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The physician advised her to move out to protect her newborn daughter and herself.

Beset by financial problems, he abused Annabella, contemplated suicide and indulged in promiscuous infidelity with lovers of both sexes, including an incestuous affair with his half-sister - his daughter’s namesake.Īnnabella had a medical doctor examine her husband to assess his mental health. During and after the pregnancy, Byron descended into madness and alcoholism. Unfortunately, her parents’ marriage began unraveling even before the infant’s birth. Her first name honored the writer’s beloved half-sister, but all her life, Ada would be known by her middle name, which her father chose because “It is short, ancient, vocalic.” The poet had hoped for a “glorious boy,” but salved his disappointment by naming the baby girl Augusta Ada Byron.

However, Ada - born 200 years ago today - never knew her dad. Her prescient genius would have been remarkable in any person of her time, but mathematics and computing were particularly uncommon pursuits for women in that benighted pre-feminist age.Īda’s father, the great Romantic poet Lord Byron (1813 painting by Thomas Phillips Photo Credit: Wikipedia)Īda’s work combined the poetic imagination of her famous father - George Gordon Byron - with the scholarly bent of her mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke.ĭuring her parents’ courtship, Lord Byron lauded his fiancée’s fascination with math and advanced skills in the subject, calling her his “Princess of Parallelograms.” It can follow analysis but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.” It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. She wrote, “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. Incredibly, Ada also correctly predicted limits to computing technology that continue to stand in our time.

“Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.” She realized that numbers could represent any “subject… in the universe,” and that mathematical operations could stand for “any process which alters the mutual relation of two or more things.” Thus, computers could transcend mere math and solve practical problems in the arts and sciences: She developed her algorithm to run on the “analytical engine” then proposed by Charles Babbage.īabbage conceived of the device merely as a very sophisticated calculator, but Ada foresaw the vast potential and varied possible applications of computing. In 1843, the English noblewoman Ada Lovelace wrote the world’s first computer program - a full century before the invention of the first modern computer. Ada Lovelace ( née Byron), pioneer of computer programming (1840 watercolor by Alfred Chalon Photo Credit: Wikipedia)