Ada Lovelace

(1815 - 1852)

The daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, was a pioneer of computer science and a mathematical prodigy who mastered trigonometry and calculus without attending university, from which women in early nineteenth-century England were forbidden. In 1833 she met Charles Babbage, inventor of the first automatic digital computer, who helped her to learn mathematics. Her tutor predicted she could be “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” In 1843 she published an extensively annotated translation of an Italian engineer’s seventeen-page explication of Babbage’s Analytical Engine. In “Note G,” she presented the world’s first computer program, showing how the machine could calculate a series of values known as Bernoulli numbers.