Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron. Her mother — fearing the poet's 'madness' — had her tutored intensively in mathematics from the age of four. At seventeen she met Charles Babbage, who was designing his Difference Engine; at twenty-seven she translated an Italian engineer's account of his second, much more ambitious Analytical Engine and added 'Notes' that ran to longer than the original article. In Note G she wrote out what is recognisably the first computer algorithm — a procedure for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers — and made an observation no other contemporary made: that such a machine could in principle manipulate any symbol, not only numbers, and so might one day compose music or generate text. She published in 1843 under the initials A.A.L., out of conventional Victorian modesty about a woman publishing science. She died of uterine cancer at thirty-six. The US Department of Defense's programming language Ada is named for her.
All Figures
Mathematician · The First Programmer
Ada Lovelace
1,815 CE – 1,852 CE
Lord Byron's daughter, raised on mathematics rather than poetry — and the first person to imagine that a machine could compute anything beyond numbers.
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