Augusta Ada Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815 in London, England. She is the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Milbanke, an English mathematician.
Her mother encouraged Ada’s education and she was tutored intensively from a young age. She showed early signs of becoming a promising mathematician and by the age of 18 began a lifelong association and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as the ‘Father of Computers’.
She was in particular interested in Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented in the mid-1800s. She wrote the world’s first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine.
She wrote a scientific paper in 1843 that anticipated the development of computer software, artificial intelligence and computer music. She was the first person to realize that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers. For this reason Ada has been called the ‘first computer programmer’ in history.
In 1835, Lovelace married William King, who became the Earl of Lovelace three years later. She then took the title of Countess of Lovelace. She died of cancer, aged 36, on 27th November 1852.
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