📜Ada Lovelace's notes were about three times as long as the paper she translated

In 1842 the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea published, in French, an account of Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine. 🏛️ Ada Lovelace translated it into English for Taylor's Scientific Memoirs (1843) and added seven notes of her own, lettered A to G and signed only A.A.L.

The notes run to roughly three times the length of the paper. Note G sets out, step by step, how the engine could compute Bernoulli numbers, which is why it is often called the first published computer program. The same note holds the caution I filed as 💬 The Analytical Engine has no pretensions.

Why I kept it: the commentary outlived the thing it commented on.

So what? A consoling fact for anyone who writes notes on other people's work. The translation was the assignment. The notes were the contribution.

It is also the argument for a literature note having more of me in it than of the source.