Description
She was Lord Byron's daughter, raised behind a curtain that hid her father's portrait. Her mother filled her mind with mathematics to suppress the poetic madness she feared lurked in Byron's blood. It worked—and it didn't. At seventeen, Ada Byron met Charles Babbage and saw in his brass calculating engine something no one else could see: not just a machine that computed numbers, but a universal engine that could weave any pattern—music, logic, language—anything expressible in symbols. In 1843, she wrote what we now recognize as the first computer program, an algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine that wouldn't be built for another century. Her Notes asked the question that still haunts artificial intelligence: can machines originate, or can they only do what we tell them? She died at thirty-six—the same age as her father—and asked to be buried beside him. The daughter who'd been kept from Byron in life chose to spend eternity at his side. The poet and the programmer, together at last. This is the story of the Enchantress of Number.