Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the noted poet Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke Byron. Their marriage lasted little more than a year, and Ada never met her father. To counteract the "dangerous" mental tendencies of Ada's father, Annabella emphasized music, French, and mathematics in her daughter's studies. This last subject particularly appealed to Ada.
In 1833 Ada Lovelace met the mathematician Charles Babbage, who had designed a calculating machine called the Difference Engine. Lovelace was inspired by the prototype of the Difference Engine and became Babbage's lifelong friend. Babbage had a new project in mind, a much more-advanced machine, the Analytical Engine. In 1843 Lovelace translated a French paper that Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea wrote about the Analytical Engine. She also added thousands of words of her own notes to the paper. Lovelace realized that the Analytical Engine could carry out an extensive sequence of mathematical operations. The example she wrote of one such sequence—how to calculate Bernoulli numbers—is regarded by computer historians as the first computer program. She even speculated that the Analytical Engine could be used to perform operations on "other things besides number," such as musical notes.
Only a small piece of the Analytical Engine was ever built, and Ada Lovelace died in 1852. Her fame lives on, however. She gave her name to the Ada programming language. Every year on the second Tuesday in October, the contributions of women to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are celebrated on Ada Lovelace Day.
10 Women Scientists Who Should Be Famous (or More Famous)