In 1842 Charles Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the
University of Turin about his analytical engine.
Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer, and future
Prime Minister of Italy, wrote up Babbage's lecture in French, and this transcript was subsequently published in the
Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842.
Babbage asked Ada to translate Menabrea's paper into English,
subsequently requesting that she augment the notes she had added to the
translation. Ada spent most of a year doing this. These notes, which are
more extensive than Menabrea's paper, were then published in
The Ladies' Diary and
Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under the
initialism "AAL".
In 1953, over one hundred years after her death, Ada's notes on
Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished. The engine has now been
recognised as an early model for a computer and Ada's notes as a
description of a computer and software.
The "Note G" source code: Tabular representation of one of the first
'computer programs', a computation of Bernoulli numbers for the
Analytical Engine.
Ada's notes were labelled alphabetically from A to G. In note G, she describes an
algorithm for the analytical engine to compute
Bernoulli numbers.
It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for
implementation on a computer, and for this reason Ada is often cited as
the first computer programmer;
however, the engine was not completed during Lovelace's lifetime.
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