as the title says. many people have told me that Ada Lovelace invented the first computer code. as far as i could find, she only invented some sort of calculation for Bernoulli (sorry for spelling) numbers.
seems to me like saying “i invented the cap to the water bottle, before the water bottle was invented”
did she do something else? am i missing something?
edit: ah! thank you everyone, i understand!!
In: Mathematics
I’d explain it to a 5yr old this way: You can picture a small gear driving a large gear. Say the small gear turns 100 times for every 1 full turn of the large gear: thats multiplication, and in reverse its division. You could also picture a gear and levers that kick another gear one tooth at a time: Addition and Subtraction. Believe me when I tell you that you can do boolean logic with Mult/Addition (AND, OR, NAND). Now say you’re Ada Lovelace and you’ve just pictured how to make a machine determine, on its own, how to switch out sets of gears and levers. Its mechanically configuring itself, dynamically, to do boolean-logic – an enormously complicated gear system intricate as clockwork. But, it can run a program! Thats why Ada Lovelace is so fundamental to CompSci.
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