Ada, Charles and Jacob: The First Computer Program & The Power of Recursion
- Dr Nicolas Garron
28th February 2026
Have you ever noticed how a simple set of rules can create something incredibly complex? How the steps to solve a puzzle can be contained within the puzzle itself?
This talk is a journey through that very idea.
We start with a deceptively simple medieval legend: the Towers of Hanoi.
Moving a stack of disks from one peg to another might seem like a child's game, but its solution reveals a powerful, self-repeating pattern called recursion, where a problem solves itself by calling upon smaller versions of the same problem.
This logical "magic" of recursion is not just for puzzles. In the 1840s, Ada Lovelace, a visionary mathematician and daughter of the poet Lord Byron, saw it in the designs of Charles Babbage's early mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. While translating notes on the machine, she did something extraordinary: she wrote the world's first published computer program (algorithm).
And what did she choose to demonstrate this groundbreaking concept? She designed a computer program to calculate the Bernoulli numbers (a tricky sequence of numbers important in advanced mathematics)
We will connect the dots: How the recursive logic of a puzzle like the Towers of Hanoi mirrors the step-by-step, looping instructions of a computer program. How Ada Lovelace used this kind of thinking to instruct a machine a century before modern computers existed. And why her choice of the Bernoulli numbers was the perfect test of a machine's true computational power.
Join us to explore how a playful puzzle, an obscure sequence of numbers, and the genius of a Victorian countess came together to launch the very idea of software and reveal the recursive heart of computation.