Ada Lovelace

Some of her closest friends were scientists, Charles Babbage, Andrew Crosse, Charles Wheatstone, Michael Faraday, and writer Charles Dickens.

Ada married William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace, on July 8th, 1835, having been egged on by her mother. The couple had two sons, Byron, Ralph Gordon, and a daughter, Anne Isabella.

Augusta Ada Byron was born to English poet, Lord Byron and his wife, Baroness Anne Isabella Milbanke, on December 10, 1815, in London, England. When Ada was only a month old, her parents separated and the young girl never met her father again.

The young girl had a very strict, religious upbringing, forming a close bond with her grandmother, Judith, rather than her own mother, Anne. Anne did not care much about her own daughter, even calling little Ada 'it', and all correspondence with her own mother was to put up a facade of maternal love.

The child was quite frail, and was bedridden for two years after suffering from measles in 1829. It was only after two years, that she was able to move around using crutches.

However, she was a bright student, with a deep interest in mathematics and science. Her imaginative mind was curbed by her mother, who made sure that she did not grow an affinity towards poetry, like her father. According to Anne and her friends, poets always turned out to be immoral.

The young girl was taught by mathematical geniuses like Mary Somerville, Augustus De Morgan, William King and William Frend.

In 1833, Lovelace was introduced to Charles Babbage, also known as the "Father of Computers", by her tutor, Mary Somerville. Since then a professional friendship between the young woman and Babbage ensued, and Ada became interested in the latter's 'Difference Engine.

She also became engrossed in phrenology, which dealt with measuring the human skull, and animal magnetism.

In the year 1840, Babbage's lecture on his invention, the 'Analytical Engine', delivered at the 'University of Turin', was written in French by Italian, Luigi Menabrea. This paper was printed two years later, in the 'Bibliothèque universelle de Genève'.

After the publication, Lovelace took it upon herself to translate Luigi's French paper into English, after a request from Babbage's acquaintance, Charles Wheatstone. The paper was transcribed during 1842-43, and as an addition, the young lady included notes of her own analysis.

Her notes spoke about how the 'Analytical Engine' was more advanced than previous machines that were built for the purpose of calculations. She claimed that Babbage's machine could do more than just numerical computations, and went on to explain its operations in detail.

Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician, known mainly for the assistance she provided to Charles Babbage on his ‘Differential Engine’ and ‘Analytical Engine’. She wrote the world’s earliest algorithm for the ‘Analytical Engine’, which allowed the machine to calculate 'Bernoulli numbers'.