COMPUTE THIS

HOW I WAS BORN

MATHEMATICIAN | COMPUTER PIONEER

An only child, Ada Byron Lovelace was born to lauded poet, Lord Byron. Her mother saw to it that her education was exemplary and insisted Ada master mathematics and science.

Around the age of seventeen, Ada met Charles Babbage, a mathematician, and the inventor of the first mechanical computer. It was obvious to Babbage that Ada understood the machine better than anyone else had. To demonstrate its capabilities, she went on to write the world's first computer program. Science and art coexisted freely in her mind, and she possessed an obvious gift for connecting disparate ideas in original ways. A full century before the digital day dawned, Ada envisioned the computer-driven world we know today.

More than a hundred years after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished after having been forgotten. The engine was recognized as a model for a computer, and Ada Lovelace's notes served as a description of a computer and software.

Ada’s contributions to the field of computer science were not discovered until the 1950s. Since then, Ada has received many posthumous honors for her work. In 1980, the US Department of Defense named a newly developed computer language "Ada," after Lovelace.