Ada Lovelace: The Enchantress of Numbers

Celebrating Women's History Month with a badass a day.

Long before Wi-Fi passwords, cat videos, and doom-scrolling, there was Ada Lovelace—the woman who basically looked at a Victorian-age calculator and said, “But what if it could do more?” While most people were still trying to figure out indoor plumbing, Ada was busy dreaming up algorithms that would lay the foundation for modern computing.

Born in 1815, Augusta Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of the scandalous poet Lord Byron. He bailed when Ada was just a month old, leaving her mother, Lady Byron, to raise her alone. Lady Byron, who had a deep distrust of poetry (probably because of her ex), steered Ada toward mathematics, hoping numbers would keep her out of trouble. Plot twist: they didn’t. They just helped her become a different kind of rebel—the kind that invents computer programming a century before computers exist.

Ada’s passion for numbers led her to Charles Babbage, a mathematician working on a prototype of a mechanical computer called the Analytical Engine. Babbage was…