Ada Lovelace Quotes

In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which in all mathematical analysis belong to operations, as distinguished from the objects operated upon and from the results of the operations performed upon those objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.

The person who did most to give to analysis the generality and symmetry which are now its pride, was also the person who made mechanics analytical; I mean Euler.

Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

Of course, analysis can sometimes give more accurate results than intuition but usually it’s just a lot of work. I normally do what my intuition tells me to do. Most of the time spent thinking is just to double-check.

In science we have to consider two things: power and circumstance.

The facts never speak for themselves. They have to be interpreted in terms of some understanding of where they come from and what the relation between them is.

Expose every belief to the light of reason, discourse, facts, scientific observations; question everything, be sceptical because this is the only chance at life you will ever get.

I'd discovered you never know yourself until you're tested and that you don't even know you're being tested until afterwards, and that in fact there isn't anyone giving the test except yourself.

This is that which I think great readers are apt to be mistaken in; those who have read of everything, are thought to understand everything too; but it is not always so. Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours. We are of the ruminating kind , and it is not enough to cram ourselves with a great load of collections:;; unless we chew them over again, they will not give us strength and nourishment.

If you want to photograph a man spinning, give some thought to why he spins. Understanding for a photographer is as important as the equipment he uses.

Mathematical Analysis is... the true rational basis of the whole system of our positive knowledge.

Theory is the essence of facts. Without theory scientific knowledge would be only worthy of the madhouse.

Don't take too much advice. Most people who have a lot of advice to give ~ with a few exceptions ~ generalize whatever they did. Don't over-analyze everything. I myself have been guilty of over-thinking problems. Just build things and find out if they work.

Beyond the element of giving, the active characteristic of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsability, respect and knowledge

Care about understanding and before you know it, in just a few decades, you'll have a system of thinking that gives you answers whenever you ask.

No one knows what the right algorithm is, but it gives us hope that if we can discover some crude approximation of whatever this algorithm is and implement it on a computer, that can help us make a lot of progress.

Above all else show the data.

The question you raise, 'How can such a formulation lead to computations?' doesn't bother me in the least! Throughout my whole life as a mathematician, the possibility of making explicit, elegant computations has always come out by itself, as a byproduct of a thorough conceptual understanding of what was going on. Thus I never bothered about whether what would come out would be suitable for this or that, but just tried to understand - and it always turned out that understanding was all that mattered.

People can portray me anyway they want because I don’t give a damn… But don’t you analyze me and don’t you tell me what I am until you get close enough to understand what I am. Then you can make an analysis of me. But don’t you dare do it until then.

You think you photograph a particular scene for the pleasure it gives. In fact it's the scene that wants to be photographed. You're merely an extra in the production.

The whole of the developments and operations of analysis are now capable of being executed by machinery ... As soon as an Analytical Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.

The tool which serves as intermediary between theory and practice, between thought and observation, is mathematics; it is mathematics which builds the linking bridges and gives the ever more reliable forms.

It is the invaluable merit of the great Basle mathematician Leonard Euler, to have freed the analytical calculus from all geometric bounds, and thus to have established analysis as an independent science, which from his time on has maintained an unchallenged leadership in the field of mathematics.

Service is the measure of greatness; it always has been true; it is true today, and it always will be true, that he is greatest who does the most of good. Nearly all of our controversies and combats grow out of the fact that we are trying to get something from each other--there will be peace when our aim is to do something for each other. The human measure of a human life is its income; the divine measure of a life is its outgo, its overflow--its contribution to the welfare of all.

Close scrutiny of an object in nature will nearly always yield some significant fact.