Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), born Augusta Ada Byron, was an English mathematician and the only legitimate daughter of the poet Lord Byron. After meeting Charles Babbage in 1833, she became the closest intellectual partner of his work on the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose programmable computer designed in the 1830s but never built. In 1843 she published her translation of Luigi Menabrea's account of the Engine together with extensive Notes of her own — including Note G, an algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers that is widely regarded as the first published computer program, though the extent and originality of her contribution remain debated. She married William King in 1835, becoming Countess of Lovelace in 1838, and died of cancer in 1852 at the age of 36. The programming language Ada, standardized for the U.S. Department of Defense as MIL-STD-1815, is named after her.