Ada Lovelace was born in London in 1815. Her father was the famous poet Lord Byron, but he left the family when Ada was a baby, and she never knew him. Her mother believed that a strong education would keep Ada's mind calm and clear. So the girl studied math and science from an early age — very unusual for a girl at that time.
When Ada was seventeen, she met Charles Babbage, a scientist with a bold dream. He wanted to build a huge machine, the Analytical Engine, that could do difficult math by itself. Most visitors saw only a strange pile of metal wheels. Ada saw the future.
In 1843 she translated a French article about the machine and added her own notes. Her notes grew three times longer than the article itself. In them, she described, step by step, how the machine could be told to solve a problem. Many people call this the first computer program — written about a hundred years before the first real computer.
Ada also made an amazing jump of imagination. She wrote that such a machine might one day work with more than numbers. If music or pictures could be turned into numbers, she said, the machine could make music or pictures too. Today, when a phone plays a song or shows a photo, it is doing exactly what Ada imagined.
Ada Lovelace died young, at thirty-six, in 1852. For a long time her work was almost forgotten. Now she is a hero of computer science. A programming language, Ada, carries her name, and every October people around the world celebrate Ada Lovelace Day, a day that honors women in science.