- Wikipedia

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For the computer microarchitecture, see Ada Lovelace (microarchitecture).

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The Right Honourable The Countess of Lovelace
$\"Augusta$ 1836 portrait of Lovelace
Born	Hon. Augusta Ada Byron (1815-12-10)10 December 1815 London, England
Died	27 November 1852(1852-11-27) (aged 36) Marylebone, London, England
Resting place	Church of St. Mary Magdalene, Hucknall, Nottingham, England
Nationality	British
Known for	Mathematics, computing
Spouse	\n William King-Noel, 1st Earl of Lovelace \n (m. 1835)
Children	\n Byron King-Noel, Viscount Ockham \n Anne Blunt, 15th Baroness Wentworth \n Ralph King-Milbanke, 2nd Earl of Lovelace \n
Parents	\n George Byron, 6th Baron Byron (father) \n Anne Isabella Milbanke (mother) \n
Signature

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (n\u00e9e Byron; 10 December 1815 \u2013 27 November 1852), also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.\n

Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke.^[1] All her half-siblings, Lord Byron's other children, were born out of wedlock to other women.^[2] Lord Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. He died in Greece when she was eight. Lady Byron was anxious about her daughter's upbringing and promoted Lovelace's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Lovelace remained interested in her father, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her death, she was buried next to her father at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Lovelace pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.\n

Lovelace's educational and social exploits brought her into contact with scientists such as Andrew Crosse, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Charles Wheatstone and Michael Faraday, and the author Charles Dickens, contacts which she used to further her education. Lovelace described her approach as \"poetical science\"^[3] and herself as an \"Analyst (& Metaphysician)\".^[4]\n

When she was eighteen, Lovelace's mathematical talents led her to a long working relationship and friendship with fellow British mathematician Charles Babbage, who is known as \"the father of computers\". She was in particular interested in Babbage's work on the Analytical Engine. Lovelace first met him on 5 June 1833, when she and her mother attended one of Charles Babbage's Saturday night soir\u00e9es^[5] with their mutual friend, and Lovelace's private tutor, Mary Somerville.\n

Between 1842 and 1843, Lovelace translated an article by the military engineer Luigi Menabrea (later Prime Minister of Italy) about the Analytical Engine, supplementing it with an elaborate set of seven notes, simply called \"Notes\". \nLovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, especially since the seventh one contained what many consider to be the first computer program\u2014that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from 1837 to 1840 contain the first programs for the engine.^[6]^[7]^[8] She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.^[9] Her mindset of \"poetical science\" led her to ask questions about the Analytical Engine (as shown in her notes), examining how individuals and society relate to technology as a collaborative tool.^[2] The programming language Ada is named after her.\n

