This brief biographical sketch was done for Ada Lovelace Day 2009. I think I in was a pub at the time.









From a humble beginning as a joke in a pub, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage is now an Eisner-nominated graphic novel! New York Times Bestseller and winner of the British Society for the History of Mathematics Neumann Prize!

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For more on Ada Lovelace not in the form of a comic book, an excellent in-depth summation of Lovelace and Babbage’s work can be found at Steven Wolfram’s blog.

Read More About Charles Babbage. Charles Babbage would totally have become a street-music destroying Masked Avenger if he could have. Actually he kind of did.

For more on the Analytical Engine, I have some animations and visualisations of it here. If that whets your appetite for gigantic steam powered Babbagey calculating machines be sure to check out Plan 28 where an intrepid crew is attempting to build one.

For the hardcore:

Ada Lovelace’s Paper on the Analytical Engine (are you HARD ENOUGH?)

Charles Babbage’s Autobiography (awesome, hilarious, fascinating, with VOLCANOES and MATH, why is this not in print?!?)

Behold the awesome might of the Difference Engine! Two working Difference Engines have been built in modern times- there’s one in the Science Museum in London, and that’s the one currently in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.

There’s also the whole rest of this website, with several amusing episodes and assorted oddities.