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Woman of the Day mathematician and computer scientist Ada Lovelace born OTD 1815 in London, who wrote the first known algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine. Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron who left her mother, Annabella, a month after her birth and died in Greece when she was eight. Annabella, herself a mathematical genius nicknamed the “Princess of Parallelograms”, believed that rigorous training in logic and reason would prevent her daughter from developing her father's moody and unpredictable temperament. She also made Ada lie still for long periods of time in the belief that it would help her to develop self-control. Ada showed an early talent for numbers and language and from the age of four, was tutored in mathematics and science. After studied the anatomy of birds at 12, Ada drew up plans to construct a winged flying apparatus intended to carry out powered flight: “I have got a scheme to make a thing in the form of a horse with a steam engine in the inside so contrived as to move an immense pair of wings, fixed on the outside of the horse, in such a manner as to carry it up into the air while a person sits on its back.” The turning point came when Ada’s mother engaged fellow mathematician and scientist Mary Somerville, one of the first women to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society, as Ada’s tutor. It was through Mary that 17 year old Ada first met Charles Babbage, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, in 1833 at a party. His “Analytical Engine” combined gears with an elaborate punchcard operating system. It was never completed but the design had all of the essential elements of a computer and Ada was fascinated when he demonstrated a small working section of the Engine to her. They became friends and Babbage served as her mentor. He arranged for Ada to study advanced mathematics with a professor at the University of London. In 1842, Ada translated a short article about the Analytical Engine written by an Italian military engineer for publication in England. Babbage asked her to expand the article “as she understood the machine so well”. Ada’s notes were three times longer than the original paper and were published in an English journal in 1843 under her initials “A.A.L.” In Note G, she explained how the machine could be programmed with a code to calculate Bernoulli numbers. This was the first known algorithm intended to be carried out by a machine - the first computer programme - and she theorised a method by which the engine could repeat a series of instructions, a process known as ‘looping’ that computer programmes use today. Ada speculated that the Engine “might act upon other things besides numbers...the Engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. This marked a significant shift from calculation to computation. Her notes were one of the critical documents that inspired Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers in the 1940s. Ada developed uterine cancer in 1852. Bedridden, she was visited by Charles Dickens in August of that year. At her request, he sat by her bedside and read to her a chapter from his novel Dombey and Son. She died three months later at the age of just 36. “Your best and wisest refuge from all troubles is in your science.”