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v t e Lord Byron
Topics	\n Barony of Byron \n Byronic hero \n Early life \n Newstead Abbey \n Timeline of Lord Byron \n
People	\n Anne Isabella, Lady Byron (wife) \n Ada Lovelace (daughter) \n Allegra Byron (daughter) \n John \"Mad Jack\" Byron (father) \n Claire Clairmont \n Nicolo Giraud \n Contessa Guiccioli \n Jane Harley \n John Cam Hobhouse \n Douglas Kinnaird \n Lady Caroline Lamb \n Augusta Leigh (paternal half-sister) \n Medora Leigh \n Thomas Moore \n Isaac Nathan \n Walter Scott \n John William Polidori \n Percy Bysshe Shelley \n Mary Shelley \n Edward John Trelawny \n Michael C. Burgess \n
Longer poetry	\n Hours of Idleness (1807) \n English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809) \n Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812\u20131818) \n The Giaour (1813) \n The Bride of Abydos (1813) \n The Corsair (1814) \n Lara, A Tale (1814) \n The Siege of Corinth (1816) \n Parisina (1816) \n The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) \n The Dream (1816) \n Prometheus (1816) \n \"Darkness\" (1816) \n The Lament of Tasso (1817) \n Beppo (1818) \n Don Juan (1819\u20131824; incomplete upon Byron's 1824 death) \n Mazeppa (1819) \n The Prophecy of Dante (1819) \n The Vision of Judgment (1821) \n The Age of Bronze (1823) \n The Island (1823) \n
Plays	\n Manfred (1817) \n Marino Faliero (1820) \n Sardanapalus (1821) \n The Two Foscari (1821) \n Cain (1821) \n Heaven and Earth (1821) \n Werner (1822) \n The Deformed Transformed (1822) \n
Shorter poetry	\n \"Lachin y Gair\" (1807) \n \"Epitaph to a Dog\" (1808) \n \"Maid of Athens, ere we part\" (1810) \n Hebrew Melodies (1815)\n \"She Walks in Beauty\" \n \"The Destruction of Sennacherib\" \n \"Fare Thee Well\" (1816) \n Irish Avatar (1821) \n \"So, we'll go no more a roving\" (1830) \n
Prose	\n Fragment of a Novel (1819) \n Letters \n Memoirs \n
Portrayals	\n Byron (1908 play) \n The Bride of Frankenstein (1935 film) \n The Bad Lord Byron (1949 film) \n Camino Real (1953 play) \n Lord Byron (1972 opera) \n Lady Caroline Lamb (1972 film) \n Childe Byron (1977 play) \n Bloody Poetry (1984 play) \n Gothic (1986 film) \n Rowing with the Wind (1988 film) \n Haunted Summer (1988 film) \n Arcadia (1993 play) \n Mary Shelley (2017 film) \n \"The Haunting of Villa Diodati\" (2020 TV episode) \n
Related	\n Villa Diodati \n
\n $\"\"$ Category \n

v t e Timelines of computing
Computing	\n Before 1950 \n 1950\u20131979 \n 1980s \n 1990s \n 2000s \n 2010s \n 2020s \n Scientific \n Women in computing \n
Computer science	\n Algorithms \n Artificial intelligence \n Binary prefixes \n Cryptography \n Machine learning \n Quantum computing and communication \n
Software	\n Free and open-source software \n Hypertext technology \n Operating systems\n DOS family \n Windows \n Linux \n Programming languages \n Virtualization development \n Malware \n
Internet	\n Internet conflicts \n Web browsers \n Web search engines \n
Notable people	\n Kathleen Antonelli \n John Vincent Atanasoff \n Charles Babbage \n John Backus \n Jean Bartik \n George Boole \n Vint Cerf \n John Cocke \n Stephen Cook \n Edsger W. Dijkstra \n J. Presper Eckert \n Adele Goldstine \n Lois Haibt \n Betty Holberton \n Margaret Hamilton \n Grace Hopper \n David A. Huffman \n Bob Kahn \n Brian Kernighan \n Andrew Koenig \n Semyon Korsakov \n Nancy Leveson \n Ada Lovelace \n Donald Knuth \n Joseph Kruskal \n Douglas McIlroy \n Marlyn Meltzer \n John von Neumann \n Kl\u00e1ra D\u00e1n von Neumann \n Dennis Ritchie \n Guido van Rossum \n Claude Shannon \n Frances Spence \n Bjarne Stroustrup \n Ruth Teitelbaum \n Ken Thompson \n Linus Torvalds \n Alan Turing \n Paul Vixie \n Larry Wall \n Stephen Wolfram \n Niklaus Wirth \n Steve Wozniak \n Konrad Zuse \n

Authority control databases $\"Edit$
International	ISNI VIAF FAST WorldCat
National	Germany United States France BnF data Japan Czech Republic Spain 2 Netherlands Norway Korea Sweden Poland Israel Catalonia 2
Academics	zbMATH MathSciNet
People	Deutsche Biographie DDB
Other	IdRef SNAC 2

Biography

Childhood

Adult years

Education

Death

Work

First published computer program

Insight into potential of computing devices

Distinction between mechanism and logical structure

Controversy over contribution

Commemoration

Bicentenary (2015)

In popular culture

Novels and plays

Film and television

Computing and STEM

Other

Publications

Publication history

See also

Explanatory notes

References

Citations

General and cited sources

Further reading

External links

Ada Lovelace

Media collections