Augusta Ada Lovelace was born in Piccadilly, Middlesex (now in London), England, on December 10, 1815. Her parents were Lord George Gordon Byron, the poet and Anne Isabella (Annabella) Milbanke. Annabella was nicknamed "the Princess of Parallelograms" by Lord Byron before they were married. Augusta more commonly went by the name Ada. Her parents divorced while she was under a year old, and her father left when she was an infant. He did not return before his death when she was eight. Her mother raised her, alongside her maternal grandmother. Her mother is the primary reason she became acquainted with mathematics and received such an extensive education focused on mathematics. Ada’s mother was upset when she discovered her daughter's favorite subject was geography, so she took away a period of geography and added more arithmetic to her studies. She was privately tutored throughout her youth.

Ada finally found her own passion for mathematics, programming, and engineering when she met Charles Babbage. Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who is credited with having conceived the first automatic digital computer. She met Babbage at a party in 1833 and took to Babbage when he demonstrated the small working section of the Engine. Once she married in 1835, she paused her studies and pursued motherhood, having three children by 1839. She resumed her studies when domestic duties allowed. In 1843, she published a translation of an article originally in French on the Analytical Engine by Luigi Menabrea, to which Ada added extensive notes of her own. Ada’s notes included the first published description of a stepwise sequence of operations for solving certain mathematical problems, leading to Ada being referred to as 'the first programmer'.

In the Notes, Ada presented the idea of a machine that could manipulate symbols in accordance with rules, and that numbers could represent entities other than quantity. This marked the transition from calculation to computation. Ada, when translating and notating Luigi’s work, wrote what many consider to be the first ever computer program. She has been referred to as 'prophet of the computer age'. Certainly, she was the first to express the potential for computers outside mathematics. Sadly, this was the peak of her intellectual pursuits. In 1852, she passed away from cancer at the age of 37.

Key Takeaways: Ada helped lead the way for the digital computer. She essentially paved the way for programming and what it could be. She also continued to pursue a career and academic interest in a male-dominated field where she succeeded due to her own merit, not because of who she was related to.