Check out 10 surprising facts about the pioneering woman often cited as the world’s first computer programmer.
“At the age of 17, Lovelace met inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage and watched him demonstrate a model portion of his difference engine, an enormous mathematical calculating machine that has led to his being dubbed the “father of the computer.”
After becoming Babbage’s protégé, she translated into English an article written by military engineer—and future Italian prime minister—Luigi Menabrea about Babbage’s theoretical analytical engine. Lovelace augmented the translation with her own notes about the analytical engine that were three times as long as the original paper and published in an English journal in 1843 with only her initials, “A.A.L.”
In Note G of her elaborate paper, Lovelace wrote of how the machine could be programmed with a code to calculate Bernoulli numbers, which some consider to be the first algorithm to be carried out by a machine and thus the first computer program.”
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