1
00:00:19,917 --> 00:00:21,667
I'm Nick Woodhouse.

2
00:00:21,667 --> 00:00:23,767
I'm chair of the Clay Mathematics Institute.

3
00:00:23,767 --> 00:00:28,347
And I'll explain in a second what we've got to do with today's event.

4
00:00:28,347 --> 00:00:33,701
I get to introduce first of all, Ursula Martin and

5
00:00:33,701 --> 00:00:42,577
Sauron Reese who are going to talk about Ada Lovelace, a scientist in the archives.

6
00:00:42,577 --> 00:00:46,867
Sauron is a reader in computer science in London.

7
00:00:46,867 --> 00:00:51,327
And he's rather on the mathematical end of computer science, but

8
00:00:51,327 --> 00:00:54,192
he also has an interest in computer chess,

9
00:00:54,192 --> 00:00:59,384
which I'm sure is something that Ada Lovelace would have enjoyed very much.

10
00:00:59,384 --> 00:01:04,047
Ursula I'm sure is well known to all of you, I'll just make one remark

11
00:01:04,047 --> 00:01:08,885
about something which isn't in her biographical notes in the program.

12
00:01:08,885 --> 00:01:13,985
And that's that in 1992, she was appointed as the first

13
00:01:13,985 --> 00:01:18,797
ever woman professor in any discipline at St. Andrews.

14
00:01:18,797 --> 00:01:25,077
So this is 140 years after the death of Ada Lovelace.

15
00:01:25,077 --> 00:01:31,067
I calculated that her appointment raised the rate of

16
00:01:31,067 --> 00:01:38,893
appointment of women professors at Saint Andrew's from zero to 1.72 per millennium.

17
00:01:38,893 --> 00:01:43,477
>> [LAUGH] >> So, this a mathematical institute.

18
00:01:43,477 --> 00:01:48,147
Anyway, I am sure you're also aware that she's been the driving force behind

19
00:01:48,147 --> 00:01:51,627
this afternoon, behind this whole event.

20
00:01:51,627 --> 00:01:54,137
She's done an enormous amount of work.

21
00:01:54,137 --> 00:01:56,547
She's gathered together some quite spectacular speakers.

22
00:01:56,547 --> 00:01:59,617
So I think it's right that we should hear from her.

23
00:01:59,617 --> 00:02:02,535
One of the things she is going to,

24
00:02:02,535 --> 00:02:07,852
you're going to see a lot of in this talk are the mathematical

25
00:02:07,852 --> 00:02:13,393
papers of Ada Lovelace which are held in the Bodleian Library.

26
00:02:13,393 --> 00:02:17,683
You may have picked up if you've read the program very carefully is that

27
00:02:17,683 --> 00:02:23,087
the Clay Mathematical Institute is undertaking a project to digitize these.

28
00:02:23,087 --> 00:02:29,397
And they will very soon be available online in a watermarked form and

29
00:02:29,397 --> 00:02:33,467
freely available for the whole community to see.

30
00:02:33,467 --> 00:02:38,219
We're very grateful to the generosity of Lord Litton who has

31
00:02:38,219 --> 00:02:41,306
allowed us to undertake this project.

32
00:02:41,306 --> 00:02:46,874
Anyway, I think let's say no more,

33
00:02:46,874 --> 00:02:52,633
but hand over to Ursula and to Sauron.

34
00:02:52,633 --> 00:02:58,967
>> [APPLAUSE] >> [INAUDIBLE]

35
00:02:58,967 --> 00:03:03,441
trying to say some of the things that I was going to say for me but

36
00:03:03,441 --> 00:03:06,317
that won't stop me saying them again.

37
00:03:06,317 --> 00:03:08,517
Why are we doing this in Oxford?

38
00:03:08,517 --> 00:03:09,827
You see it's very interesting.

39
00:03:09,827 --> 00:03:14,942
When male scientists have their 200th birthday, typically they belong somewhere.

40
00:03:14,942 --> 00:03:18,525
[INAUDIBLE] belonged to Cork, Turing belonged to Oxford and.

41
00:03:18,525 --> 00:03:20,091
Sorry, no he didn't, did he?

42
00:03:20,091 --> 00:03:23,380
>> [LAUGH] >> Turing belonged to Cambridge in

43
00:03:23,380 --> 00:03:26,907
Manchester, Darwin belonged to Cambridge.

44
00:03:26,907 --> 00:03:29,517
Charles Dobson belonged to Oxford.

45
00:03:29,517 --> 00:03:30,667
Now, Lovelace, was a woman.

46
00:03:30,667 --> 00:03:32,287
She wasn't attached to an institution.

47
00:03:32,287 --> 00:03:37,157
And suddenly there's no institution to invest a lot of time and

48
00:03:37,157 --> 00:03:39,107
energy into celebrating her.

49
00:03:39,107 --> 00:03:41,207
Well hang on, we better change that.

50
00:03:41,207 --> 00:03:44,257
Why do we think we in Oxford are going to do that?

51
00:03:44,257 --> 00:03:45,557
What do we have that's special?

52
00:03:45,557 --> 00:03:46,453
Well we have this.

53
00:03:46,453 --> 00:03:49,828
We have the Library, this is the new part of the Library,

54
00:03:49,828 --> 00:03:53,537
where some of you are coming for a reception this evening.

55
00:03:53,537 --> 00:03:58,079
And, as Nick said, we have the fabulous archives of the Miller,

56
00:03:58,079 --> 00:04:00,399
Byron, and Lovelace families.

57
00:04:00,399 --> 00:04:05,061
About 460 boxes deposited in the by, I know Lord Litton's coming later,

58
00:04:05,061 --> 00:04:06,691
I'm not sure he's here yet.

59
00:04:06,691 --> 00:04:11,064
But deposited in the by Lord Litton.

60
00:04:11,064 --> 00:04:15,957
And another birthday present to Ada is those of you who have struggled

61
00:04:15,957 --> 00:04:19,807
with the catalog online, or lack of the catalog online.

62
00:04:19,807 --> 00:04:24,551
And have been working with the photocopies of a paper catalog

63
00:04:24,551 --> 00:04:27,182
which seems to be drifting out there.

64
00:04:27,182 --> 00:04:32,274
The has now put the catalog online, it's easier to find it by Googling

65
00:04:32,274 --> 00:04:38,197
it than me giving you a 10 foot long URL but that's fantastic news for scholars.

