Ada Lovelace honored: pioneer of coding | Tangente

Lady Ada King is the quintessential romantic figure: young, beautiful, independent and intelligent, she would die in the prime of life, at just 36.

Ada was the daughter of mathematician Annabella Milbanke (1792–1860) and poet Lord Byron (1788–1824), whom she never knew; her parents separated shortly after her birth. Ada received an education in music and science from Augustus De Morgan and Mary Somerville. She met Charles Babbage in 1833, when she was 17. Babbage explained the principles of his first calculating machine to her, and the young Briton was fascinated. He then told her about a new machine, the "Analytical Engine", a true mechanical computer… that was never built. Ada grasped its potential.

In 1840, Ada describes a program for calculating Bernoulli numbers that makes full use of the machine's capabilities (conditional branching, loops…). This program is far more sophisticated than those Babbage had envisaged. Many regard it as the first genuine computer program in history.

From 1843 onward, Ada's health declines rapidly as she becomes gravely ill. She dies on November 27, 1852, probably of cancer. She is buried alongside the father she never knew.

Lady Ada and the first computer. Eugène Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole, Pour la science 261, July 1999.