Ada Byron was the daughter of a brief marriage between the Romantic poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke, who separated from Byron just a month after Ada was born. Four months later, Byron left England forever. Ada never met her father (who died in Greece in 1823) and was raised by her mother, Lady Byron. Her life was one of struggle between emotion and reason, poetics and mathematics, ill health and bursts of energy.Lady Byron wished her daughter to be unlike her poetical father, and she saw to it that Ada received tutoring in mathematics and music, as disciplines to counter dangerous poetic tendencies. But Ada's complex legacy became apparent as early as 1828, when she produced the design for a flying machine. It was mathematics that gave her life its wings.Lady Byron and Ada moved in an elite London society, one in which gentlemen not members of the clergy or occupied with politics or the affairs of a division were quite likely to spend their time and fortunes pursuing botany, geology, or astronomy. In the early nineteenth century there were no "professional" scientists but the participation of noblewomen in intellectual pursuits was not widely encouraged.In 1835, Ada married William King, ten years her senior, and when King inherited a noble title in 1838, they became the Earl and Countess of Lovelace. Ada had three children. The family and its fortunes were very much directed by Lady Byron, whose domineering was rarely opposed by King.At the age of 17 Ada was introduced to Mary Somerville, a remarkable woman and whose texts were used at Cambridge. Though Mrs. Somerville encouraged Ada in her mathematical studies, she also attempted to put mathematics and technology into an appropriate human context. It was at a dinner party at Mrs. Somerville's that Ada heard in November 1834, Babbage's ideas for a new calculating engine, the Analytical Engine. He conjectured: what if a calculating engine could not only foresee but could ac...
