Ada Lovelace Quotes

#1. One essential object is to choose that arrangement which shall tend to reduce to a minimum the time necessary for completing the calculation.

Ada Lovelace

#2. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.

Ada Lovelace

#3. The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value.

Ada Lovelace

#4. Understand well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.

Ada Lovelace

#5. Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.

Ada Lovelace

#6. Forget this world and all its troubles and if possible
its multitudinous Charlatans
everything in short but
the Enchantress of Numbers.

Ada Lovelace

#7. The object of the engine is in fact to give the utmost practical efficiency to the resources of numerical interpretations of the higher science of analysis, while it uses the processes and combinations of this latter.

Ada Lovelace

#8. But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes.

Ada Lovelace

#9. I believe myself to possess a most singular combination of qualities exactly fitted to make me pre-eminently a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature.

Ada Lovelace

#10. It is however pretty evident, on general principles, that in devising for mathematical truths a new form in which to record and throw themselves out for actual use, views are likely to be induced, which should again react on the more theoretical phase of the subject.

Ada Lovelace

#11. I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.

Ada Lovelace

#12. The more I study, the more insatiable do I feel my genius for it to be.

Ada Lovelace

#13. In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation.

Ada Lovelace

#14. I find that nothing but very close and intense application to subjects of a scientific nature now seems at all to keep my imagination from running wild, or to stop up the void which seems to be left in my mind from a want of excitement.

Ada Lovelace

#15. We cannot forbear suggesting one practical result which it appears to us must be greatly facilitated by the independent manner in which the engine orders and combines its operations: we allude to the attainment of those combinations into which imaginary quantities enter.

Ada Lovelace

#16. That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal, as time will show.

Ada Lovelace

#17. As soon as I have got flying to perfection, I have got a scheme about a steam engine.

Ada Lovelace

#18. The Analytical Engine, on the contrary, can either add, subtract, multiply or divide with equal facility; and performs each of these four operations in a direct manner, without the aid of any of the other three.

Ada Lovelace

#19. One main reason why the separate nature of the science of operations has been little felt, and in general little dwelt on, is the shifting meaning of many of the symbols used in mathematical notation. First, the symbols of operation are frequently also the symbols of the results of operations.

Ada Lovelace

#20. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform ... But it is likely to exert an indirect and reciprocal influence on science itself.

Ada Lovelace

#21. This one fact implies everything; and it is scarcely necessary to point out, for instance, that while the Difference Engine can merely tabulate, and is incapable of developing, the Analytical Engine can either tabulate or develope.

Ada Lovelace

#22. The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

Ada Lovelace

#23. If you can't give me poetry, can't you give me poetical science?

Ada Lovelace

#24. Owing to some peculiarity in my nervous system, I have perception of some things, which no one else has; or at least very few, if any ... I can throw rays from every quarter of the universe into one vast focus.

Ada Lovelace

#25. In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science.

Ada Lovelace

#26. The intellectual, the moral, the religious seem to me all naturally bound up and interlinked together in one great and harmonious whole.

Ada Lovelace

#27. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible.

Ada Lovelace

#28. It may be desirable to explain, that by the word operation, we mean any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things, be this relation of what kind it may. This is the most general definition, and would include all subjects in the universe.

Ada Lovelace