A look back at the life and work of Ada Lovelace, the genius mathematician who gave her name to the architecture of NVIDIA’s RTX 40s.
NVIDIA has announced the release of a Next Gen GPU whose architecture is named Ada Lovelace. The American company, which has a habit of naming its products after scientists, has this time chosen Ada Lovelace, a mathematician of the 19th century.e century. Relatively unknown, this brilliant English scientist is now considered the mother of computer code.
Rocked by mathematics from childhood
Born in 1815, Ada Byron (real name Augusta) was born into a British high-society family that experienced its share of scandal. Disappointed not to have had a boy, her father will not try to obtain her custody after the separation with her mother and will never see her again. It is therefore Ada’s mother, who is passionate about mathematics, who will take care of her education and ensure that she studies science. She even makes her meet Charles Babbage, visionary inventor and creator of a calculating machine. Such an upbringing was very unusual for a girl of nobility. But the rest of Ada’s life will be just as much.
It was in 1835 that she married the Earl of Lovelace, who encouraged her passion for mathematics. But because we are still in Victorian England, this passion cannot take precedence over her roles as mother and mistress of the house. She therefore puts mathematics aside for a while.
The birth of the first computer program
Consumed by her devouring passion, Ada resumed her studies in 1839 and some time later, she found Babbage, whose machines began to tour Europe. Fascinated, Lovelace accompanies the inventor on his promotional tours and spends most of her time working on his creations.
One day, when she presents Babbage with a translation of an article written by an Italian mathematician and dealing with calculating machines, he asks her to enrich it with his notes and remarks. It is here that his legend will be written. Three times longer than the article, its very complete notes notably include a detailed algorithm, written in a special language intended to be executed by the machine. Later, this algorithm will be considered the first computer program in history.
The fragile health and the three pregnancies of Ada Lovelace will then not leave her much respite and she ends up dying in 1852. She was not even 37 years old but her spirit, him, was well 150 in advance .
Source : WccfTech, Wikipedia
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