Women Scientists

Ada, Countess Lovelace 1815-1852

At a glance:

Bryon's daughter and teenage predictor of the computer age

Ada was the product of a disastrous marriage between her mother Isabelle and the poet Lord Byron. Isabelle fled Byron with Ada when she was only 4 weeks old, resolving that Ada would be brought up to have nothing whatsoever to do with poets or poetry. She was tutored in maths and music and her mentors included Mary Somerville (qv). At 17, she met Charles Babbage, Lucasian professor of maths at Cambridge and inventor of the difference engine, a calculating machine. At the time he was working on an analytical engine. In 1842, an Italian mathematician published a memoir in French on Babbage's analytical machine, a forerunner of computers, which Ada translated. Her copious additional notes make it clear that she understood its promise better than Babbage. She died a horrible death from cancer at 36 and was forgotten until relatively recently, when her contribution to computing was acknowledged. A computer language is named after her and a portrait of Ada was once the security watermark for Microsoft products.
Ada, Countess Lovelace

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