Questão 1914530

TEXT 24

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The World's 1st Computer Algorithm, Written by Ada Lovelace, Sells for \$125,000 at Auction

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By Brandon Specktor published July 24, 2018

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Young Ada Lovelace was introduced to English society as the sole (legitimate) child of scalawag poet Lord Byron in 1815. More than 200 years later, she is remembered by many as the fi rst programmer in the history of computing.

On Monday (July 23), Lovelace's scientifi c reputation got a boost when a rare fi rst edition of one of her pioneering technical works — featuring an equation considered by some to be the world's fi rst computer algorithm — sold at auction for 95,000 pounds (\$125,000) in the U.K.

In the rare book, titled "Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, Esq"(Richard & John Taylor, 1843), Lovelace translated a paper by Italian mathematician (and later Italian Prime Minister) Luigi Menabrea that describes an automatic calculating machine (aka, a computer) proposed by English engineer Charles Babbage.

Starting in her teen years, Lovelace collaborated extensively with Babbage. Her work on the 1843 manuscript was not just simple translation; her own contributions were longer than the original Menabrea paper, including copious new notes, equations and a formula she devised for calculating Bernoulli numbers (a complex sequence of rational numbers often used in computation and arithmetic).

This formula, some scholars say, can be seen as the fi rst computer program ever written.

"She's written a program to calculate some rather complicated numbers — Bernoulli numbers," Ursula Martin, an Ada Lovelace biographer and professor of computer science at the University of Oxford, told The Guardian. "This shows off what complicated things the computer could have done."

In the auctioned copy, "Lady Lovelace" is inscribed below a line on the title page reading "with notes by the translator." (This inscription, among other handwritten notes scribbled throughout the document, are believed to have been written by Lovelace's friend Dr. William King, who is thought to be the book's original owner.) According to a statement from Moore Allen & Innocent, Lovelace's identity as the author was not revealed until 1848, just four years before she died of cancer at age 36.

Though Lovelace showed a mathematical aptitude her entire life, she is best known for her collaboration with Babbage on the automatic calculating machines, the "Diff erence Engine" and the never-built "Analytical Engine." The extent of Lovelace's contributions to this work have been debated by scholars for centuries, but evidence of her mathematical prowess — including correspondence with Babbage and handwritten notes of algorithms — continues to mount.

"Recent scholarship, seeing past the naivety and misogyny of earlier work, has recognized that [Lovelace] was an able mathematician," Martin told The Guardian. "Her [auctioned] paper went beyond the [limitations] of Babbage's never-built invention to give far-reaching insights into the nature and potential of computation."

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Extracted from: https://www.livescience.com/63154-ada-lovelace-fi rstalgorithm-auction.html

The word scalawag, highlighted in the fi rst paragraph, is closest in meaning to: