Ada Lovelace： Grandmother of Computing ｜ Mini Bio ｜ Biography

Ada Lovelace is considered one of the first computer programmers, which may sound a little strange because she lived in the early 1800s, well before the invention of the computer. Ada was the daughter of famous English poet Lord Byron and Lady Anne Isabella Milbank. Her mom was known for being incredibly smart, which Lord Byron found very attractive, calling her his princess of parallelograms, and so they decided to get married. But Byron had a reputation for being kind of a bad boy, and she sort of saw it as her moral obligation to fix him. Oh dear. Classic mistake. Ladies, let this be a lesson. You cannot change him. And of course, she didn't. He was moody, unpredictable, and maybe suffered from mental illness. So Lady Anne and Lord Byron separated one month after Ada was born, and three months later, he left England and never saw Ada again. So Lady Anne was a single mother with a brand new baby to raise. On top of that, Lady Anne worried that Ada might have inherited her father's tempestuous personality. Because even as a young girl, it was clear. Ada definitely inherited her parents' gifted minds. So Lady Anne made it her priority to prevent the development of a volatile personality in Ada. Her medicine? Rigorous studying. She insisted that her daughter learn science and math, even though those challenging subjects weren't considered suitable for your average aristocratic lady. Ada excelled, especially in math and languages. So her mother set her up with the best tutors in town, including the family doctor and Mary Somerville, who was the first woman to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society. Lady Anne also made Ada lie still for long periods of time, thinking it would help her learn self-control. That was a little less useful. But it did come in handy when she sat for her portrait. Look how still she is! At 17, Ada met the famous mathematician and father of the computer, Charles Babbage, who served as her mentor, helping her study advanced mathematics with a professor from the University of London. At 20, she wed William King, who loved her and supported her academic and intellectual work. They have three kids and partied with some of England's greats, like Charles Dickens. It was the best of parties. Eventually, she was asked to translate this super complex article about the analytical engine, which was her mentor Charles Babbage's brainchild. She translated the article beautifully into English, and then added in her own notes, which she aptly titled Notes. Her notes were three times as long as the original article, and in them she proposed a wild idea. Computers could be used for things beyond just simple number crunching. They could be used to do advanced algorithms, and she included in that paper what many considered to be the first algorithm. But her accomplishments were cut short when she died of uterine cancer in 1852 at just 36 years old. While she was known by a few in her time, much of her legacy was hidden in the footnotes of history. But her notes inspired greats like Alan Turing. In 1980, the U.S. Department of Defense honored her by naming a new computer language after her, Ada.