66
00:04:38,197 --> 00:04:42,015
They've also made it rather easier to access the papers.

67
00:04:42,015 --> 00:04:47,387
If you were used to accessing the papers by a rather complicated process involving

68
00:04:47,387 --> 00:04:49,927
letters of recognition and so on, that's also gone.

69
00:04:49,927 --> 00:04:54,347
So that's the generosity of Lord Litton and the and I think that's a great

70
00:04:54,347 --> 00:04:58,957
service to scholars, as is the digitization that Nick mentioned.

71
00:04:58,957 --> 00:05:04,777
But because of the presence of this archive, I think

72
00:05:04,777 --> 00:05:08,787
it was Becky Toole, who's sitting there in the front row who first of all said

73
00:05:08,787 --> 00:05:13,657
to John who was here a bit earlier, who's the master of.

74
00:05:13,657 --> 00:05:16,062
Well aren't you going to do something?

75
00:05:16,062 --> 00:05:16,597
>> [COUGH] >> Or

76
00:05:16,597 --> 00:05:19,104
did you say it's Richard Aldington or did you say it's both of them?

77
00:05:19,104 --> 00:05:24,002
Anyway, by force of personality Betty made it so

78
00:05:24,002 --> 00:05:28,307
that the agreed to have a display.

79
00:05:28,307 --> 00:05:30,210
And the then looked around and

80
00:05:30,210 --> 00:05:33,426
thought well there must be somebody in the Masters department or

81
00:05:33,426 --> 00:05:37,135
the Computer Science department who'd like to help us with the display.

82
00:05:37,135 --> 00:05:39,851
And I don't think I could duck fast enough.

83
00:05:39,851 --> 00:05:43,009
>> [LAUGH] >> I didn't really know, had a sort of

84
00:05:43,009 --> 00:05:47,315
general interest in history and the history of science, but I didn't know very

85
00:05:47,315 --> 00:05:52,037
much more than anybody else about Lovelace before I embarked on this project.

86
00:05:52,037 --> 00:05:57,807
But one of the things I rapidly realized was that although there is this remarkable

87
00:05:57,807 --> 00:06:04,107
archive, many parts of it have not been studied in the depths that they deserved.

88
00:06:04,107 --> 00:06:08,247
And in particular I made the remarkable discovery that well,

89
00:06:08,247 --> 00:06:14,647
some people looked at Lady Lovelace's mathematics, like

90
00:06:14,647 --> 00:06:19,457
Ben Nyman had written a short paper about Ada Lovelace's mathematics in the 70s.

91
00:06:19,457 --> 00:06:23,640
No real historian of mathematics had done an in depth study of her

92
00:06:23,640 --> 00:06:25,118
mathematical paper.

93
00:06:25,118 --> 00:06:29,705
And so we were very fortunate to get funding to secure for Chris Haulings who's

94
00:06:29,705 --> 00:06:34,362
just been appointed to a lectureship in history of maths here and Adrian Rice who

95
00:06:34,362 --> 00:06:39,251
is the world expert on de Morgan to work through Lovelace's mathematical papers.

96
00:06:39,251 --> 00:06:45,947
Particularly her 400 page correspondence course with Augustus de Morgan.

97
00:06:45,947 --> 00:06:47,567
There's lots of exciting things to say there but

98
00:06:47,567 --> 00:06:53,437
I'm not going to say them because Chris is going to say them tomorrow.

99
00:06:53,437 --> 00:06:55,267
But I am going to say some other things.

100
00:06:55,267 --> 00:06:59,777
This research has been really at the heart of what we've been, what we've done.

101
00:06:59,777 --> 00:07:04,327
It is very exciting to be able to do new research in an area that appears to be so

102
00:07:04,327 --> 00:07:05,857
well worked over.

103
00:07:05,857 --> 00:07:09,637
But it's also motivated other things that we've done some of which we heard about

104
00:07:09,637 --> 00:07:11,037
this morning.

105
00:07:11,037 --> 00:07:13,747
The partnership with the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley,

106
00:07:13,747 --> 00:07:18,657
who were doing a digital version of our display in

107
00:07:18,657 --> 00:07:22,657
a group at Queen Mary University of London produce a magazine called CS for Fun.

108
00:07:22,657 --> 00:07:25,607
You should all have a copy in your plastic bag.

109
00:07:25,607 --> 00:07:28,757
They've done an Ada-themed issue.

110
00:07:28,757 --> 00:07:33,327
Just before tea, and that's why we must all keep even me.

111
00:07:33,327 --> 00:07:35,877
Just before tea, we're going to have a prize giving for

112
00:07:35,877 --> 00:07:41,647
the National Museum of Computing's Write a Letter to Ada competition.

113
00:07:41,647 --> 00:07:44,977
So there's been a huge amount of other stuff happening locally,

114
00:07:44,977 --> 00:07:49,797
and nationally as well.

115
00:07:49,797 --> 00:07:55,007
So I think what I want to talk about is our thinking in putting together

116
00:07:55,007 --> 00:08:02,137
the display and use that to pick up some of my own reactions to the archive and

117
00:08:02,137 --> 00:08:09,887
to as a science in an archive for the first time working on a scientist archive.

118
00:08:09,887 --> 00:08:14,137
All right, so we sat down to plan the display.

119
00:08:14,137 --> 00:08:20,847
We being Maddie Slaven, who is the Director of Exhibitions at the Bodleian,

120
00:08:20,847 --> 00:08:24,517
and then Maddie recruited a bunch of people to help and advise.

121
00:08:24,517 --> 00:08:27,548
Becky Claw came over and gave us her, must have been about a year ago,

122
00:08:27,548 --> 00:08:28,505
wasn't it, Becky?

123
00:08:28,505 --> 00:08:29,294
>> Last October.

124
00:08:29,294 --> 00:08:32,989
>> Last October.

125
00:08:32,989 --> 00:08:35,977
Chris Hollings and Adrian Rice.

126
00:08:35,977 --> 00:08:40,467
But somehow, I did mention not ducking fast enough,

127
00:08:40,467 --> 00:08:43,327
a lot of the work, the more detailed work,

128
00:08:43,327 --> 00:08:47,227
I had the privilege of working with Mary Clappingson on this display.

