Ada's Algorithm: How Lord Byron's Daughter Ada Lovelace Launched the Digital Age

The world’s first computer programmer and daughter of Lord Byron finally gets credit for her research in this gossipy short biography

Over 150 years after her death, a widely-used scientific computer program was named “Ada,” after Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate daughter of the eighteenth century’s version of a rock star, Lord Byron. Why?

Because, after computer pioneers such as Alan Turing began to rediscover her, it slowly became apparent that she had been a key but ove…