Madness in the Numbers

     Ada Lovelace lived from 1815 to 1852 in The United Kingdom. She was a mathematician most known for her work with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, an early version of the computer. Lovelace is generally accepted as the first computer programmer.

Madness in the Numbers

   Oh, you wish to hold conversations with a spirit of the deceased do you? Well, you may be conversing with a mad one, depending on who you ask. I thought it would be appropriate to give you fair warning. People found me a little overwhelming in life and on occasion I wonder if the trait intensified in death. Do you still wish for me to linger about? Maybe I will, if just for a little while longer. I shall humor you with my ramblings. I was born with the name Augusta Ada Byron, but you may know me as Ada Lovelace.

   Let us be rid of the first question I know is on your lips. Yes, I cannot deny the irony of a daughter of a poet, such as the great Lord Byron himself, finding her passion in mathematics. Ironic, maybe, but that did not give my mother pause. The way of science and numbers was the course my mother, Annabell, set for me from my first breath on this earth—maybe before even that. Some say I was lucky, for not many girls of my time received an education equal to mine. If you ask me, she was the one luck favored. From the very first time I counted on my fingers, the way of numbers had me enthralled. If another endeavor had caught my fancy, there would have been no force that could have hindered me.

   She would have attempted nonetheless. My mother was shrewd woman. On occasion I would even doubt her love for me—has your mother referred to you as it?—but my mother was determined to save me from the blood of my father that courses—excuse my error, I meant that formerly coursed through these very veins. My mother was sure that my father’s “poetic temperament,” as she put it, would manifest in her daughter. To put it so bluntly, she thought he was mad and feared the same for me. Although I must assume this fear originated from a deeper fear of public ridicule, for I can assure you my well-being was not what my mother cared for. She was never in my presence long enough to be informed of my health until the very end. I only gained my mother’s undivided attention when I retired to my deathbed.

  Returning to the topic at hand, there was no cause for her worry; I cannot remember a time when I laid my eyes on the man alive! He passed on by the eighth year after my birth. My first glimpse of Lord Byron was a portrait of him on my twentieth birthday. Her incessant verbal assault on Lord Byron created an air of alluring mystery, which only increased my fascination with the man. My mother thought I was the mad one, but my curiosity nearly sent her to the brink of insanity.  You may call me bitter, or perhaps even cruel, but I could not resist one final retort. You see, my body, or whatever remains of it, lies only a few feet away from Lord Byron. My father plagued my mother from beyond the grave, and now too shall I. Despite the amusement I receive from it, the dense soil continually separates a daughter from her father.

  Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary, my mother’s whispers of my impending madness followed me through my youth. I do not know what possessed me, but I was filled with a desire for wantonness. My first wanderings led me to near marriage to my tutor. It was logical to me. We were both intelligent adults. The affair was promptly hidden by my mother and her cohorts, but that did not give me cause to cease my youthful transgressions. As I grew older, the courts became the gardens of my escapades. My fickle favor flitted from suitor to suitor, continuing far beyond my own wedding. My only regret in life was hurting my husband, William. He fulfilled all of his duties to me faithfully and deserved better than I. I do not blame him for leaving me at my deathbed. I only wished he left me sooner, as to avoid more pain for him.

   It is intriguing how imminent death transforms the fragile minds of the young. After thirty-six years of intermittent illness through my childhood and adult life, I had an appointment with death and I could not avoid this one. With my mother keeping me hidden from the public and acquaintances, I was only left with her sermons of brimstone and eternal damnation. The consequences of my ill-advised lifestyle came in flooding waves. Why would one be possessed to do such things? Was it a sign of my madness? It seemed logical in my fevered state. I was morally ill and physical disease haunted me through all my years. My mother always feared the day I would slip from reason and that day was coming to pass. I was doomed to insanity like my father. My only consolation was that God, if one existed, was merciful enough to end my life before my lucid mind grew foggy.

  At the same moment, it brought anguish as well. It was unjust that I perished in such an inept age. In my youth, especially while working with my dear friend on his calculating machine, I dreamed of the advances in technology I would witness in my lifetime. I knew there would come a time when the equations I wrote in ink could breathe life in humming machines of metal, but I would never see that day. Insanity aside, I was correct in my fantasies. You sit in the world I envisioned right at this very moment.    

   In some ways, my mother accomplished her goal. I shall forever be inscribed within books as a mathematician ahead of her time, but how dull that description is! Call me mad! And maybe that is a more fitting description. Is it mad to see the beauty and transcendence in the numbers? Is it mad to dream of strange devices with nothing but a string of numbers guiding its actions? Is it mad to imagine music, dynamic and alive with emotion, dictated by not a musician, but by numerical patterns? Call me mad!

  My mother wished to prevent me from following my father in poetic madness, but I am a poet. Numbers are simply words describing the universe in a way we cannot see with our own eyes. Equations and codes are the lines and stanzas of my poems. Numbers are nature, beauty, and life. I am a manipulator, an artist, and a poet. I am the enchantress of numbers. As for my madness, I shall let you be the judge of that.