129
00:08:47,227 --> 00:08:51,157
If you're a sharp eye, you saw Mary Clappingson's name there.

130
00:08:51,157 --> 00:08:54,537
Mary, is Mary here?

131
00:08:54,537 --> 00:08:55,837
I don't think so.

132
00:08:55,837 --> 00:09:01,027
Anyway, so Mary is at the heart of many, many works to do with the Lovelace papers.

133
00:09:01,027 --> 00:09:06,587
It's when these papers arrived in the from the Litten family in the 1970s,

134
00:09:06,587 --> 00:09:09,147
it was Mary who cataloged them.

135
00:09:09,147 --> 00:09:13,197
And Mary is credited at the front of many of the biographies, or

136
00:09:13,197 --> 00:09:15,077
the biographies are dedicated to Mary for

137
00:09:15,077 --> 00:09:18,327
her extraordinary help she's been able to give people.

138
00:09:18,327 --> 00:09:24,527
So it was a real privilege working with professionals on designing a display.

139
00:09:24,527 --> 00:09:30,989
And something else I've never been involved in before either,

140
00:09:30,989 --> 00:09:35,905
and I kept saying no you can't have so much mass.

141
00:09:35,905 --> 00:09:37,593
>> [LAUGH] >> Does anybody else

142
00:09:37,593 --> 00:09:38,471
get what that was about?

143
00:09:38,471 --> 00:09:41,832
No, oh, well.

144
00:09:41,832 --> 00:09:43,937
So, what did we do, how did we plan it?

145
00:09:43,937 --> 00:09:47,432
Well, given the interest, given, of course, there's 460 boxes.

146
00:09:47,432 --> 00:09:50,307
[LAUGH] There's a lot of stuff to choose from.

147
00:09:50,307 --> 00:09:53,047
We had long list, a long, long list, a short long list.

148
00:09:53,047 --> 00:09:58,577
And then the final decision certainly came right down

149
00:09:58,577 --> 00:10:04,547
to the wire in thinking about the layout of the case and so on.

150
00:10:04,547 --> 00:10:09,177
It's a tribute to the extraordinary resources that there are In Oxford.

151
00:10:09,177 --> 00:10:11,807
But here's our display, I hope some of you can see it.

152
00:10:11,807 --> 00:10:15,386
Only one item in that actually belongs to the.

153
00:10:15,386 --> 00:10:17,824
[LAUGH] >> [LAUGH]

154
00:10:17,824 --> 00:10:19,567
>> The rest of it is, well,

155
00:10:19,567 --> 00:10:23,817
many of the papers of course belong to Lord Lytton.

156
00:10:23,817 --> 00:10:27,684
Some of the items in the middle belong to the Oxford's Museum of the History of

157
00:10:27,684 --> 00:10:31,267
Science, you were hearing a bit about that from this morning.

158
00:10:31,267 --> 00:10:36,425
The daguerreotypes belong to Jeffrey Bond,

159
00:10:36,425 --> 00:10:43,493
who I'll say a bit more about the daguerreotypes in a minute.

160
00:10:43,493 --> 00:10:46,091
And some of the other items belong to Summerville College

161
00:10:46,091 --> 00:10:49,967
from the Mary Summerville archive.

162
00:10:49,967 --> 00:10:52,888
And we planned it, we sort of thought about three things.

163
00:10:52,888 --> 00:10:57,056
We were thinking mainly about Ada Lovelace's scientific life,

164
00:10:57,056 --> 00:10:58,504
her mathematic life.

165
00:10:58,504 --> 00:11:02,015
We started over on the left with items related to her childhood,

166
00:11:02,015 --> 00:11:05,915
in the middle with items related to Babbage and the work on the engine and

167
00:11:05,915 --> 00:11:08,727
on the right with items to do with her mathematics.

168
00:11:08,727 --> 00:11:15,387
We were fortunate to be able to get ahold of portraits that people haven't seen.

169
00:11:15,387 --> 00:11:16,783
These are distorted aren't they.

170
00:11:16,783 --> 00:11:20,196
>> Yes, yes.

171
00:11:20,196 --> 00:11:22,507
>> Does anybody care to fix that?

172
00:11:22,507 --> 00:11:23,497
I don't know how to.

173
00:11:23,497 --> 00:11:27,887
I'm sorry they're distorted.

174
00:11:27,887 --> 00:11:32,777
This is a portrait of Ada as a child that belongs to Somerville College.

175
00:11:32,777 --> 00:11:36,347
Now those of you who read Ada's childhood writings will know she was very

176
00:11:36,347 --> 00:11:37,837
fond of cats.

177
00:11:37,837 --> 00:11:41,737
And you see she is actually holding a little chapbook with picture of,

178
00:11:41,737 --> 00:11:44,467
it's obviously a long, long time before Beatrix Potter but

179
00:11:44,467 --> 00:11:46,017
they're a little bit like Beatrix Potter cats.

180
00:11:46,017 --> 00:11:50,107
They're all dressed up.

181
00:11:50,107 --> 00:11:55,287
But her mother ensured that she had a mathematical education.

182
00:11:55,287 --> 00:11:59,247
This is one of her childhood mathematical exercises.

183
00:11:59,247 --> 00:12:03,997
And people often comment on her skill at abstract thought,

184
00:12:03,997 --> 00:12:06,877
at pulling out the principles of things.

185
00:12:06,877 --> 00:12:14,394
Now here she's doing a sort of childhood mathematical exercise.

186
00:12:14,394 --> 00:12:16,787
And what's she doing, well you look at the top of the right hand column.

187
00:12:16,787 --> 00:12:18,887
Two times five plus three plus four equals 22.

188
00:12:18,887 --> 00:12:21,897
Two times five is ten, plus three times four equals 22.

189
00:12:21,897 --> 00:12:25,667
But what she's saying in the words before

190
00:12:25,667 --> 00:12:30,807
is that she'd initially been thinking of it the wrong way around.

191
00:12:30,807 --> 00:12:34,817
I had been wrong, as I thought you did five times two is ten,

192
00:12:34,817 --> 00:12:39,327
to which you add three is thirteen and then multiply the whole lot by four.

193
00:12:39,327 --> 00:12:41,547
So she spotted the principle of the thing.

194
00:12:41,547 --> 00:12:46,097
She spotted, it's rather

195
00:12:46,097 --> 00:12:51,377
charming thing to have in an archive and be able to put up.

