An entire industry has been built around the idea that Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was a great mathematician and the world's first computer programmer. Both of these claims are based on verbose notes she made to her 1843 translation of an 1842 paper by Menabrea about Charles… pic.twitter.com/gSQW8eCY3g
— Gavan Tredoux (@gtredoux) October 22, 2024
An entire industry has been built around the idea that Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was a great mathematician and the world's first computer programmer. Both of these claims are based on verbose notes she made to her 1843 translation of an 1842 paper by Menabrea about Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, an analog cogwheel-and-pinion computer which existed mostly on paper only (see https://drive.google.com/file/d/16qxC5R3Nr8FhET006LNe0sFeU8QDZ-29/view?usp=sharing). Both claims are entirely false. Here I will address the issue of her mathematical abilities.
Dorothy Stein was the first to point out in 1985, based on reading Ada's correspondence with Mary Somerville and Augustus de Morgan that Byron's daughter appeared to have very weak mathematical abilities. She could not do simple algebra. It is easy to verify this, without resorting to her manuscripts, by actually reading her published 1843 notes to Menabrea, a step few if any people ever seem to have taken the trouble to do. After all they're very long and use a lot of symbols. Here I will address only those on the Bernoulli numbers and their supposed calculation (see Note G in the paper). But this is just the basking seal on top of the iceberg, so to speak: the whole paper is riddled with bellowing nonsense, of which more later.
Babbage had been planning to use the Bernoulli numbers (from the power series expansion for a common expression involving e^x) as an example for his engine since 1835, as he wrote to Nathaniel Bowditch that year. In his memoirs he admitted (long after the fact) that he had worked out the details of this for Ada, "to save her the trouble". We can now see how this worked.
What Babbage had given Ada was just a brief sketch, which she expanded, in her prolix style, to match her understanding of the material. The crux was that Babbage wanted to accumulate calculations of Bernoulli numbers, as you would when constructing a table, something like his earlier Difference Engine, which used cumulated finite differences to do calculations of numerical results for tables. With some simple manipulations of the power series for e^x, see attached, an expression for the next odd indexed Bernoulli number can be obtained from the preceding ones. (Similar reasoning applies to the even indexed ones.) That follows from this relationship, a linear dependency, which we will write as equation (8), see attached
A_0 + A_1B_1 + A_3B_3 + .... + A_(2n-1)*B_(2n-1) + B_(2n+1) = 0. (8)
where the B_i are the odd Bernoulli numbers, and the A_i are coefficients which, as Ada failed to understand, actually depend on n too and are not constants. To get an expression for B_(2n+1), use your arithmetic superpowers to deduce (8*)
B_(2n+1) = -A_0 - A_1B_1 - A_3B_3 - .... - A_(2n-1)*B_(2n-1)
It is a step that sorely puzzled Ada though. She felt compelled to come up with an explanation anyway. She appears to have landed the world's smallest grappling hook on the phrase "linear dependence", probably used by Babbage in conversation with her. Scanning the equations she convinced herself that this "linear dependence" must apply to the index n, which she triumphantly concluded was dependent on its distance d from 0. So she wrote down some useless tautologies about that. Since you cannot do anything with them, she left them out there and simply moved on to point out that terms not listed in (8) must be zero (!) and wrote down a tautology involving multiplication and division by one, in which she gets the (irrelevant) indexes wrong for good measure (see attached for this extraordinary gibberish). This concludes her explanation. It has stood unexamined since 1843 by people who solemnly pronounce on the evidence it shows for her advanced abilities (!)
Why didn't Babbage notice this nonsense and correct her, supplying the necessary arithmetic superpowers? Correspondence shows that once she started writing her "notes", at his suggestion, she would accept no correction, So one assumes he simply stopped reading it, or at least commenting on it. Don't dare presume to alter what I, a daughter of Byron, write! So much for that.
Not realizing that the A_i terms depend on n too had further implications. You need to recalculate them when accumulating Bernoulli numbers iteratively, a step that eluded her and which undoes much of the sort of computational "saving" that Babbage was claiming. Indeed the execution trace (for the paper only contains such traces, not programs as such) doesn't work. Indeed none of the traces given in the paper for terms involving n could ever have been produced by Babbage's machine. More on that later. And on Ada's information that one can calculate a divergent (or indeed oscillating) infinite series on a computer, term by term. And why Babbage chose to use Menabrea and less successfully, Ada, in the first place. Not to mention what Babbage meant by The Enchantress of Number (hint: it was not Ada). Do not adjust your set.
