The only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron (who abandoned his wife a month after the birth), Ada Lovelace began a lifelong friendship with Charles Babbage, a professor of mathematics at Cambridge, in 1833 AD, when she was but 17 years old. Their relationship seems to have been a platonic one, for they soon commenced a voluminous correspondence on mathematics, logic, and all manner of scholarly topics. In 1835 Ada married William King, ten years her senior and soon Earl of Lovelace. She would bear three children.

Her only other significant contribution to civilization resulted from her efforts as a translator for Babbage. By 1834 Babbage had devised a new design for his “Difference Engine,” a mechanical calculator for polynomial functions. But Parliament refused to sink any money into this second design, the “Analytical Engine,” and Babbage turned to foreign investors. In 1842, the Italian Louis Menebrea published a tract in French on the Analytical Engine, and Babbage recruited Ada to translate it for him. Over a nine-month period, she worked at this task, and appended a series of detailed notes to it … longer than the memoir itself. Among this extensive annotation, she devised a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the machine. On the basis of this, some historians of science consider her to be the first “computer programmer.”

Following the publication of Lovelace’s work, she and Babbage had a brief falling out. But it was smoothed over not long before her death of cancer at the age of 36. She remained his “Enchantress of Numbers.”