January 17, 2018 Wednesday
Bedtime Story
Ada Byron becomes Lady Ada Lovelace
All of us modern apes may find it very
amusing if not outright shocking this practice of introducing a young lady who
has reached maturity to the society very formally.
Obviously this practice was only applicable
to the ladies of aristocracies or nobilities.
Such a woman was termed a debutante who was
open for courting by the eligible bachelors in the court.
In just two years Ada Byron was indeed
hooked up by a very eligible bachelor and got married to William King-Noel, 1st
Earl of Lovelace who also was not only a wealthy nobleman with multiple manors
but also a low profile scientist.
From then onwards Ada Byron became Ada
Lovelace, Lady Ada Lovelace to be more precise.
Ada bore him three children in very quick
succession, all three in a span of four years; I guess reproduction cannot get
faster than that as far singular births are concerned.
Ada in spite of her marriage to a royalty
and in spite of her three children began to exhibit the dark tendencies of her
father.
One was through loose relationships with
several men (not necessarily sexual) but even worse the second through
gambling.
Gambling led her to form bonds with
sinister type of men who not only bought her disrepute but made her to incur losses
of thousands of pounds and even debt to syndicates.
Ada had this thought in her mind that she
would be able to get the odds right in her betting wagers using mathematical
models but we all know that it never works that way.
If it would have been so then some of the
greatest mathematicians would never have had to die poor.
Thankfully all these drawbacks in her
character did not destroy her brilliance and attraction for mathematics and
sciences.
In 1833 the very first year Ada was
introduced to Babbage through her mathematics tutor Somerville, he invited her
to have a look at this difference engine.
What she saw was a working prototype of the
difference engine and was deeply impressed with it.
This visit sparked and reignited her
interest in mathematics.
Babbage it seems too was impressed by the
intelligence of this young woman who was then just turning eighteen (born on
December 10, 1915).
As I had mentioned earlier, the next six
years of the life was spent in mating and procreation of three babies like most
female apes programmed biologically.
What was different and even striking was
that after having born three children and barely months after the birth of the
third child in 1939, she decided to get more serious about mathematics.
Person no less than Augustus De Morgan
(born in Madurai, Madras Presidency) who is most famous for his de Morgan’s
laws than for anything else was deployed for her mathematics higher education.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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