Ada Lovelace

Trained Against Her Father's Ghost

Augusta Ada Byron was born in 1815 to the poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Byron left when she was a month old and she never saw him again. Her mother, determined that nothing poetic should survive in her, had her drilled in mathematics from early childhood — an education almost no woman of her class received, imposed as a prophylactic. She met Charles Babbage at seventeen and spent the rest of her life around his machines. In 1835 she married William King, who became Earl of Lovelace three years later, making her the Countess of Lovelace — the name history remembers her by. In 1843 she published her translation of the Italian engineer Menabrea's paper on the Analytical Engine with seven notes of her own, signed only A.A.L. Note G contains a step-by-step method for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers, generally called the first published computer program, and also the first clear statement that however far its reach, such a machine could never originate anything of its own — an objection the mathematician Alan Turing was still answering by name a hundred years later.

Her Mother, Back in Control

She died of uterine cancer on 27 November 1852, aged thirty-six — the same age at which Byron had died. Her doctors bled her. In her last months her mother took control of the sickroom, sent away her friends, and pressed her into a religious repentance. She asked to be buried beside the father she had never met, and was.