May 22, 2018 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Note G of Ada Lovelace - Part 14 (Termination)
Tonight we shall continue with the Note G
of Ada Lovelace and perhaps terminate it as well.
This will bring us to an end of a very
comprehensive coverage of all the Notes written by her as an adjunct to the
scientific essay of Luigi Menabrea of Turin.
“It is desirable in all calculations so to
arrange the processes, that the offices performed by the Variables may be as
uniform and fixed as possible.
Supposing that it was desired not only to
tabulate B1, B3, etc, but A0, A1, etc; we have only then to appoint another
series of Variables V41, V42, etc and for receiving these latter results as
they are successively produced upon V11.
Or again, we may, instead of this, or in
addition to this second series of results, wish to tabulate the value of each
successive total term of the series (8), viz. A0, A1B1, A3B3 etc.
We have them merely to multiply each B with
each corresponding A as produced, and to place these successive products on
Result-columns appointed for the purpose.
The formula (8) is interesting in another
point of view.
It is one particular case of the general
Integral of the following Equation of Mixed Differences:-
for certain special suppositions respecting
z, x and n.
The general integral itself is of the form,
and it is worthy of remark, that the engine
might (in a manner more or less similar to the preceding) calculate the value
of this formula upon most other hypotheses for the functions in the integral
with as much, or (in many cases) with more ease than it can formula (8).”
With this we have covered all the Notes of
Ada Lovelace, letter-by-letter and equation-by-equation.
Now you may not recall but I had committed
to you that after covering the Notes, I would review them more broadly and
generally in a much simpler or rather modern English to get a better
perspective of the contents of these Notes.
Before that, I would like to pose to you
certain question: What do you think happened to the work of Ada Lovelace or for
that matter, even Charles Babbage?
Well, both their works and this strange
couple were largely forgotten, nearly-totally wiped out from the consciousness of
average Briton.
Lady Ada had died very early in 1852 when
she was just 36 while Babbage lived longer till 1871, but both failed to see
any meaningful development in then very nascent field of computer science when
the word “computer” itself was barely in use or used with quite a different
meaning.
In fact, as late as 1952, the word computer
usually represented a human computer and this generally referred to, at least
in north America, to lady assistants who would carry out calculations
mechanically without perhaps precisely knowing for what purpose their computed data
would be used for.
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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