Ada Lovelace quotes

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer, widely recognized as the world’s first computer programmer. Her work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine included the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine. She is remembered for her visionary ideas about the potential of computing. Here are 22 of her quotes:

When I behold the scientific and so-called philosophers full of selfish feelings, and of a tenency to war against circumstances and Providence, I say to myself: They are not true priests, they are but half prophets - it not absolutely false ones. They have read the great page simply with the physical eye, and with none of the spirit within. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole... That God is one, and that all the works and the feelings He has called into existence are ONE; this is a truth (a biblical and scriptural truth too) not in my opinion developed to the apprehension of most people in its really deep and unfanthomable meaning. There is too much tendency to making separate and independent bundles of both the physical and the moral facts of the universe. Whereas, all and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume could I write you on this subject. (Ada Lovelace)
Our family are an alternate stratification of poetry and mathematics. View quote
Ada Lovelace
[...] engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity. View quote
Ada Lovelace
[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. View quote
Ada Lovelace
One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation. View quote
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 in making available what we are already acquainted with. View quote
Ada Lovelace
A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. View quote
Ada Lovelace
But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes. View quote
Ada Lovelace
It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may. This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe. View quote
Ada Lovelace
The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations. View quote
Ada Lovelace
The object of the engine is in fact to give the utmost practical efficiency to the resources of numerical interpretations of the higher science of analysis, while it uses the processes and combinations of this latter. (Ada Lovelace)
The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, can either add, subtract, multiply or divide with equal facility; and performs each of these four operations in a direct manner, without the aid of any of the other three. View quote
Ada Lovelace
God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings. View quote
Ada Lovelace
I do not regret the sufferings and peculiaties of my physical constitution. They have taught me, and continue to teach me, that which I think nothing else could have developed. It is a force and control put upon me by Providence which I must obey. And the effects of this continual disciple of facts are mighty. They tame the in the best sense of that word, and they fan into existence a pure, bright, holy, unselfish flame within that sheds cheerfulness and light on many. View quote
Ada Lovelace
That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show. View quote
Ada Lovelace
We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves. View quote
Ada Lovelace
Perhaps you have felt already, from the tone of my letter, that I am more than ever now the bride of science. Religion to me is science, and science is religion. In that deeply-felt truth lies the secret of my intense devotion to the reading of God's natural works. It is reading Him. His will - His intelligence; and this again is learning to obey and to follow (to the best of our power) that will! For he who reads, who interprets the Divinity with a true and simple heart, then obeys and submits in acts and feelings as by an impupulse and instinct. He can't help doing so. At least, it appears so to me. View quote
Ada Lovelace
I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar. View quote
Ada Lovelace
The purpose which that engine has been specially intended and adapted to fulfil, is the computation of nautical and astronomical tables. View quote
Ada Lovelace
With all my wiry power and strength, I am prone at times to bodily sufferings, connected chiefly with the digestive organs, of no common degree or king. I do not regret the sufferings and peculiaties of my physical constitution. They have taught me, and continue to teach me, that which I think nothing else could have developed. It is a force and control put upon me by Providence which I must obey. And the effects of this continual disciple of facts are mighty. They tame the in the best sense of that word, and they fan into existence a pure, bright, holy, unselfish flame within that sheds cheerfulness and light on many. - Ever yours truly. "A. A. Lovelace." View quote
Ada Lovelace
Circumstances have been such, that I have lived almost entirely secluded for some time. Those who are much in earnest and with single minds devoted to any great object in life, must find this occasionally inevitable.... You will wonder at having heard nothing from me; but you have experience and candour enough to perceive and know that God has not given to us (in this state of existence) more than very limited powers of expression of one's ideas and feelings... I shall be very desirous of again seeing you. You know what that means from me, and that it is no form, but the simple expression and result of the respect and attraction I feel for a mind that ventures to read direct in God's own book, and not merely thro' man's translation of that same vast and mighty work. (Ada Lovelace)
All but one of the programs cited in her notes had been prepared by Babbage from three to seven years earlier. The exception was prepared by Babbage for her, although she did detect a 'bug' in it. Not only is there no evidence that Ada ever prepared a program for the Analytical Engine, but her correspondence with Babbage shows that she did not have the knowledge to do so. View quote
Ada Lovelace