Do we like Ada Lovelace?
Our score: 8 out of 10. No harm on the record we could open, and a lasting legacy that women in science still celebrate, but our sources on her private life are thin.
Ada Lovelace was born in 1815, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who left the family only months after she arrived. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, pushed her towards logic and mathematics from a young age, reportedly to counter the volatile temperament she saw in Byron.
The big moment came in 1843. She wrote up a remarkable article on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a computer that was never built, and it included what the Bodleian describes as the first documented computer program, for calculating Bernoulli numbers. That's why she gets called the first computer programmer.
Here's the stoush you'll hear about: how much of that was hers and how much was Babbage's. Plenty of people call her the first programmer, and Scientific American says she is considered by many to be exactly that. Others quibble with the title, and we haven't got enough dated reporting in front of us to settle it for you.
Nothing recent has surfaced about her personally. Her name lives on, though: Ada Lovelace Day, begun in 2009 to celebrate women and girls in STEM, ran its London live event until its founder announced in November 2024 that it would end for lack of funding.
The good stuff is her legacy more than any charity. Oxford's Bodleian Library marked her 200th birthday in 2015 with a display of her letters and exercise books, and a day in October is named for her to lift up women in science.
So, would we support her? Yes. We can't vouch for every corner of her private life, because our sources don't cover it, but on what we could check she is someone to be happy you like.