Ada Lovelace - Prophet of the computer age and Princess of Parallelograms
Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was born Augusta Ada Byron, the only legitimate child of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Her mother, Lady Byron, had mathematical training and insisted that Ada study mathematics too - an unusual education for a woman back then. At the age of 12, she conceptualized a flying machine. After studying the anatomy of birds and the suitability of various materials, she illustrated plans to construct a winged flying apparatus before moving on to think about powered flight.
At a party in 1833. when she was seventeen, Ada met the brilliant and eccentric British mathematician Charles Babbage who spoke excitedly of an invention he called the “Difference Machine,” a tower of numbered wheels that could make reliable calculations with the turn of a handle. The lifelong friendship that ensued between 18-year-old Lovelace and 45-year-old Babbage sparked an invaluable union of software and hardware to which we owe enormous swaths of modern life — including the very act of reading these words on this screen. Beginning in the 1840s, Ada began a gambling habit that contributed to her dwindling finances and forced her to secretly pawn the Lovelace family’s diamonds.
Although she didn’t know Lord Byron who called her his "Princess of Parallelograms", she maintained a life-long fascination with him and his works. After her death, at the age of 36, she was buried at her request in the Byron family vault.
During the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense developed a high-order computer programming language to supersede the hundreds of different ones then in use by the military. The suggestion of naming the new language “Ada” in honor of Lovelace in 1979. was unanimously approved. Ada is still used around the world today in the operation of real-time systems in the aviation, health care, transportation, financial, infrastructure and space industries.
Every year on the second Tuesday in October, the contributions of women to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are celebrated on Ada Lovelace Day.