2 Ada

Ada Byron (1815-52) was the daughter of the British Romantic poet and aristocrat George Gordon Byron. Ada didn’t live with Lord Byron: he left Britain when she was four months old and never returned. Byron died when Ada was eight. Lady Byron, who believed her estranged husband was insane, pushed Ada toward mathematics and science to prevent her from turning out like Byron. When she was nineteen in 1835, Ada married an aristocrat named William King, who was also a scientist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. When King was made the first Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada became Countess Lovelace. But she was already well-known in scientific circles before becoming a Lady.

As a precocious teenager with social connections, Ada had access to British thinkers like Charles Dickens, physicist Michael Faraday, and mathematician Charles Babbage. Ada’s tutor was a the first female member of the Royal Astronomical Society, Mary Somerville, who introduced her to Babbage in 1833 when Ada was seventeen (Babbage had co-founded the Society in 1820).