Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) was the daughter of Lord Byron and a mathematical prodigy in her own right. She was the first to see the true “poetry” in Babbage’s machines. Nicknamed the “Enchantress of Numbers” by Babbage himself, she saw a machine that could manipulate any symbol, from musical notes to scientific concepts.
She translated Menabrea’s work and, at Babbage’s urging, added her own “Notes” to describe a method for the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. She was the world’s first true programmer, a visionary who saw the computer as a collaboration tool.