196
00:12:51,377 --> 00:12:53,877
When we were thinking about Babbage,

197
00:12:53,877 --> 00:12:57,417
we talked to the Museum of the History of Science.

198
00:12:57,417 --> 00:13:00,767
We had to have a copy of the famous program.

199
00:13:00,767 --> 00:13:02,307
That's bottom right.

200
00:13:02,307 --> 00:13:07,007
If you've been to the Caesar display, you'll spot that's not quite

201
00:13:07,007 --> 00:13:10,067
the famous program was reproduced in Taylor's Magazine.

202
00:13:10,067 --> 00:13:13,187
It's a different type setting of the famous program

203
00:13:13,187 --> 00:13:17,797
from the archive in the Museum of the History of Science.

204
00:13:17,797 --> 00:13:20,477
And I think that we haven't actually had time to go through it and

205
00:13:20,477 --> 00:13:23,177
see if it's had any of the typos corrected.

206
00:13:23,177 --> 00:13:26,647
Maybe, maybe some of the people working on this have.

207
00:13:26,647 --> 00:13:30,567
We also had some bits of different hanging up there.

208
00:13:30,567 --> 00:13:32,757
Some of these bits that Lauren showed us, too.

209
00:13:32,757 --> 00:13:37,947
And this is where somebody

210
00:13:37,947 --> 00:13:43,847
who's not used to this, you suddenly get things that you never get before.

211
00:13:43,847 --> 00:13:45,537
In the process of planning this,

212
00:13:45,537 --> 00:13:48,597
I got to go into the Museum of the History of Science and

213
00:13:48,597 --> 00:13:52,112
pick up some of these things, you know, wearing special rubber gloves and all.

214
00:13:52,112 --> 00:13:56,597
[LAUGH] I hadn't thought before, they're big bits of metal.

215
00:13:56,597 --> 00:13:57,752
They're very heavy.

216
00:13:57,752 --> 00:13:59,567
>> [LAUGH] >> And

217
00:13:59,567 --> 00:14:04,027
the physicality of this machine, I've got somebody working for

218
00:14:04,027 --> 00:14:07,677
me at the moment who keeps telling me how materiality is important.

219
00:14:07,677 --> 00:14:08,877
Okay, that's news, I get it.

220
00:14:08,877 --> 00:14:14,787
[LAUGH] The materiality of this, this wasn't numbers as abstract things,

221
00:14:14,787 --> 00:14:17,437
you know, just in thing calculated on your phone.

222
00:14:17,437 --> 00:14:19,887
This is, computing is a physical thing,

223
00:14:19,887 --> 00:14:25,257
what do you think, as we were hearing this morning, the big clanking machines.

224
00:14:25,257 --> 00:14:29,517
We also looked for some letters.

225
00:14:29,517 --> 00:14:33,405
This is a letter, it's a bit hard to read but it's rather nice,

226
00:14:33,405 --> 00:14:39,516
because this is the correspondence between Lovelace and had its own particular tone.

227
00:14:39,516 --> 00:14:40,977
Being very flattering.

228
00:14:40,977 --> 00:14:43,617
This is Lovelace writing to her mother.

229
00:14:43,617 --> 00:14:47,397
And complaining that Babbage is so wretchedly disorganized.

230
00:14:47,397 --> 00:14:51,097
If he does consent, basically she's saying, look, if he lets me be

231
00:14:51,097 --> 00:14:54,302
his project manager, then we'll actually get this dratted engine built.

232
00:14:54,302 --> 00:14:56,317
>> [LAUGH] >> Well,

233
00:14:56,317 --> 00:14:58,727
Babbage wasn't having any of that.

234
00:14:58,727 --> 00:15:04,937
But I think it's rather, he is beyond measure, careless and desultory.

235
00:15:04,937 --> 00:15:08,747
Well I think we would, whoever put up the slides of his last attempts to write

236
00:15:08,747 --> 00:15:11,457
an account of the analytical engine where he sort of writes two pages and

237
00:15:11,457 --> 00:15:13,617
then starts doodling or something else.

238
00:15:13,617 --> 00:15:16,027
He's beyond measure, careless and desultory at times.

239
00:15:16,027 --> 00:15:18,396
I shall be willing to be his whipper in.

240
00:15:18,396 --> 00:15:19,917
>> [LAUGH] >> Well that of course is

241
00:15:19,917 --> 00:15:22,205
a metaphor from the hunting field.

242
00:15:22,205 --> 00:15:26,797
The whipper in is the person who runs around the back and herds the hounds.

243
00:15:26,797 --> 00:15:27,357
Isn't it?

244
00:15:27,357 --> 00:15:28,892
Somebody who knows more about hunting than me?

245
00:15:28,892 --> 00:15:29,522
>> Yeah.

246
00:15:29,522 --> 00:15:30,660
>> Yes? >> [LAUGH]

247
00:15:30,660 --> 00:15:31,333
>> Thank you.

248
00:15:31,333 --> 00:15:35,007
>> [LAUGH] >> So

249
00:15:35,007 --> 00:15:39,127
she was going to be Babbage's whipper in but it didn't quite happen.

250
00:15:39,127 --> 00:15:45,447
Well in the third bay that was where we got to think about the mathematics.

251
00:15:45,447 --> 00:15:49,036
And that was where I was told less is more, no, you can't have that one, Ursula.

252
00:15:49,036 --> 00:15:50,316
No, nobody will understand it.

253
00:15:50,316 --> 00:15:51,201
Oh, okay.

254
00:15:51,201 --> 00:15:52,734
They were right, actually.

255
00:15:52,734 --> 00:15:57,563
[LAUGH] They were right.

256
00:15:57,563 --> 00:15:59,877
So what did we end up with?

257
00:15:59,877 --> 00:16:02,697
Well, we had another image of Lovelace.

258
00:16:02,697 --> 00:16:05,797
And, oh gosh, this is not distorted on my, sorry,

259
00:16:05,797 --> 00:16:09,917
somebody can instantly see how to un-distort this.

260
00:16:09,917 --> 00:16:11,017
But it's the same image,

261
00:16:11,017 --> 00:16:15,577
if you look at your program, it's the image on the front of your program.

262
00:16:15,577 --> 00:16:19,427
Now, the history of this image.

