Which 1953 book republished Ada Lovelace's notes as an appendix?

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The 1953 book that republished Ada Lovelace’s notes as an appendix was *Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines*.

Edited by B. V. Bowden and published by Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, the volume surveyed the emerging field of electronic digital computing. Its first appendix reproduced Lovelace’s translation of Luigi Federico Menabrea’s account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, together with her extensive notes.

Lovelace originally published the translation and notes in 1843. Her Note G described a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the Analytical Engine and is often called the first published computer algorithm. The machine was never completed, so the procedure was not tested on the intended hardware.

A common mix-up is to identify the 1953 book with Babbage’s calculating-machine writings generally. The key clue is the republication of Lovelace’s complete translation and notes in an appendix, rather than a modern biography of Lovelace or a book about cybernetics.

Source: Wikipedia · fact-checked Sept. 2026

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