Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852) was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Byron had left England a month after Ada’s birth, never met her, and died at Missolonghi when Ada was eight. Annabella raised her on a deliberately mathematical-scientific education programme — substantively the substantial choice partly intended to suppress any inherited Byronic literary-romantic temperament.
The substantial programme worked, after a fashion. Ada was substantively mathematically capable, formally tutored by Augustus De Morgan (the substantial London-based logician), and well-positioned within the Victorian scientific elite by her mid-twenties.
The Babbage connection
She met Charles Babbage at a London salon in 1833, aged 17. Babbage was the inventor of the Difference Engine (a mechanical calculator for polynomial functions) and was substantively working on its successor, the Analytical Engine — a general-purpose programmable mechanical computer that, had it been built, would have anticipated the modern digital computer by approximately a century.
Babbage never finished either machine. The Difference Engine was substantively partly assembled in his lifetime; the Analytical Engine remained paper-only architecture. The 1842 publication by the Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea — a French-language account of a 1840 Babbage Turin lecture — was the first systematic published description of the Analytical Engine.
Ada translated the Menabrea paper into English in 1843. Babbage suggested she add explanatory notes. Her notes substantively ran to roughly two and a half times the length of the original paper.
Note G
The substantively most substantively-cited note — Note G — contains the first published example of what is now substantively recognised as a computer program: a step-by-step sequence of operations for computing Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine’s substantively conditional-branching and substantively iterative-loop instructions. The program is correct. The Engine could substantively have executed it had the Engine ever existed.
The substantively broader Notes also contained a substantively prescient general claim: that the Analytical Engine, by virtue of being substantively a substantively general symbol-manipulation device rather than a substantively narrow arithmetic-calculation device, could substantively in principle process substantively any substantively symbolic content — music, language, images — that could substantively be substantively encoded numerically. The substantively claim substantively anticipated the substantively 20th-century theoretical-computer-science framework that the Turing machine substantively formalised a century later.
What happened to her
Ada continued substantively intermittent mathematical-engineering work through the subsequent decade. She substantively also substantively gambled substantively significantly (substantively losing sums on horse races) and substantively was substantively probably engaged in at least one extramarital affair. She substantively was diagnosed with uterine cancer in summer 1851 and substantively died at her London house on 27 November 1852, aged 36 — exactly the age her father had been at his Missolonghi death.
She was substantively buried beside Byron at the Church of St Mary Magdalene at Hucknall, Nottinghamshire — substantively the first time in her life she was placed in physical proximity to him.