Early Life
Augusta Ada Byron, born in London, England, December 10, 1815 was the daughter of a brief marriage Anne
Isabelle Milbanke and Romantic poet Lord Byron. She was named after Augusta, Byron's half sister, who had been
his mistress. Her parents separated a month after Ada was born and Byron left England forever four months later. Ada never knew her father and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron.

Her life was not an easy one, but instead a struggle between emotion and reason, poetry and science, bursts of energy and health challenges, drug addiction, wild gambling and her efforts to be a wife and mother.

Lady Anne Byron wished to ensure her daughter would not emulate her father and thus provided Ada with tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter any poetic tendencies.

But Ada's complexity and intellect showed early, as young as age 12 when, in 1828, she produced the design for a flying machine. It was to be mathematics which would give her life flight.

Her first serious illness was measles, which in 1829 made her an invalid for almost 3 years. She recovered and was presented  in 1833.

Adulthood and Career

Ada married William King who inherited a noble title three years later in 1838, making them the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. They had three children but her family and its fortunes were very much directed by the domineering Lady Byron.

Ada lived in the milieu of an elite London society in the early nineteenth century, at which time there were no professional scientists. Wealthy gentlemen self financed their own avocations in the the affairs astronomy or biology. Yet women of any class were not encouraged such pursuits. The intellectual realm was indeed a man's world.

At age 17 Ada was introduced to the ideas of one of the famous gentlemanly scientists of the era, Charles Babbage, professor of mathematics at Cambridge. Babbage was the inventor of the Difference Engine, an elaborate calculating machine and forerunner of today's computers.

Ada was touched by the "universality of his ideas", although hardly anyone else was. They began a continuous correspondence on the topics of mathematics, logic, and ultimately all subjects and would become lifelong friends.

Lovelace's "Notes"

Babbage had made plans in 1834 for a new kind of calculating machine called the Analytical Engine. But the British Parliamentary refused to support this newer machine while  the Difference Engine remained unbuilt. Babbage looked abroad for support and found it in Italy. In 1842, an Italian mathematician, Louis Menebrea, published a memoir in French on the Analytical Engine.

Babbage enlisted Ada as translator of Menebrea's paper. During a nine-month period in 1842-43, while she had three children at home under the age of eight, Ada worked feverishly on the translation, appending a set of her own Notes to it.

It is these Notes -  three times the length of the original article - which are the source of her enduring fame.

Through her close work and association with Babbage, she understood the plans for the Analytical Engine as well as Babbage. But she was better at fleshing out and articulating the breadth and range of its potential and promise. She recognized it as what we call today a "general purpose" computer, designed for a range of diverse tasks.

She wrote,  "It was designed for developing and tabulating any function whatever. . . the engine is the material expression of any indefinite function of any degree of generality and complexity."

Her Notes predict future developments of the Engine to include applications such as the composition of complex music and graphics. She saw that the machine and its descendants would be used for both practical and scientific purposes. In predicting the many eventual functions of computers, she was completely correct.
 

Sometimes it is written that Ada was the world's first programmer. That is not accurate, but rather she was one of the first five or so, after  Babbage, his assistant, and perhaps his three sons.  Ada suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now often regarded as the one of the  first "computer programs."
 

Ada did little invention, as it were, but reworked Babbage's earlier calculations. This is not to say that her achievements were not remarkable. As Babbage's interpretress, his 'fairy lady', she has a significant role in the history of the Computing Engine. Even more remarkable for the fact she was a woman in a man's world.

After she wrote the description of Babbage's Analytical Engine her life was plagued with illnesses. She died of cancer in 1952 at age 37. She was buried beside her father, Lord Byron, who died at the same age, and whom she never knew.

Though her life was short Ada anticipated by more than a century most of what we think of as start of the art computing.