Ada Lovelace was born in London in 1815. She was the daughter of well regarded romantic poet Lord Byron. Byron left Ada’s mother, Lady Byron, soon after she was born, and he died eight years later. Lady Byron, harboring resentment, encouraged Ada's pursuit of scientific and mathematical endeavors, intending to dissuade her from following in her father's footsteps as a writer Still, Ada and her mother were not very close and Ada’s grandmother looked after her often. She grew up very ill, losing some of her vision at the age of eight and becoming paralyzed due to measles at 14.
Ada’s passion for mathematics grew as she got older, leading to her notable achievement in translating Babbage's Analytical Engine. She was assigned the task of translating and annotating a lecture by Babbage and Ada is widely recognized as the first computer programmer due to the detailed notes she took during the process. Her writing was later republished after her death as an appendix in Faster than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines. The Analytical Engine is viewed as an early design of the modern computer and its software.
Ada was famously nicknamed the “poetic scientist”, in tribute to her father. Even her mother’s greatest efforts to keep her away from poetry was not enough, and she still found a way to embrace it in her mathematical discoveries. Tragically, Lovelace died at the age of 36 due to uterine cancer. She was buried next to her father, at her request, at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.
