48 Fun Facts About Ada Lovelace

Which novelist visited the dying Lovelace in 1852 and, at her request, read to her from one of his books?

Charles Dickens. She asked him for the scene in Dombey and Son in which six-year-old Paul Dombey dies; the two had probably met years earlier through Babbage.

What became of the Analytical Engine that Lovelace's famous Notes describe?

It was never built. Babbage finished only small trial pieces, so her program was never run; a project called Plan 28, launched in 2010, set out to build the machine at last.

What is Lovelace often called because of her notes on the Analytical Engine?

The first computer programmer. The title is argued over, since Babbage had drafted programs of his own years earlier, but hers was the first to be published.

Which mathematical sequence did Lovelace's Note G describe a method for the engine to calculate?

Bernoulli numbers. Babbage offered to work this example himself to save her the trouble, and she sent his version back after finding a grave mistake in it.

What did Lovelace suggest Babbage's engine might one day do, beyond working with numbers?

Compose music. She reasoned that if the relations of musical notes could be expressed in the engine's notation, it 'might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity'.

What phrase did Lovelace use to describe her own approach to knowledge?

"Poetical science". Her mother had drilled her in mathematics so that she would not grow up a poet like her father; Ada ended by laying claim to both.

Which science writer became Lovelace's mentor and friend in the 1830s?

Mary Somerville. She sent Ada mathematics books, set her problems and talked the subject through with her, and with that encouragement Ada was soon working eagerly through Euclid.

Who was Ada named after?

Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh. Her full name was Augusta Ada, and it was Byron himself who took to calling her Ada, the name that stuck.

In which poem did Byron call his absent child Ada the 'sole daughter of my house and heart'?

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. The lines open the third canto, published in 1816, the year he left England for good; he never saw his daughter again.

The Analytical Engine was to take its instructions the same way as the Jacquard loom: from what?

Punched cards. Lovelace wrote that the engine 'weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves', and noted that a woven portrait of Jacquard himself had taken 24,000 cards.

Which childhood illness left the 13-year-old Ada bedridden for many months from 1829?

Measles. It took her years to recover fully, and she was back on her feet only just in time for her first London season at 17.

What did twelve-year-old Ada title the illustrated book she planned about learning to fly?

Flyology. She studied the anatomy of birds, weighed up paper, oiled silk, wire and feathers for wings, and went on to plan a steam-driven flying horse with room for a rider.

Ada was eight when her father, Lord Byron, died in which country, where he had gone to join a war?

Greece. He had sailed to help the Greeks fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire and died of a fever at Missolonghi, never having seen his daughter again.

At 17, Ada first met Babbage in 1833 at what kind of occasion?

One of his evening parties. Two weeks later she and her mother were back to see his calculating machine, and a family friend wrote that Ada, 'young as she was, understood its working'.

How did Ada Byron come to be known as Lovelace?

Her husband was made an earl. William King became Earl of Lovelace in 1838, a title picked because Ada descended from an extinct line of Barons Lovelace, and she became his countess.

In Babbage's Analytical Engine the arithmetic was done in the 'mill'; what was the memory called?

The store. Keeping the numbers in one place and working on them in another is the same split between memory and processor that computers still use.

In 2018, which newspaper ran a belated obituary of Lovelace in a series on people it had overlooked?

The New York Times. Its 'Overlooked' series began by admitting that its obituaries since 1851 had been dominated by white men; Charlotte Brontë was in the same first batch.

In 1841, what did Ada's mother tell her about her cousin Medora?

That Ada's father was her father too. Rumours about Byron and Medora's mother had swirled when Ada's parents separated, years before; the claim about Medora was never proved.

What habit left Lovelace deep in debt by the end of her life?

Betting on horse races. She secretly pawned the family diamonds to cover her losses; the story that she had a mathematical system for picking winners is doubted, for want of any evidence.

Which logician taught Lovelace calculus by letter in 1840–41?

Augustus De Morgan. He was the founding professor of mathematics at London's new university, and his correspondence course gave her much of the higher mathematics she needed for her work with Babbage.

Lovelace's Notes grew from her translation of a paper by Luigi Menabrea of Turin, written in which language?

French. Menabrea, an engineer, had written up the lectures Babbage gave in Turin in 1840 for a Geneva journal, and Lovelace's notes on her translation ran to about three times its length.

Which actress played Lovelace in the 1997 film Conceiving Ada?

Tilda Swinton. In the film a present-day computer scientist finds a way to reach Lovelace across time, and the 1960s counterculture figure Timothy Leary turns up in a small part.

How were Lovelace's 1843 Notes on the Analytical Engine signed?

With her initials only. They appeared as the work of A.A.L.; she wrote that she did not wish to proclaim who had written them, and for a time only her friends knew.

Why did Babbage press Lovelace to withdraw her Notes shortly before they were published?

A row over his unsigned preface. Babbage wanted his attack on the government's handling of his engines printed anonymously with her work; she refused to withdraw, and it came out without the preface.

What did Babbage call Lovelace in an 1843 letter about the world's "multitudinous Charlatans"?

"The Enchantress of Number". Note the singular, since the phrase is usually misquoted as 'Numbers'; Ada replied that he was a brave man to give himself wholly up to 'Fairy-Guidance'.

