Ada Lovelace

Alan Turing is called the father of computing. But the first computer programmer? That was a woman.

Ada Lovelace was born in 1815.

She was the daughter of the infamous poet Lord Byron and the wealthy, mathematically gifted Annabella Milbanke.

When she turned 17, Ada was introduced to Charles Babbage.

A brilliant mathematician and inventor who showed her a prototype of his “difference engine,” a mechanical calculator.

What began as a mentorship soon became an intellectual partnership.

Then came the analytical engine.

Unlike the difference engine, which could only perform fixed equations, Babbage’s new machine had memory (“the store”), a processor (“the mill”), and used punch cards to process data.

But Babbage, for all his genius, saw the machine only as a number cruncher.

Ada saw more.

She began advanced studies under Augustus De Morgan, one of the leading mathematical minds of the era.

In 1842, Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea published a paper summarizing Babbage’s lectures in Turin on the analytical engine.

Ada translated it into English, and added her own notes.

Her notes were 3x longer than the paper itself.

She added 7 footnotes, labeled A through G.

In Note A, she became the first to distinguish between numbers and symbols, realizing a machine could process not just math but music, letters, and logic.

In Note G, she included the first published computer program: an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli numbers using Babbage’s engine.

A step-by-step plan for storing variables, processing operations, and producing a result.

What we now call software.

In Note G, Ada wrote what is now called “Lady Lovelace’s Objection”.

An early critique of artificial intelligence.

“The analytical engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can follow analysis, but it has no power of anticipating any relations or truths.”

This led to what is now known as the Lovelace Test, proposed in 2001: a computer can only be said to have intelligence when it can create something entirely original, without human input.

To this day, no AI has passed the Lovelace Test.

And then, just as she was getting started, she got sick.

In 1851, she was diagnosed with cancer.

She died a year later at age 36.

Her work was largely forgotten.

Until 1953.

That year, Bertram Bowden republished her notes in “Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines”.

And Ada was reintroduced to the world as the first computer programmer.

In the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense named a new programming language after her: ADA.

Ada believed programming would shape mathematics itself.

She believed coding would teach us new ways to think.

And she was right.

But… why didn’t she get credit?

Because she was a woman.

She couldn’t publish under her name.

She couldn’t enter libraries.

She needed her husband to retrieve source material.

She couldn’t attend university.

She was born 100 years too early.