel, other photographic experiments is like
Tolbert, like Claudet were also very interested in
scientific equipment on photographic principles.
And this is, if you've read much of Ada Lovelace, this is pure Ada Lovelace this
tone, the present object is merely to suggest to Mr..
One feels a merely sort of jest from Ada Lovelace, had a certain amount of force.
And to other scientific agriculturists, how accurately the two instruments above,
the and the which were Herschel's instruments,
would supply the desired data as regards light and heat.
Seems to write unaware of the means of which photography
has offered toward the easy and delicate appreciation of this, and so on and so
forth, and other papers where she talks about the importance of photography,
the importance of the experimental approach.
Towards the end of her life she started thinking, and there's a lot been
written about this, and I'm only telling you about it in 30 seconds.
So I can't say terribly much.
But she started thinking about what she called a mathematical model of the nervous
system, or a calculus of the nervous system.
And she started thinking about it, both in mathematical forms but
in experimental terms.
She drew up, it's not clear how much experimental work she did,
how much mathematical work she did.
But just the way she wrote about it is rather extraordinary.
We've got the whole of this in the body of the display, but she says,
I hope to bequeath the next generations a calculus of the nervous system.
Now calculus of the nervous system to scientists today.
Yeah, you know, we can kind of figure out what we probably mean by that.
But for somebody to say that in the 1840s,
to be thinking that way, I find quite extraordinary.
And I think it's not something that's been written about.
And perhaps the depths of cultural positioning it might have been.
And I think this is a bigger question about Lovelace.
One of the things that fascinates me about, as a scientist,
coming of this, but while I suppose there are several things that fascinate me.
First of all, I'm always tempted to say gosh,
it's such fun working in the but I realize it's like a box of chocolates.
It's all this amazing stuff.
But I realize that's a bit like a typical response.
When people meet a mathematician,
people sometimes say I could never do maths at school.
And, you know, sometimes people meet somebody in the humanities, and
they say, gosh, it must be nice reading books all day.
[LAUGH] So saying to the wow you're a box of chocolates is a bit [INAUDIBLE].
It's lovely and all sorts of amazing stuff.
But it's brought me a new realization, I think, of two aspects.
First of all that scientific archives are important.
Scientific archives are important for present-day scientific problems,
not just for the history of science.
So, all this data that people were gathering at the time.
Oh, so John Clare was writing poems about the disappearance of some bird or other,
somebody else was modeling the plant that that ate which was disappearing.
Cuz the plant was disappearing.
Those records are somewhere.
We can go back.
We can go back and use that information in the spirit of,
well it won't be not very big data.
Anyway, that data is still there for us to use as scientists today.
But also it's a bigger issue of to really understand what's going on,
you need the cultural context, you need the humanities background,
you need the social science background.
To look at where these ideas come from as Adrian Johnston was saying this morning.
Now these ideas of machinery of operator of function.
They didn't just appear in a vacuum, they appeared in a cultural context
as well as a scientific context and this is another quote from the famous
paper which bears out what I think, I'm not the first person to say.
Somebody needs to take this paper and study it as literary object.
As a not just as a scientific object.
Those who view mathematical science not just as a vast body of abstract and
immutable truths whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry, logical completeness,
when regarded in their connection together as a whole entitle them to a prominent
place in the interest of all profound.
Oh God, is there a comma anywhere?
[LAUGH] In the interest of all profound and logical minds.
But as for a yet deeper interest for the human race,
when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which we
alone can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.
And those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which visibly or
invisibly consciously or unconsciously, oh.
Our immediate physical perceptions
are interminably going on in the the creation we live amongst.
And suddenly we've got to the creation.
We got to theology.
We got to contemporary views on theology and the nature of mathematics.
Well, is she feeling, she needs to put a bit of that gold stuff in so
she's not getting into trouble.
It was rather, something rather deeper there going on, I think.
I got to the semicolon.
Those who thus think on mathematical truth, as the instrument through which
the weak-minded man can most effectively reach his creative works.
Will regard with a special interest all that content to facilitate
the translation of it's principles into explicit practical forms.
In other words, the machine is an instrument of God's work,
as well as being.
I find that kind of sentiment quite extraordinary.
And I find, the conclusion I've drawn from all this, humanities people, please let me
keep coming to talk to you, and I'll try not to call the a box of chocolates.
>> [LAUGH] >> And
let's work together on finding out exactly what was going on here.
Thank you.