Ada Lovelace.

Ada Lovelace was one of the first women to become involved in the technology of computers. Born Augusta Ada Gordon on 10 December 1815 in London, Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron, the famous poet. The tempestuous Lord Byron married Annabella Millbanke in 1815, but their marriage was very unhappy, and the two separated just one month after their child, Augusta Ada, was born.

Her mother, fearful that young Ada had inherited her father’s tempestuous character, had her tutored in mathematics and music in an attempt to counter any tendencies toward becoming a poet. In fact, Ada inherited both her father’s intelligence and his psychological imbalance. Ada excelled in mathematics, but her education was sometimes interrupted by a mysterious chronic illness, which may have been psychosomatic. For instance, a severe “attack” at age 14 left her unable to walk for almost three years.

Babbage's analytical engine, the machine that was described in the paper that Lovelace translated.

Things changed for Ada when, at age 18, she heard a lecture by Charles Babbage, an English mathematician who had recently developed the idea for a mechanical calculator that he called the Difference Engine. The next year, she was married to William King, the future Lord Lovelace. Two years later, now using her husband’s new title, she began to correspond with Babbage as Countess Ada Lovelace. Then in 1844, she volunteered to translate for Babbage an article written in Italian about the Difference Engine. Babbage, impressed with her work, encouraged her to append her own comments to the translation, which she did. In this way, Lovelace publicly contributed to the ongoing development of computing technology. Her notes included instructions for using the Difference Engine to calculate so-called Bernoulli numbers, a feat that has earned her the title of the first computer programmer.