Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace

Abstract The polymathic Charles Babbage—mathematician, engineer, systems analyst, economist, computer pioneer—has rarely been associated closely with statistics. But he was so proud of his role in founding the Statistical Movement in 1833-4 that he left four published accounts of it, and he made contributions to the Statistical Society of London on several occasions over the next three decades. This chapter examines Babbage’s role in the movement and those contributions to statistics, and it links Babbage to his friend and confidant Ada Lovelace, who acted as the interpreter of his statistical ideas. As far back as 1822, when explaining his concept of a mechanical calculating engine, Babbage had seen the requirement for machines capable of processing very large sets of numbers, what we would now call ‘Big Data’. In her exposition of his work, published in 1843, Ada Lovelace returned to this theme, foreseeing an age when large-scale numerical analysis would require mechanization. The concept of the computer is not a direct outcome of the Statistical Movement, but must be related to Babbage’s interest in ‘number’ and his foresight in envisaging a future age when science would not be able to accomplish its aims without the means to analyse numbers on a grand scale. This chapter sets Babbage in a statistical context and shows how much he took from and contributed to the Victorian statistical movement.