Ada Lovelace

"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with."

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Source: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage. Book by L.F. Menabrea. Scientific Memoirs (Richard Taylor): 694, 1842.

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Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

Mathematician, Writer

Ada Lovelace was a mathematician and writer, known for her work on the first algorithm and her visionary ideas about computing.

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Ada Lovelace Mathematician, Writer

"I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand about the many connections and relations which occur to me, how the matter in question was first thought of or arrived at, etc., etc."

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Ada Lovelace Mathematician, Writer

"The Analytical Engine might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."

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