263
00:16:19,427 --> 00:16:24,317
This image is actually reproduced in Doris Langley Moore's biography of Lovelace,

264
00:16:24,317 --> 00:16:28,537
written in the 1980s, the one dedicated to Mary.

265
00:16:28,537 --> 00:16:33,867
And so I read this book, Sylvia Nitch, and thought, oh, well that's nice.

266
00:16:33,867 --> 00:16:35,367
Let me do a daguerreotype.

267
00:16:35,367 --> 00:16:37,447
I wonder where it is.

268
00:16:37,447 --> 00:16:43,277
And thanks to the power of the network, it turned out, I was only two away from it.

269
00:16:43,277 --> 00:16:46,927
I asked the arbiter of all things Byron where it might be.

270
00:16:46,927 --> 00:16:51,786
Drum and bone and he said well the expert on Byron portraiture is

271
00:16:51,786 --> 00:16:56,469
Jeffrey Bond whose sitting at the back there, he might now.

272
00:16:56,469 --> 00:17:01,103
And indeed he did know because he was sitting about two yards away from it at

273
00:17:01,103 --> 00:17:06,035
the time he got the email, and Jeffrey has very kindly lent it for the display,

274
00:17:06,035 --> 00:17:08,674
which you know the it's tiny.

275
00:17:08,674 --> 00:17:10,442
It's tiny.

276
00:17:10,442 --> 00:17:16,195
And he's allowed us to reproduce it and distribute it with appropriate credit.

277
00:17:16,195 --> 00:17:23,065
And it is extraordinary, Doris Langley Moore had the wrong date, we've dated it,

278
00:17:23,065 --> 00:17:28,289
it says on the box Claudette, Claudette was a the most

279
00:17:28,289 --> 00:17:33,556
famous who set up shop in London in the early 1840s.

280
00:17:33,556 --> 00:17:36,817
He was quite a pioneer daguerreotypist.

281
00:17:36,817 --> 00:17:41,097
In particular he was a pioneer of using painted back drops.

282
00:17:41,097 --> 00:17:44,377
And the painted back drop in this is exactly the same as the painted back

283
00:17:44,377 --> 00:17:49,157
drop in a daguerreotype he made of Fox Talbot.

284
00:17:49,157 --> 00:17:53,374
So we can, which is dated, so we can date it at about 1842,

285
00:17:53,374 --> 00:17:56,967
43 which is about the time when she wrote the paper.

286
00:17:56,967 --> 00:18:00,281
And I think it's amazing, I think it's amazing because she,

287
00:18:00,281 --> 00:18:04,925
many of the of women of that period, well they were presenting a certain image.

288
00:18:04,925 --> 00:18:06,227
It was a certain image,

289
00:18:06,227 --> 00:18:11,017
they might be if they were having a portrait painted aristocrat women.

290
00:18:11,017 --> 00:18:12,667
She looks intense, she looks fierce.

291
00:18:12,667 --> 00:18:16,457
She's, you can't say it's because they had to

292
00:18:16,457 --> 00:18:20,245
sort of sit in neck braces to have their taken.

293
00:18:20,245 --> 00:18:24,177
Claudette had found a way of doing away with the neck brace, so

294
00:18:24,177 --> 00:18:25,247
it's a remarkable image.

295
00:18:25,247 --> 00:18:28,677
And thank you very much, Jeffery, for allowing everyone to see it.

296
00:18:28,677 --> 00:18:31,377
It's quite remarkable.

297
00:18:31,377 --> 00:18:34,167
But then another treasure.

298
00:18:34,167 --> 00:18:38,061
I just get to talk about my fun treasures because I'm an amateur at this.

299
00:18:38,061 --> 00:18:43,727
Now this was my wow moment in the archives.

300
00:18:43,727 --> 00:18:46,837
So, okay lots of people put their hands up earlier and

301
00:18:46,837 --> 00:18:48,147
said they were computer scientists.

302
00:18:48,147 --> 00:18:50,727
Okay, computer scientists, what is this a picture of?

303
00:18:50,727 --> 00:18:54,257
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Exactly.

304
00:18:54,257 --> 00:18:56,028
Well you knew cuz I told you before.

305
00:18:56,028 --> 00:19:00,067
[LAUGH] Was it you?

306
00:19:00,067 --> 00:19:06,297
So but you know just imagine I'm an amateur to this archive stuff.

307
00:19:06,297 --> 00:19:11,739
But the thrill of turning over the pages in this box of archives with Mary and

308
00:19:11,739 --> 00:19:14,148
looking at this and thinking, wow,

309
00:19:14,148 --> 00:19:18,601
I'm the first person to look at this box and to muse at what that was.

310
00:19:18,601 --> 00:19:20,972
It's so exciting.

311
00:19:20,972 --> 00:19:24,377
So [INAUDIBLE], what's that all about?

312
00:19:24,377 --> 00:19:29,207
Well, this is a page where Lovelace and are doodling.

313
00:19:29,207 --> 00:19:32,347
We don't really have a date on it but it includes

314
00:19:32,347 --> 00:19:36,737
various things that they've talked about in letters at various times so, but

315
00:19:36,737 --> 00:19:38,117
they were friends for a very long time.

316
00:19:38,117 --> 00:19:40,930
So we don't know.

317
00:19:40,930 --> 00:19:43,368
But Conisbrough is a problem.

318
00:19:43,368 --> 00:19:48,497
Conisbrough is a problem all about, you've got a river and bridges.

319
00:19:48,497 --> 00:19:53,657
And what you want to do is to walk on a circuit, starting, let's say bottom-left,

320
00:19:53,657 --> 00:19:57,857
walk around, cross over all the bridges and come back to where you started.

321
00:19:57,857 --> 00:20:01,037
Well, more materiality, look at that.

322
00:20:01,037 --> 00:20:04,107
The river and the bridges are drawn in that really smudgy ink.

323
00:20:04,107 --> 00:20:06,977
It was probably a quill pen that hadn't been sharpened.

324
00:20:06,977 --> 00:20:07,737
Somebody told me that.

325
00:20:07,737 --> 00:20:10,727
I mean, who knows about these things.

326
00:20:10,727 --> 00:20:14,267
But the walk, you see is pencil, and it has been done while the ink is wet.

327
00:20:14,267 --> 00:20:18,977
And so as it's dragged along, it sort of dragged through the ink.

