Events

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, died of uterine cancer on November 27, 1852, at the age of 36, the same age at which her father, the poet Lord Byron, had died. She left behind a small body of published work, one piece of which would earn her recognition, more than a century later, as the first computer programmer in history. Her notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine contained what is now considered the first algorithm designed for machine execution. Ada Byron was raised by her mother, who separated from Lord Byron a month after Ada's birth and was determined that her daughter pursue mathematics rather than poetry. The strategy worked, though Ada's mathematical imagination retained a distinctly poetic quality. She was tutored by some of Britain's finest mathematicians and became fascinated by Babbage's mechanical computing engines after meeting him at a London party in 1833, when she was seventeen. Babbage's Analytical Engine existed only as a design, never built in his lifetime. In 1843, Ada translated an Italian mathematician's description of the engine and appended her own notes, three times longer than the original article. Note G contained a detailed method for calculating Bernoulli numbers, complete with step-by-step instructions and a diagram resembling what we now call a computer program. More remarkably, she speculated that the engine could manipulate symbols beyond numbers, anticipating the general-purpose computer by a century. Her contributions were largely forgotten until Alan Turing referenced the "Lady Lovelace's Objection" in his 1950 paper on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Department of Defense named its programming language Ada in her honor in 1979. Whether she or Babbage deserves primary credit for the algorithm remains debated, but her vision of computing as something beyond calculation was entirely her own.

Alfred Nobel sat in the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris on November 27, 1895, and signed a will that surprised everyone who knew him. The man who had built his fortune on dynamite and military explosives directed that his estate, roughly 31 million Swedish kronor, be used to establish annual prizes for outstanding contributions to physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and peace. Nobel died the following year, and his family immediately contested the will. Nobel's motivations have been debated ever since. A popular story holds that a French newspaper mistakenly published his obituary when his brother Ludvig died in 1888, headlining it "The Merchant of Death Is Dead." Whether or not this incident occurred, Nobel was aware that his legacy was entangled with destruction. He held 355 patents and founded 90 factories, but his most profitable inventions were instruments of war. He was also a melancholy, literary man who corresponded with Bertha von Suttner, a leading pacifist who may have influenced the peace prize. The will was remarkably vague on logistics. Nobel specified the categories and that awards should go to those who conferred the "greatest benefit to humankind" but provided no selection mechanism. His executors spent five years battling Nobel's relatives and skeptical institutions. The Nobel Foundation was created in 1900, and the first prizes were awarded on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel's death. The prizes became the world's most recognized measure of intellectual achievement. The Peace Prize, awarded in Oslo while the others are given in Stockholm, has been the most controversial. Nobel's fortune, converted to a managed endowment, has funded over 600 prizes. His name, once synonymous with explosives, now means excellence.