The bride of science : romance, reason, and Byron's daughter / Benjamin Woolley.

New York : McGraw-Hill, ©1999.

viii, 416 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cm

Originally published: London : Macmillan, 1999.

"Known in her day as the "Enchantress of Numbers," Ada Lovelace was one of the most fascinating women of the 19th century. She rubbed elbows with many of the brightest scientific lights of her day, including the brilliant experimentalists Michael Faraday and Andrew Crosse - arguably the model for Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein. She was the protege of the "Queen of Nineteenth-Century Science," Mary Somerville. And, with mathematician Charles Babbage, inventor of the Analytical Engine - the mechanical "thinking machine" that anticipated the modern computer by more than a century - she developed a set of instructions for mechanically calculating Bernoulli numbers, in effect, creating the first computer program. In recognition of her accomplishment, the U.S. Department of Defense, in 1980, named its standard programming language "Ada," thus, nearly one hundred and thirty years after her death, granting her the immortality she so craved." "Yet, as journalist Benjamin Woolley reveals in this portrait of this woman, Ada was far from being the cool and dispassionate exemplar of the modern scientific spirit." "The Bride of Science is both the story of a life lived passionately and an intriguing rumination on the death of Romanticism and the birth of the Machine Age, offering profound insights into the seemingly irreconcilable gulf between art and science that persists to this day."--Jacket.

English

April 13, 2015

Includes bibliographical references (pages 399-402) and index.