328
00:20:18,977 --> 00:20:21,567
More materiality, whatever was going on here, of course,

329
00:20:21,567 --> 00:20:26,427
what we would really love to know is what's going on with these dots.

330
00:20:26,427 --> 00:20:30,407
You know, wouldn't we all love to think it was an algorithm for something.

331
00:20:30,407 --> 00:20:35,517
Well, a jigsaw puzzle remains and thanks to the digitization that Nick announced,

332
00:20:35,517 --> 00:20:40,447
this image will be on the web and we can all have a go at cracking the puzzle.

333
00:20:40,447 --> 00:20:43,507
Another element and I've been walking around full of glee showing this to people

334
00:20:43,507 --> 00:20:47,867
and I showed it to a friend of mine

335
00:20:47,867 --> 00:20:51,577
who's an expert in a different part of recreational mathematics.

336
00:20:51,577 --> 00:20:54,977
And he spotted something I hadn't spotted.

337
00:20:54,977 --> 00:20:59,027
And now, just to keep the audience on its toes,

338
00:20:59,027 --> 00:21:04,117
Soren is gonna come up and explain what's going on with that.

339
00:21:04,117 --> 00:21:08,485
Some of you have guessed what that is, Soren.

340
00:21:08,485 --> 00:21:12,250
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah.

341
00:21:12,250 --> 00:21:14,827
Yeah.

342
00:21:14,827 --> 00:21:20,267
>> So what we have there is what in modern terminology is called a magic square,

343
00:21:20,267 --> 00:21:21,377
as you can see.

344
00:21:21,377 --> 00:21:24,637
And what struck me when I saw this document, but

345
00:21:24,637 --> 00:21:29,177
also, the magic square there, is that it shows that Ada Lovelace was

346
00:21:29,177 --> 00:21:32,847
also a mathematician, but it also show her as a computer scientist.

347
00:21:32,847 --> 00:21:34,277
And let me explain that.

348
00:21:34,277 --> 00:21:36,227
If you look at the numbers in this square,

349
00:21:36,227 --> 00:21:40,027
you will notice if you add them up along each row or

350
00:21:40,027 --> 00:21:44,777
column you get the same results, 15, that's why it is called a magic square.

351
00:21:44,777 --> 00:21:48,047
So the numbers add up to the same thing but

352
00:21:48,047 --> 00:21:53,817
the thing is that this is not just numbers produced by some trial and error process.

353
00:21:53,817 --> 00:21:57,357
It's actually, you can see from the context which [INAUDIBLE]

354
00:21:57,357 --> 00:21:59,037
from this document here you can see,

355
00:21:59,037 --> 00:22:03,542
this part of the document you can see that she's actually following an algorithm.

356
00:22:03,542 --> 00:22:05,277
What we today we'd call an algorithm.

357
00:22:05,277 --> 00:22:09,127
This is a procedure of simple steps and

358
00:22:09,127 --> 00:22:13,197
that procedure is in putting the numbers in place.

359
00:22:13,197 --> 00:22:18,237
So, let me illustrate this idea that some

360
00:22:18,237 --> 00:22:21,922
slightly different example but also from square.

361
00:22:21,922 --> 00:22:28,917
And this is something that is wonderful to teach children.

362
00:22:28,917 --> 00:22:32,057
So the algorithm itself.

363
00:22:32,057 --> 00:22:34,597
It's very easy to understand.

364
00:22:34,597 --> 00:22:38,357
That's exactly what an algorithm is, every step just follows from simple rules.

365
00:22:38,357 --> 00:22:42,037
So I'm not going to go into detail with the procedure I'm following,

366
00:22:42,037 --> 00:22:45,307
I'll just fill in the numbers here.

367
00:22:45,307 --> 00:22:47,977
But essentially what I'm doing is I'm going up and

368
00:22:47,977 --> 00:22:51,237
to the right all the time and when I get to the end here,

369
00:22:51,237 --> 00:22:54,967
I follow a rule that is telling me that I have to come in from the other side.

370
00:22:54,967 --> 00:22:58,897
So you have four here, five here, and now I bump into one.

371
00:22:58,897 --> 00:22:59,667
I'm stuck.

372
00:22:59,667 --> 00:23:03,487
And there's another rule telling me then you just go one down.

373
00:23:03,487 --> 00:23:06,207
You continue up to the right, up to the right here.

374
00:23:06,207 --> 00:23:09,447
Get out of the paper here, so I continue down here.

375
00:23:09,447 --> 00:23:13,507
I get out in of the paper according to rule at come in on this side, the 10.

376
00:23:13,507 --> 00:23:18,691
I bump into something I follow another rule it tells me I go down,

377
00:23:18,691 --> 00:23:21,480
the rule from before, continue.

378
00:23:21,480 --> 00:23:26,187
Make sure I bump into the corner, again I am stuck.

379
00:23:26,187 --> 00:23:32,847
So I go one down 16, 17, come up here, come down 18, 19, 20.

380
00:23:32,847 --> 00:23:35,037
Bump into a number, go down.

381
00:23:35,037 --> 00:23:40,474
21, 22, 23, 24, come in here and come in here, 25.

382
00:23:40,474 --> 00:23:42,501
And that's- >> [APPLAUSE]

383
00:23:42,501 --> 00:23:44,330
>> The amazing thing here is that

384
00:23:44,330 --> 00:23:46,525
this is indeed very amazing because

385
00:23:46,525 --> 00:23:50,047
if you add up the numbers here along each row you get 65.

386
00:23:50,047 --> 00:23:58,377
65, 65, or think of 65 as sums here, 65, 65, 65.

387
00:23:58,377 --> 00:24:04,390
The diagonals add up to 65, the other diagonal to 65.

388
00:24:04,390 --> 00:24:06,596
You can even add up the corners and the one in the middle.

389
00:24:06,596 --> 00:24:07,411
You get 65.

390
00:24:07,411 --> 00:24:09,513
You take the middle points here, add up, you get 65.

391
00:24:09,513 --> 00:24:12,387
There's lots of Mendican properties here.

392
00:24:12,387 --> 00:24:14,917
But, of course, from the computer science perspective I

393
00:24:14,917 --> 00:24:20,107
would say that the magical thing is that this algorithm is perceived to work.

394
00:24:20,107 --> 00:24:21,907
Why does it work?

