Ada Lovelace: The First Programmer
The visionary who realized computers could do more than just math.
Explore this event on the interactive timeline →While translating an article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace added extensive notes of her own. In "Note G," she wrote an algorithm for the machine to compute Bernoulli numbers, which is widely recognized as the world's first published computer program.
Verified Facts
- She was the only legitimate child of the famous "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" poet Lord Byron.
- While Babbage saw his machine purely as a massive calculator for numbers, Lovelace was the first to realize that if numbers could represent other things (like letters or musical notes), the machine could manipulate any data. This was a 100-year leap in theoretical computer science.
- The US Department of Defense named the "Ada" programming language in her honor in 1980.