Ada Lovelace was the daughter of a famous poet, but her mother pushed her to study math instead - partly to keep her away from her father’s wild ways. It worked. Ada became one of the best math students in London at a time when girls usually weren’t taught math at all.
In her 20s she met inventor Charles Babbage, who was designing a giant brass machine called the Analytical Engine. It was meant to do math by itself - basically the first computer. While translating a paper about it, Ada added notes nearly three times longer than the original.
In one of those notes, she included a step-by-step set of instructions for the Engine to calculate a sequence of numbers. That’s now considered the first real computer program. Even more amazing: she predicted machines like this could one day do art, music, and language - not just arithmetic.
