Women in Science, Medicine and Mathematics

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was born on December 10, 1815, in London, England. She was the daughter of famed poet, Lord Byron and Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke-Byron, who was known to be extremely intelligent. Her parents marriage was an unhappy one and they separated mere weeks after Ada was born. A couple of months later, Lord Byron left England and Ada never saw her father again. He died in Greece, when Ada was 8 years old. 

Ada had a unusual upbringing for an upper-class woman in the mid-1800's. Her mother insisted she learn mathematics and science and brought in tutors to teach Ada. Such challenging difficult subjects were not the norm for women at the time but Ada's mother believed studying them would prevent Ada from developing her father's moody and unruly personality, she had already displayed signs of this as a child. Her mother even forced her to lay still for extended periods of time because she believed it would help her develop self-control. 

Ada excelled with numbers and language from an early age. Some of her most notable tutors were: William Friend, a social reformer, William King, the family doctor and Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician; who was one of the first women admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society. When she was about 17, she met Charles Babbage, who is known as the "Father of Computers", he invented the difference engine, which was designed to do simple mathematical calculations as well as created plans for, the analytical engine which handled more advanced equations. 

Ada was later asked to translate an article of Babbage's analytical engine, written by an Italian engineer named, Luigi Frederico Menabrea, for a Swiss journal. She not only translated the original French text but her notes on the machine ended up being three times longer than the original article. Her work was published in 1843, in an English science journal. In her published work she also proposed a radical new idea, computer codes could be used to utilize letters and symbols as well as numbers. Ada also came up with a method that the engine would repeat a series of instructions, which is called looping and is used in computers today. For this work Ada is often called the first computer programmer. 

Ada married William King, in 1835. William became Earl of Lovelace three years later, at the same time Ada took on the title of Countess of Lovelace. William and Ada shared a love of horses and together had 3 children. Most accounts say, William supported his wife's endeavors and the couple is known to have mingled with some of the great minds of the day, including Michael Faraday and Charles Dickens. However her health began to decline when she suffered a bout of cholera in 1837, after she had persistent issues with asthma and her digestive system. Doctors prescribed her with painkillers like laudanum and opium. After Ada started taking these drugs she began to change, she reportedly had regular mood swings and  hallucinations. 

Unfortunately her article garnered little attention when Ada was alive and later in life she developed mathematical schemes to cheat at gambling, which caused her to fall into a dangerous financial situation. Ada died of uterine cancer on November 27, 1852, in London; she was only 36. She was buried next to her father, in the Church of St. Mary's graveyard, in Nottingham, England. It wasn't until the 1950's that her contributions were discovered, her notes were republished by B.V Bowden, in 1953. Since than Ada Lovelace has received many posthumous honors for her research. In 1980, the US Ministry of Defence named a newly created computer language after her called, "Ada". 

https://www.biography.com/people/ada-lovelace-20825323