395
00:24:21,907 --> 00:24:23,557
So, we have two aspects.

396
00:24:23,557 --> 00:24:27,107
We have the procedure itself, you can teach children, it has a wonderful way to

397
00:24:27,107 --> 00:24:32,837
introduce children to the mystery of mathematics and algorithms.

398
00:24:32,837 --> 00:24:38,098
On the other hand it really takes a mathematician

399
00:24:38,098 --> 00:24:42,973
like Ada Lovelace to work out why these kind of

400
00:24:42,973 --> 00:24:47,352
implements and procedures of the work.

401
00:24:47,352 --> 00:24:48,582
So Ursula, continue, thank you.

402
00:24:48,582 --> 00:24:54,292
>> [APPLAUSE] >> Well,

403
00:24:54,292 --> 00:24:57,857
Ada Lovelace retained her interest in mathematics.

404
00:24:57,857 --> 00:24:59,057
And, one has to pause and

405
00:24:59,057 --> 00:25:02,807
think about mathematics in the cultural context of the day.

406
00:25:02,807 --> 00:25:07,024
It was the age when people were starting to.

407
00:25:07,024 --> 00:25:10,757
Why was Babbage building his engines, building his engines to compute tables?

408
00:25:10,757 --> 00:25:12,307
Why were they computing tables?

409
00:25:12,307 --> 00:25:16,907
Because they were seeing the power of mathematics in collecting data,

410
00:25:16,907 --> 00:25:18,507
modeling data.

411
00:25:18,507 --> 00:25:22,697
They were producing data tables for insurance, tables for

412
00:25:22,697 --> 00:25:24,937
time, tables for plant growth.

413
00:25:24,937 --> 00:25:28,647
That was the age of people collecting data,

414
00:25:28,647 --> 00:25:33,207
sending it in to organizations like the Society will correlate, organize it.

415
00:25:33,207 --> 00:25:37,242
Write papers, all of that kind of thing was starting to happen.

416
00:25:37,242 --> 00:25:41,317
And William Lovelace, Lovelace's husband became

417
00:25:41,317 --> 00:25:45,887
rather interested in scientific approaches to agriculture, and

418
00:25:45,887 --> 00:25:50,367
he wrote several lengthy papers addressing this sort of point.

419
00:25:50,367 --> 00:25:54,217
Which is as far as we know, Lovelace's only other published work, his footnotes,

420
00:25:54,217 --> 00:25:59,617
to these papers criticizing various possible models for plant growth.

421
00:25:59,617 --> 00:26:03,427
But I think to have another footnote, which shows her broad scientific interest.

422
00:26:03,427 --> 00:26:06,647
This one, she's actually talking about photography,

423
00:26:06,647 --> 00:26:10,837
not from the point of view of having her photograph taken, like a grand lady,

424
00:26:10,837 --> 00:26:17,677
which she was, but the paraphotography in instrumentation.

425
00:26:17,677 --> 00:26:20,507
If you're trying to measure light levels, measure clouds.

426
00:26:20,507 --> 00:26:26,387
So scientists like Herschel, other photographic experiments is like

427
00:26:26,387 --> 00:26:32,017
Tolbert, like Claudet were also very interested in

428
00:26:32,017 --> 00:26:35,077
scientific equipment on photographic principles.

429
00:26:35,077 --> 00:26:39,022
And this is, if you've read much of Ada Lovelace, this is pure Ada Lovelace this

430
00:26:39,022 --> 00:26:43,467
tone, the present object is merely to suggest to Mr..

431
00:26:43,467 --> 00:26:48,337
One feels a merely sort of jest from Ada Lovelace, had a certain amount of force.

432
00:26:48,337 --> 00:26:53,517
And to other scientific agriculturists, how accurately the two instruments above,

433
00:26:53,517 --> 00:26:58,847
the and the which were Herschel's instruments,

434
00:26:58,847 --> 00:27:02,427
would supply the desired data as regards light and heat.

435
00:27:02,427 --> 00:27:05,887
Seems to write unaware of the means of which photography

436
00:27:05,887 --> 00:27:10,697
has offered toward the easy and delicate appreciation of this, and so on and so

437
00:27:10,697 --> 00:27:14,647
forth, and other papers where she talks about the importance of photography,

438
00:27:14,647 --> 00:27:17,967
the importance of the experimental approach.

439
00:27:17,967 --> 00:27:23,027
Towards the end of her life she started thinking, and there's a lot been

440
00:27:23,027 --> 00:27:26,517
written about this, and I'm only telling you about it in 30 seconds.

441
00:27:26,517 --> 00:27:27,617
So I can't say terribly much.

442
00:27:27,617 --> 00:27:32,247
But she started thinking about what she called a mathematical model of the nervous

443
00:27:32,247 --> 00:27:34,637
system, or a calculus of the nervous system.

444
00:27:34,637 --> 00:27:38,657
And she started thinking about it, both in mathematical forms but

445
00:27:38,657 --> 00:27:40,176
in experimental terms.

446
00:27:40,176 --> 00:27:44,118
She drew up, it's not clear how much experimental work she did,

447
00:27:44,118 --> 00:27:46,407
how much mathematical work she did.

448
00:27:46,407 --> 00:27:50,957
But just the way she wrote about it is rather extraordinary.

449
00:27:50,957 --> 00:27:53,362
We've got the whole of this in the body of the display, but she says,

450
00:27:53,362 --> 00:27:59,417
I hope to bequeath the next generations a calculus of the nervous system.

451
00:27:59,417 --> 00:28:01,897
Now calculus of the nervous system to scientists today.

452
00:28:01,897 --> 00:28:05,517
Yeah, you know, we can kind of figure out what we probably mean by that.

453
00:28:05,517 --> 00:28:08,057
But for somebody to say that in the 1840s,

454
00:28:08,057 --> 00:28:12,247
to be thinking that way, I find quite extraordinary.

455
00:28:12,247 --> 00:28:16,497
And I think it's not something that's been written about.

456
00:28:16,497 --> 00:28:22,047
And perhaps the depths of cultural positioning it might have been.

457
00:28:22,047 --> 00:28:25,067
And I think this is a bigger question about Lovelace.

458
00:28:25,067 --> 00:28:29,717
One of the things that fascinates me about, as a scientist,

459
00:28:29,717 --> 00:28:34,347
coming of this, but while I suppose there are several things that fascinate me.

