How Ada Lovelace, Daughter of Lord Byron, Wrote the First Computer Program in 1842–a Century Before the First Computer

We can add to the pan­theon of great women in sci­ence the name Ada Byron, Count­ess of Lovelace, the daugh­ter of Roman­tic poet Lord Byron. “I feel like I’ve final­ly got­ten to know Ada Lovelace,” he writes, “and got­ten a grasp on her sto­ry. When, in 1842, Ital­ian math­e­mati­cian Louis Menabrea pub­lished a paper in French on the Ana­lyt­i­cal Engine, “Bab­bage enlist­ed Ada as trans­la­tor,” notes the San Diego Super­com­put­er Cen­ter’s Women in Sci­ence project. Lovelace died of can­cer at the age of 36, and for some time, her work sank into semi-obscu­ri­ty. As the Women in Sci­ence project puts it, “She right­ly saw [the Ana­lyt­i­cal Engine] as what we would call a gen­er­al-pur­pose com­put­er.