Ada Lovelace Trivia
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48 free Ada Lovelace trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ada Lovelace was Lord Byron's only legitimate child, raised on mathematics by a mother determined to keep the poet's madness out of her, and at 27 wrote the notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine that are called the first published computer program. She also saw, a century early, that a computing machine could handle music and symbols, not just numbers. She gambled on horses, flirted with scandal, and died at 36, asking to be buried beside the father she never knew. This quiz covers all of it. Easy questions ask who her father was and whose engine she wrote about. Harder ones want the tutor who introduced her to Babbage, the childhood book on flying she planned at twelve, the Italian who wrote the article she translated, the note that held the Bernoulli algorithm, Babbage's nickname for her, "Lady Lovelace's Objection", the programming language, the £2 coins, the Nvidia chips and the passport she shares with Babbage. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Ada Lovelace, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for computer science teachers, Ada Lovelace Day organisers and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Alan Turing, Computers and Women in Science.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which novelist visited the dying Lovelace in 1852 and, at her request, read to her from one of his books?
Charles Dickens
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.
Q 02What became of the Analytical Engine that Lovelace's famous Notes describe?
It was never built
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.
Q 03What is Lovelace often called because of her notes on the Analytical Engine?
The first computer programmer
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.
Q 04Which mathematical sequence did Lovelace's Note G describe a method for the engine to calculate?
Bernoulli numbers
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.
Q 05What did Lovelace suggest Babbage's engine might one day do, beyond working with numbers?
Compose music
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'.
Q 06What phrase did Lovelace use to describe her own approach to knowledge?
"Poetical science"
"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.
Q 07Which science writer became Lovelace's mentor and friend in the 1830s?
Mary Somerville
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.
Q 08Who was Ada named after?
Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh
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.
Q 09In which poem did Byron call his absent child Ada the 'sole daughter of my house and heart'?
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
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.
Q 10The Analytical Engine was to take its instructions the same way as the Jacquard loom: from what?
Punched cards
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.
Q 11Which childhood illness left the 13-year-old Ada bedridden for many months from 1829?
Measles
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.
Q 12What did twelve-year-old Ada title the illustrated book she planned about learning to fly?
Flyology
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.
Q 13Ada was eight when her father, Lord Byron, died in which country, where he had gone to join a war?
Greece
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.
Q 21Lovelace's Notes grew from her translation of a paper by Luigi Menabrea of Turin, written in which language?
French
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.
Q 22Which actress played Lovelace in the 1997 film Conceiving Ada?
Tilda Swinton
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.
Q 23How were Lovelace's 1843 Notes on the Analytical Engine signed?
With her initials only
Q 14At 17, Ada first met Babbage in 1833 at what kind of occasion?
One of his evening parties
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'.
Q 15How did Ada Byron come to be known as Lovelace?
Her husband was made an earl
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.
Q 16In Babbage's Analytical Engine the arithmetic was done in the 'mill'; what was the memory called?
The store
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.
Q 17In 2018, which newspaper ran a belated obituary of Lovelace in a series on people it had overlooked?
The New York Times
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.
Q 18In 1841, what did Ada's mother tell her about her cousin Medora?
That Ada's father was her father too
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.
Q 19What habit left Lovelace deep in debt by the end of her life?
Betting on horse races
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.
Q 20Which logician taught Lovelace calculus by letter in 1840–41?
Augustus De Morgan
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.
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.
Q 24Why did Babbage press Lovelace to withdraw her Notes shortly before they were published?
A row over his unsigned preface
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.
Q 25What did Babbage call Lovelace in an 1843 letter about the world's "multitudinous Charlatans"?
"The Enchantress of Number"
"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'.
Q 26Alan Turing named 'Lady Lovelace's Objection' after her claim that the Analytical Engine could never do what?
Originate anything
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.
Q 27Lovelace's eldest son, heir to an earldom, deserted the navy and ended up working where?
In a shipyard
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.
Q 28Lovelace's Notes found a new audience in 1953 when they were reprinted in a book titled 'Faster than' what?
Thought
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.
Q 29Lovelace hoped to leave future generations what she called a 'calculus of' what?
The nervous system
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.
Q 30Of what did Lovelace die in November 1852, aged 36?
Cancer of the womb
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.