Ada Lovelace was born on December 10, 1815. Her mother had been taught mathematics, and she wanted her daughter to have the same experience, so she was privately tutored and self-taught. When Ada was sixteen, she met Charles Babbage, who invented the first computer. She was very intrigued by his ideas, including an idea for a machine called the Analytical Engine. The two became friends, and through him, she was assisted in mathematics by mathematician logician Augustus de Morgan, who was the first professor of mathematics at the University of London. Ada translated and annotated an article called Elements of Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine by Italian engineer and mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea. Her annotations were very elaborate, and they ended up being three times the size of Menabrea's article. Ada described with such detail how the machine could not only use numbers just as quantities, but that the machine could be programmed to do many tasks, like understanding codes so that the device could compute symbols letters and numbers and computing Bernoulli numbers. Ada Lovelace died on December 27, 1852 of uterine cancer. She is considered to be the first person to introduce computer programming. Her theories went on to advance technology to what it is today.
