Ada Lovelace

If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science?

— Ada Lovelace

The ideas which led to the Analytical Engine occurred in a manner wholly independent of any that were connected with the Difference…

— Ada Lovelace

Those who incline to very strictly utilitarian views may perhaps feel that the peculiar powers of the Analytical Engine bear upon questions…

— Ada Lovelace

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

— Ada Lovelace

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this…

— Ada Lovelace

This one fact implies everything; and it is scarcely necessary to point out, for instance, that while the Difference Engine can merely…

— Ada Lovelace

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform...…

— Ada Lovelace

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the…

— Ada Lovelace

The object of the engine is in fact to give the utmost practical efficiency to the resources of numerical interpretations of the…

— Ada Lovelace

Secondly, figures, the symbols of numerical magnitude, are frequently also the symbols of operations, as when they are the indices of powers.…

— Ada Lovelace

“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

— Ada Lovelace

In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable;…

— Ada Lovelace

Many persons who are not conversant with mathematical studies imagine that because the business of [Babbage’s Analytical Engine] is to give its…

— Ada Lovelace

I have my hopes, & very distinct ones, too, of one day getting cerebral phenomena such that I can put them into…

— Ada Lovelace

It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and…

— Ada Lovelace

Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perception of some things, which no one else has; or at least…

— Ada Lovelace

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of…

— Ada Lovelace

Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible its multitudinous Charlatans-- everything in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

— Ada Lovelace

One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the…

— Ada Lovelace

The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.

— Ada Lovelace

The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those…

— Ada Lovelace

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we…

— Ada Lovelace

The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and…

— Ada Lovelace

As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steam engine.

— Ada Lovelace

With whomsoever or wheresoever may rest the present causes of difficulty that apparently exist towards either the completion of the old engine,…

— Ada Lovelace