Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, the famous poet, but she never knew him — he left when she was a month old. Her mother, determined that Ada wouldn’t inherit her father’s “dangerous” poetic temperament, pushed her toward mathematics. It worked, but not the way her mother intended. Ada brought a poet’s imagination to numbers. When Charles Babbage designed his Analytical Engine — a mechanical computer that was never fully built — Ada didn’t just understand it. She saw beyond it. She wrote what historians recognize as the first computer program, an algorithm for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers. More remarkably, she theorized that such a machine could compose music and manipulate symbols, not just crunch numbers. She was right about everything. She died of cancer at 36, a century before anyone could prove it.