Ada Lovelace 1815-1852 "The analytical machine will weave algebraic patterns such as Jacquard's looms weave flowers and leaves. ”

Ada Lovelace, Note A, 1843 Ada King, née Byron, Countess Lovelace, was born on 10 December 1815 in London. At a very young age, she began to study mathematics. She rose to a level sufficient to appreciate the work of a talented inventor, Charles Babbage. The latter has just developed an automatic computer. Ada looks at these complex workings and an intuition comes to her: what if, instead of handling only numbers, this device also dealt with symbols? She puts her own intuition: this will be the famous "Note G", published in 1843, the first computer program in the world. Ada will never know that she was awesome. She died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852.

Almost a century later, an American physicist named Howard Aiken makes a machine from Babbage gears and Ada Lovelace notes: the Mark I. This one will have a large progeny: computers. In 1978, the new computer language of the U.S. Department of Defense was named Ada. Ada Lovelace finally stopped being a footnote in her father's biographies. Ada ardently defended the idea of "poetic science". Merging science and poetry within the same vision, she dreamed of a machine that would be able to speak of previously unknown languages. She imagined computer science, she pulled it out of nothing at a time when our modernity was barely awakening. His work, a fragile flower blooming in the mists of romanticism, rose like a sun in the second half of the 20th century and illuminated the third millennium. By shaping our future, Ada Lovelace has marked our civilization as much as Pastor, Einstein or Fleming. Catherine Dufour

The stamp is issued on the day of "Ada Lovelace day" Every year, on the second Tuesday of October, this event celebrates innovative women in computer science.

Specifications: