Ada Lovelace

The Enchantress of Numbers

Augusta Ada Byron was born in London in 1815. Her parents separated just one month after her birth. Her mother encouraged Ada to pursue studies in Mathematics to prevent her daughter from inheriting the bad reputation of her father, the poet Lord Byron, and to try to keep her away from the world of poetry and Art in general.

At seventeen she met Charles Babbage, the father of the computer, who, impressed by her intelligence, nicknamed her “The Enchantress of Numbers.”

At twenty, she married William King, taking her husband’s surname and also the title of “Countess of Lovelace.”

Her great contribution to mathematics was to describe the programming language and invention of the analytical engine, a “computer” built by Babbage to perform trigonometric operations, among others. For fear that her work would be rejected, she signed only with her initials.