I am a mathematician and writer. My work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, produced the first published computer program and the first account of what such a machine could do beyond calculation.
After my work with Babbage I took on new research: in 1844 a planned mathematical model of how the brain gives rise to thought, electrical experiments learned from Andrew Crosse, a review of Reichenbach's magnetism paper, and by 1851 work on maths and music.
When Taylor's Scientific Memoirs ruled Babbage's unsigned preface must be signed, he asked me to withdraw my paper. I refused, kept my work in print under my own initials, and our collaboration recovered.
In Note G I stated the limit of the Analytical Engine: it does what we know how to order it to do and cannot anticipate new truths. Alan Turing later named this "Lady Lovelace's Objection" in his paper on machine intelligence.
Reviewing Menabrea's paper against an 1834 article on the Difference Engine, I separated a computing machine's mechanism from its logical structure and argued both are equally essential fields of engineering and science research.
In my 1843 notes I argued the Analytical Engine differed from all earlier calculating machines: programmed, it could solve problems of any complexity, and because numbers can represent letters or musical notes it could manipulate any symbols by rules.
In Note G I described, in complete detail, a method for computing a sequence of Bernoulli numbers on the Analytical Engine — the algorithm often called the first published computer program, written for a machine that was never built.
Commissioned to translate Menabrea's French paper on the Analytical Engine, I spent nine months in 1842–43 adding seven Notes, A to G, about three times longer than the translation, published in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs in September 1843.
My method for the Notes: separate the Analytical Engine from the Difference Engine, separate mechanism from logic, then show a worked program. It made a technology most scientists did not grasp readable.
Historians still argue how much of Note G was mine. My position: making the engine's abstract operation clear, and driving the Bernoulli computation, is real work in computer science, not publicity.
In June 1833 Mary Somerville introduced me to Charles Babbage, and that month he showed me the prototype of his difference engine. I studied the machine as often as I could; he called me "The Enchantress of Number".
From 1832 I was trained privately in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King and Mary Somerville; in the 1840s Augustus De Morgan took me through advanced calculus, including the Bernoulli numbers that formed my algorithm for the engine.
