Search engine giant Google on Monday commemorated the 197th birth anniversary of Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer, with an intriguing doodle.
Keeping to its tradition, Google welcomed users to its home page that squiggled the Google logo along with a picture hollering the importance of the day.
Ada Lovelace, a mathematician and writer by profession, is known to the world through her work Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical computer designed by father of the computer Charles Babbage. Inspired by her comprehensive mathematical knowledge, Babbbage invited Lovelace to translate an article written by Luigi Menabrea on his proposed Analytical Engine. She translated the work adding her elaborate notes in it which contained the first computer program. She also foretold the potentiality of computer that would go beyond mere number-crunching and simple calculations.
"[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," she wrote.
Babbage described her as the 'Enchantress of Numbers' and the computer language Ada was named after her.
The new Google doodle illustrated the evolution of computers right from Ada Lovelace penning down the first computer programs using a feather pen to the latest laptops and notebooks. The roll of the paper that she is seen writing on coils down to form the letters of Google's logo.
Ada Lovelace, was born Augusta Ada Byron on Dec 10, 1815 in Piccadilly Terrace, Middlesex, England. She married William King, who later became an Earl of Lovelace in 1838. She died in 1852 at the age of 36 from uterine cancer.
