Lovelace’s 1843 notes were published under the initials A.A.L. The letters represented Augusta Ada Lovelace, the name by which she was identified at the time, and allowed the work to appear without prominently displaying her full name.
The notes accompanied Lovelace’s English translation of Luigi Menabrea’s French account of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Published in Taylor’s Scientific Memoirs in 1843, the work was titled “Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage, by L. F. Menabrea, Officer of the Military Engineers, with Notes by the Translator.”
Although the translation itself was anonymous in the ordinary sense, the initials A.A.L. identified the translator and commentator. Lovelace’s additions were much longer than Menabrea’s original article and explained programming concepts, machine structure, and the possibility of using the engine beyond ordinary arithmetic. A frequent misconception is that the initials referred simply to “Ada Lovelace”; her formal name and title at the time explain the three initials.