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She deserves credit for being one of the first documented mathweasels tho
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why even live
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Everyone was humoring a 'nerd-hot' foid so they could frick her?
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frick, am I turning into a tech bro?
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Holy shit she looks more r-slurred than she actually is.
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It's a mathsweasel
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uncanny
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Haha Another Foid STEM Hero
Previously on chudder:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1629315139169075200.html
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Frick off sexist, I'm Koding with Karlie!
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Some people have no shame
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You mean the VAGINAL JEW
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Like the woman that was given credit for the black hole? image when some codecl actually did a lot of the work
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She 👏 wrote 👏 the 👏 yaml 👏 documentation 👏
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that women did more to attract otherwise neet folks into muh stem. you just hate her so much. "UHM SWEEIT THIS RACE DRIVER DID NOT ACTUALLY BUILD HIS ODNW CAR"
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OHNO NO NO WOMEN IN STEM SISTERS NOT LIKE THIS 🤣🤣🤣
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why are you fricking with dudes banging junior programmer girls on the tech team and putting them in middle management
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Well how else are women going to get their pioneers and heroes in their field?
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Ada Lovelace invented the computer.
You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over?
Ada Lovelace invented the computer.
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Just like most !engineering and codecels!
Proof she was a pioneer in CS
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Yeah same with Margie Hamilton. Both very smart women who need to be upjumped by history for reasons but still were good at what they actually did. I have a book about the development of digital life that speaks well of Lovelace while also debunking most of the hagiographic claims about her
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what is the book
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines#Evolution_of_Global_Intelligence
Tough read, lots of crazy concepts
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Could she code in Ada though?
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Lol look at this right wing cope
Nazis will make up all sorts of lies just to protect their white male privilege. Unfortunately for them, we have History on our side.
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*Herstory on our side
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*herstory
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history
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First thing that popped up in my mind was Linda Lovelace! !oldstrags !coomers !genx
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why 'sexual liberation' is a joke in one sentence
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Tbf it's a really long sentence
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@GhoulishWails stand with Israel
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more gurl math 1842 wasn't 200 years ago!!!!!
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most iq researchers arent wrong but they are annoying and therefore r-slurred
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Ok but she invented the computer chud
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The predecessor to computers was used to make pretty fabric. Computer science is still female, incel
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My takeaway from this is that the first person to discover Ada Lovelace was a fraud was a woman. Girls rock!
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Based on letters from Mary Somerville to boot
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women hate other women more than dramatards
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Erm… actually this seems like internalized misogyny, sisters shouldn't be putting others sisters down
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Computers are ultimately derived from programmable self-playing musical instruments. I claim them for art majors
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I thought the abacus was the first computer, which would make tax collectors the first programmers
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They are there to take all women's purpose in life. That's their start and their end
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!STEMfoids how many times did someone pump you up with the story of Adam Lovelace as you ascended with your autism
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i was forced to make a skit about her in middle school, i feel deceived
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never heard of him
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stfu you fricking racist
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Sorry I'm also bad at math, so I'm just going to have to trust the approved experts on this one
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yea lmao i tried reading this tweet and i physically yawned at that formula.
seriously who gives a shit?
she was clearly celebrated for making pro-gramming into something un-nerdy or like trendy instead of some white old men discussiong "theory". Her math was probably much better than the folks that built Skyrim anyway and that game riocker
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tbf she did learn quite a bit of math to even get to that point. It just was such a high tier of innovation she couldn't keep up so she mostly just made shit up like lego pieces that dont fit
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I heard she was a drunk and a laudanum fiend.
Maybe she was wasted?
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Math is all made up nonsense anyways.
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There's like 1 female that made any meaningful individual contributions to STEM fields in modern history (Grace Hopper). The rest are trains or blown out of proportion
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is marie curie just too old?
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her husband did all the actual work
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Fr? Didn't she deadass get cancer
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they used to rub radioactive materials on each other so they could glow in the dark while they had s*x
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chat is this real
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yea from radiography
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someone was wrong about something
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i had to google before I raalize this wasnt about Linda Lovelace
!slots200
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Snapshots:
https://x.com/gtredoux/status/1848778568467378569:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16qxC5R3Nr8FhET006LNe0sFeU8QDZ-29/view?usp=sharing:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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Going to be honest, I cannot even begin to fathom what the fricking frick this math actually means. Good job on cracking the fricking case, I guess, motherlover!
Kind of strange ; to think that even this errant daughter of byron would probably understand what the fricking frick you're talking about more than I...
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