Alan Turing named 'Lady Lovelace's Objection' after her claim that the Analytical Engine could never do what?

Originate anything. She wrote that the engine can do only 'whatever we know how to order it to perform'; Turing took the point on in the 1950 paper that proposed his famous test.

Lovelace's eldest son, heir to an earldom, deserted the navy and ended up working where?

In a shipyard. Byron, Viscount Ockham, worked his passage back to Britain and took a labourer's job; his mother had believed he might be in America, and he died at 26.

Lovelace's Notes found a new audience in 1953 when they were reprinted in a book titled 'Faster than' what?

Thought. Faster than Thought, a survey of the new digital computers edited by Bertram Bowden, carried her Notes as an appendix a century after her death, as computer science was getting started.

Lovelace hoped to leave future generations what she called a 'calculus of' what?

The nervous system. She told a friend that brain matter need be no harder for mathematicians than the motions of the planets, and went to an electrical experimenter to learn how to test her ideas.

Of what did Lovelace die in November 1852, aged 36?

Cancer of the womb. So it was recorded then, though modern writers think it was probably cervical cancer; in her last months her mother moved in and kept Ada's friends away.

Where was Lovelace buried, at her own request?

Next to her father at Hucknall, Nottinghamshire. She never knew him in life, yet her coffin was placed beside his in the family vault; both had died at the age of 36.

The Ada Lovelace Institute, set up in Britain in 2018, studies the effects on society of what?

Data and AI. The Nuffield Foundation founded it with partners including the Alan Turing Institute and the Royal Society, to see that the benefits of the technology are fairly shared.

The US military approved the Ada language's reference manual on 10 December 1980, the anniversary of what?

Lovelace's birth. A US Navy officer had proposed naming the new language after her, and its military standard was numbered 1815 after the year she was born.

Ada Lovelace Day, first held in 2009 and marked each October, celebrates the achievements of whom?

Women in science and technology. Suw Charman-Anderson started it as a day of blogging after reading research on how few female role models the sciences offered.

In 2015 a new British design of what pictured Lovelace alongside Babbage?

The passport. The design was one of the regular refreshes meant to keep ahead of forgers and took British creativity as its theme; Lovelace and the architect Elisabeth Scott were the only women featured prominently.

Which chip maker named its 2022 GPU microarchitecture Ada Lovelace?

Nvidia. The company names its chip designs after scientists, and hers followed Turing and Ampere; it powers the GeForce RTX 40 series of graphics cards.

Which cryptocurrency platform names its coin Ada and its smallest sub-unit a lovelace?

Cardano. The platform takes its own name from Gerolamo Cardano, a Renaissance mathematician, and its coin from Lovelace: one ada divides into a million lovelaces.

Which Tom Stoppard play features Thomasina Coverly, a teenage genius "apparently based" on Lovelace?

Arcadia. In the 1993 play Thomasina works out chaos theory and the second law of thermodynamics long before science gets there, in a country house where Byron is an unseen guest.

The Difference Engine, a 1990 steampunk novel featuring Lovelace, was co-written by Bruce Sterling and which other author?

William Gibson. He and Sterling set the story in a Victorian Britain transformed by mechanical computers, in which Lovelace's father has lived on to lead the country.

Lovelace appeared as a character in a 2020 episode of which long-running British television series?

Doctor Who. In 'Spyfall, Part 2' the Doctor lands at an exhibition of inventions in 1834 with Ada in tow, and the pair escape to wartime Paris, where the spy Noor Inayat Khan rescues them.

In Sydney Padua's graphic novel, what do Lovelace and Babbage use their engine to do?

Fight crime. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage grew out of a single strip drawn in 2009, and it is packed with footnotes on the real pair, with many lines taken from their letters.

In 2025 London's National Portrait Gallery acquired the only known what of Lovelace?

Photographs. The pair of daguerreotypes, made around 1843 by Antoine Claudet, went on show in Oxford for her bicentenary in 2015 while still privately owned; the gallery then bought them by private treaty.

Who was Ada Lovelace's mother, the reformer who left Byron weeks after Ada's birth?

Anne Isabella Milbanke. She took the five-week-old Ada to her parents' house and kept custody of her, at a time when the law gave the children of a broken marriage to the father.

Lovelace's only daughter became famous for breeding which animals?

Arabian horses. She travelled through Arabia with her husband, the poet Wilfrid Blunt, buying bloodstock from Bedouin princes for the Crabbet stud they founded in England.

Luigi Menabrea, whose paper on Babbage's engine Lovelace translated, went on to hold which office?

Prime minister of Italy. He took office in 1867 in the middle of Garibaldi's invasion of the Papal States, publicly disowned it, and his government had Garibaldi arrested.

The working piece of Babbage's first calculating engine that Ada saw demonstrated in 1833 is now kept where?

The Science Museum, London. The section, assembled in 1832 from about 2,000 parts, is only a seventh of the planned machine, and most of the other parts made for it were later melted down for scrap.

Byron nicknamed Ada's mathematics-loving mother his 'Princess of' what?

Parallelograms. Her mother had studied mathematics seriously, and she insisted that Ada, taught at home by tutors, study it too, an unusual education for a girl of the time.

In July 2023, which institution issued commemorative £2 coins honouring Lovelace?

Four versions in different metals honoured her as a computer science visionary and female trailblazer.