Ada Lovelace

Enchantress of Numbers

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician of the nineteenth century, daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Working with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine, she wrote extensive notes describing how the machine could be programmed to compute a sequence of Bernoulli numbers, widely regarded as the first published algorithm intended for a machine. She foresaw that such engines might one day manipulate not just numbers but symbols and music, anticipating the idea of the computer by a century.