Ada Byron Lovelace was the daughter of the famous British poet george 
Gordon Byron and was born in December of 1815. Only one month after she was 
born her parents seperated and Ada was raised by her mother. Her mother forced 
her to study mathematics to keep her from becoming a poet like her father. On 
June 5th 1833 Ada met a man named Charles Babbage at aparty and was invited to 
study his "difference engine" which was a machine capable of performing 
mathematical operations.

	The machine that Babbage invented was composed of five basic parts. The 
store which contained and stored all the variables, the mill which acted like 
the CPU, thecontrol which controled the sequence of operations using punch cards,
and finally the input and output which also used punch cards. Ada said that the 
machine had both practical and scientific use and became the first computer 
programmer with the machine. She saw tremendous potential within the
machine and could explain and understand it better than most everyone else. It 
was at this time that she began the think of the potential to have a machine 
that composed music, and the idea of Artificial Inteligence was born.

	Late in her life her notes and work on the machine were published in 
Richard Taylor's Scientific Memoirs Volume 3 in 1843. She also developed problems
with drinking, opium, and gambling that pulled her from her study of mathematics
and Babbage's machine. She died at the age of 37in London in 1852 from cancer.

 

 

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Lovelace.html