460
00:28:34,347 --> 00:28:36,927
First of all, I'm always tempted to say gosh,

461
00:28:36,927 --> 00:28:41,747
it's such fun working in the but I realize it's like a box of chocolates.

462
00:28:41,747 --> 00:28:44,017
It's all this amazing stuff.

463
00:28:44,017 --> 00:28:48,137
But I realize that's a bit like a typical response.

464
00:28:48,137 --> 00:28:49,907
When people meet a mathematician,

465
00:28:49,907 --> 00:28:54,637
people sometimes say I could never do maths at school.

466
00:28:54,637 --> 00:28:57,107
And, you know, sometimes people meet somebody in the humanities, and

467
00:28:57,107 --> 00:29:00,762
they say, gosh, it must be nice reading books all day.

468
00:29:00,762 --> 00:29:06,147
[LAUGH] So saying to the wow you're a box of chocolates is a bit [INAUDIBLE].

469
00:29:06,147 --> 00:29:07,967
It's lovely and all sorts of amazing stuff.

470
00:29:07,967 --> 00:29:12,187
But it's brought me a new realization, I think, of two aspects.

471
00:29:12,187 --> 00:29:19,273
First of all that scientific archives are important.

472
00:29:19,273 --> 00:29:22,725
Scientific archives are important for present-day scientific problems,

473
00:29:22,725 --> 00:29:24,437
not just for the history of science.

474
00:29:24,437 --> 00:29:29,337
So, all this data that people were gathering at the time.

475
00:29:29,337 --> 00:29:32,857
Oh, so John Clare was writing poems about the disappearance of some bird or other,

476
00:29:32,857 --> 00:29:38,137
somebody else was modeling the plant that that ate which was disappearing.

477
00:29:38,137 --> 00:29:39,607
Cuz the plant was disappearing.

478
00:29:39,607 --> 00:29:41,495
Those records are somewhere.

479
00:29:41,495 --> 00:29:42,354
We can go back.

480
00:29:42,354 --> 00:29:45,666
We can go back and use that information in the spirit of,

481
00:29:45,666 --> 00:29:48,267
well it won't be not very big data.

482
00:29:48,267 --> 00:29:52,797
Anyway, that data is still there for us to use as scientists today.

483
00:29:52,797 --> 00:29:57,497
But also it's a bigger issue of to really understand what's going on,

484
00:29:57,497 --> 00:30:01,647
you need the cultural context, you need the humanities background,

485
00:30:01,647 --> 00:30:03,707
you need the social science background.

486
00:30:03,707 --> 00:30:10,157
To look at where these ideas come from as Adrian Johnston was saying this morning.

487
00:30:10,157 --> 00:30:14,240
Now these ideas of machinery of operator of function.

488
00:30:14,240 --> 00:30:19,204
They didn't just appear in a vacuum, they appeared in a cultural context

489
00:30:19,204 --> 00:30:24,007
as well as a scientific context and this is another quote from the famous

490
00:30:24,007 --> 00:30:28,667
paper which bears out what I think, I'm not the first person to say.

491
00:30:28,667 --> 00:30:32,827
Somebody needs to take this paper and study it as literary object.

492
00:30:32,827 --> 00:30:35,827
As a not just as a scientific object.

493
00:30:35,827 --> 00:30:39,299
Those who view mathematical science not just as a vast body of abstract and

494
00:30:39,299 --> 00:30:43,107
immutable truths whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry, logical completeness,

495
00:30:43,107 --> 00:30:46,915
when regarded in their connection together as a whole entitle them to a prominent

496
00:30:46,915 --> 00:30:48,778
place in the interest of all profound.

497
00:30:48,778 --> 00:30:50,282
Oh God, is there a comma anywhere?

498
00:30:50,282 --> 00:30:53,980
[LAUGH] In the interest of all profound and logical minds.

499
00:30:53,980 --> 00:30:57,443
But as for a yet deeper interest for the human race,

500
00:30:57,443 --> 00:31:02,221
when it is remembered that this science constitutes the language through which we

501
00:31:02,221 --> 00:31:06,887
alone can adequately express the great facts of the natural world.

502
00:31:06,887 --> 00:31:10,607
And those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which visibly or

503
00:31:10,607 --> 00:31:13,817
invisibly consciously or unconsciously, oh.

504
00:31:13,817 --> 00:31:16,207
Our immediate physical perceptions

505
00:31:16,207 --> 00:31:20,217
are interminably going on in the the creation we live amongst.

506
00:31:20,217 --> 00:31:21,557
And suddenly we've got to the creation.

507
00:31:21,557 --> 00:31:22,657
We got to theology.

508
00:31:22,657 --> 00:31:26,747
We got to contemporary views on theology and the nature of mathematics.

509
00:31:26,747 --> 00:31:29,617
Well, is she feeling, she needs to put a bit of that gold stuff in so

510
00:31:29,617 --> 00:31:30,957
she's not getting into trouble.

511
00:31:30,957 --> 00:31:34,147
It was rather, something rather deeper there going on, I think.

512
00:31:34,147 --> 00:31:35,587
I got to the semicolon.

513
00:31:35,587 --> 00:31:39,237
Those who thus think on mathematical truth, as the instrument through which

514
00:31:39,237 --> 00:31:42,742
the weak-minded man can most effectively reach his creative works.

515
00:31:42,742 --> 00:31:46,197
Will regard with a special interest all that content to facilitate

516
00:31:46,197 --> 00:31:50,034
the translation of it's principles into explicit practical forms.

517
00:31:50,034 --> 00:31:55,453
In other words, the machine is an instrument of God's work,

518
00:31:55,453 --> 00:31:57,887
as well as being.

519
00:31:57,887 --> 00:32:01,377
I find that kind of sentiment quite extraordinary.

520
00:32:01,377 --> 00:32:05,540
And I find, the conclusion I've drawn from all this, humanities people, please let me

521
00:32:05,540 --> 00:32:09,498
keep coming to talk to you, and I'll try not to call the a box of chocolates.

522
00:32:09,498 --> 00:32:11,253
>> [LAUGH] >> And

523
00:32:11,253 --> 00:32:15,930
let's work together on finding out exactly what was going on here.

524
00:32:15,930 --> 00:32:16,578
Thank you.