Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) wrote the first recognised algorithm. To mark Ada Lovelace Day , which celebrates inspirational women in science, New Scientist has secured an exclusive interview*.

“I conclude [the artist] is bent on displaying the whole expanse of my capacious jaw bone, upon which the word Mathematics should be written” Universal History Archive/Getty Images Your mother was mathematically trained, and your father, Lord Byron, a great poet. You were well set up to do interesting things.

I do not believe that my father was (or even could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an analyst (& metaphysician); for with me the two go together indisputably.

So you never doubted your abilities?

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.

It has indeed been shown that you were ahead of your time. Tell us about your relationship with Charles Babbage. You met him when you were 17.

I have a peculiar way of learning and I think it must it must be a peculiar man to teach me successfully.


You weren’t intimidated by the age difference – Babbage was 24 years older than you – or his status as a famous mathematician and inventor?

I do not think you [Babbage] possess half my forethoughts, & powers of foreseeing all possible contingencies (probable & improbable, just alike). I have always fancied you for a little harum-scarum and inaccurate.

His great projects were attempts to build automatic calculating machines.

The Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere calculating machines.

Sorry, quite right. They were mechanical, steam-powered prototypes of what we now call computers. In your Note G on his Analytical Engine, published in 1843, you showed – in what is perhaps the first computer program – how it could be used to generate Bernoulli numbers.

I am doggedly attacking & sifting to the very bottom, all the ways of deducing the Bernoulli numbers… I am grappling with this subject, & connecting it with others.

You showed how the engine could process algebra and also create sound and graphics.

We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Did you have an inkling of what would come in the future?

Though I see nothing but vague & cloudy uncertainty in the foreground of our being, yet I fancy I discern a very bright light a good way further on, and this makes me care much less about the cloudiness & indistinctness which is near. – Am I too imaginative for you? I think not.

You imagined, remarkably, how a computer could work on, and generate, different forms of information.

[The Analytical Engine] might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine… Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.

We don’t have many images of you but your portrait by Margaret Carpenter (pictured here) survives.

I conclude she [the artist] is bent on displaying the whole expanse of my capacious jaw bone, upon which the word Mathematics should be written.

Your legacy is extraordinary. Sometimes you worked throughout the night on your algorithm.

I am working very hard… like the Devil in fact (which perhaps I am). I think you will be pleased.

Sadly, you were ill for much of your short life.

I have been very suffering & more ill than yet. But today I have rallied considerably. Hang the whole affair!

You suffered greatly before succumbing to cancer of the womb, age 36.

They say that “coming events cast their shadows before”. May they not sometimes cast their lights before?

*Lovelace’s quotes are taken from correspondence held at the British Library, from her notes to her translation of the Sketch of the Analytical Engine, from James Gleick’s The Information and from Betty Alexandra Toole’s Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers. The words attributed to Lovelace are as she wrote them.

See our correspondence-mined interview with Charles Darwin.