Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron was born 10 December 1815, Lord Byron's only legitimate child; her father left a month later and died when she was eight. Raised by her mother Anne Isabella Milbanke, she studied mathematics despite frequent childhood illness. At eighteen she met Charles Babbage at one of his Saturday soirées in June 1833, beginning a working friendship that would define her legacy. She married William King in 1835; when he became Earl of Lovelace in 1838, she became Countess. Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's article on Babbage's analytical engine and added seven notes longer than the original - including a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers and a vision of machines processing music and symbols, not merely arithmetic. She called her method "poetical science." She died 27 November 1852, at thirty-six.