Augusta Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852) wrote what is arguably the first computer program for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose mechanical computer for which Ada had only a design on paper (below). The program was to be encoded on punch cards (above right), some of which stored numerical values and some of which stored operations, and computed the nonzero Bernoulli numbers by an algorithm equivalent to this Python function or this Racket function.

This class follows in Lady Lovelace's footsteps and explores the basics of the intimate connection between mathematics and computers. It meets in room B101 (Love Auditorium) of the Levine Science Research Building.