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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.
Exploring a calculus of the nervous system
4 milestones
Follow-up projects after the 1843 Notes applying mathematical methods to the nervous system; none reached publication.
Argued the Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate; later quoted and answered by Turing.
Provided an abstract, accessible explanation of the Analytical Engine that many contemporaries missed.
At 17, exposure to the Difference Engine and mentorship from Somerville connected me to Babbage and scientists.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.