Ada Lovelace
The first computer programmer
Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, circa 1840, possibly by Alfred Edward Chalon
- 1815 - Born in London, England
- 1829 - She was paralysed after a bout of measles.
- 1831 - She was able to walk with crutches.
- 1835 - She married William, 8th Baron King, becoming Lady King.
- 1844 - She wrote a review of a paper by Baron Karl von Reichenbach, Researches on Magnetism.
Here's a time line of Ada Lovelace's life:
"Ada saw something that Babbage in some sense failed to see. In Babbage's world his engines were bound by number... What Lovelace saw—what Ada Byron saw—was that number could represent entities other than quantity. So once you had a machine for manipulating numbers, if those numbers represented other things, letters, musical notes, then the machine could manipulate symbols of which number was one instance, according to rules."
-- Babbage specialist Doron Swade