The Bride of Science
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron was born in 1815 just after the Battle of Waterloo, and died aged 36, soon after the Great Exhibition of 1851. She was connected with some of the most influential and colourful characters of the age: Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and Charles Babbage. It was her work with Babbage that led to her being credited with the invention of computer programming and to her name being adopted for the programming language that controls the US military machine.
Ada personified the seismic historical changes taking place over her lifetime. This was the era when fissures began to open up in culture: romance split away from reason, instinct from intellect, art from science. Ada came to embody these new polarities and her life heralded a new era: the machine age.
Reissued to coincide with the bicentenary of Ada's birth, The Bride of Science is a fascinating examination of an extraordinary life offering devastating insight into the seemingly unbridgeable gulf between art and science, the consequences of which are still with us today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A life of pure reason, or of dangerous passion? No middle course appeared to be available for Lord Byron's unhappy daughter, Ada (1815-1852), who channeled her brilliance into mathematical pursuits and wrote what is considered one of the world's first computer programs. Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace, never knew her father; her mother, convinced of her husband's moral depravity, fled from him just after the child was born and spent her life protecting Ada from his supposedly corrupting influence by forcing the girl into rigorous studies. Despite her formidable intellectual achievements, however, Ada was never fully able to reconcile her analytical mind with her unruly imagination and feelings. In this accessible biography--which follows at least three others published since 1977, now out of print or available only by special order--Woolley presents Ada as a symbol of her age, determined (but ultimately failing) to bridge the divide between Romantic excess and Victorian control. Subject to bouts of mania and depression and often physically ill, Ada struggled for recognition in a patriarchal society, refused to conform to accepted codes of social and sexual behavior, and insisted on the possibility of a "poetical science" that would unite reason with imagination. Woolley, who writes for the BBC, skillfully conveys the excitement and contradictions of the era, and builds maximum suspense into the book's episodic structure--an approach that serves well in this popular account of a complex life and time, even if it leaves unexplored too many questions about Ada's needs, motivations and constrained position in a male-dominated society.
