Ada Lovelace

Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, born Augusta Ada Byron in 1815 in Middlesex, now part of London, is among the most unique and (until recently) under-appreciated figures in the history of invention. The only legitimate daughter of famed poet Lord Byron, whom she nevertheless never knew, Ada Byron is now called the first computer programmer and was certainly a visionary computer scientist earlier than anyone else except her friend Charles Babbage.

Lady Byron is best known for having written a computer program, or perhaps more accurately, pseudo-code, before the concept of computer programming otherwise existed; she described an algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers on the first-designed prototype digital computer—Babbage’s Analytical Engine—which was not completed during his lifetime. In the same document, she also explored a range of potential applications for digital computers that seemed wildly imaginative at the time but that we now use every day.

Lovelace’s parentage influenced her strange interests indirectly. Lord Byron and her mother Annabelle Milbanke separated legally two months after her birth, with her father leaving Britain forever and dying in Italy when Ada was only eight years old. Meanwhile, her mother Anabelle purposely raised the girl on mathematics and logic, fearing the imaginative child would develop the insanity of her poetic, wayward father. 

Ultimately, Lovelace combined imagination and analytic thought, describing advanced mathematical ideas in metaphor and wishing for a “poetical science,” as she once told her mother. “The Analytical Engine,” she once said, “weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Lovelace showed childhood brilliance, designing a flying machine when she was just 13 years old and already in love with mathematics. She was interested in Babbage’s machines by age 16 and became friends with the older mathematician at a dinner party in 1834 where Babbage discussed his idea of the Analytical Engine. Lovelace was among few people who recognized the potential of such a device, and she and Babbage began a lifelong correspondence.

Ten years later, Babbage was still facing widespread disinterest in his designs, and one Italian mathematician, Menabrea, who appreciated his work, wrote an article in French about Babbage’s plans. Lovelace translated the article, and Babbage suggested she add her own notes on the ideas—which turned out three times longer than the article itself. Her resulting article predicted computer music, graphics, science, and language processing at a time when Babbage’s machines were thought of as numerical calculators only.

Lovelace continued to work on other mathematical modeling projects for the remainder of her sadly brief life. In 1844, she wrote to a friend of wanting to create a mathematical model of neural computation—“a calculus of the nervous system”— a topic on the cutting edge of computational and cognitive science today. 

This “enchantress of numbers,” as she was called, died of cancer in 1852 at the age of 36. She went largely unremembered until the late 1970s when one of the first programming languages, Ada, was named after her.