<p>Once you get to know about Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) and her life and work, its difficult not to become more or less obsessed with her. She was a truly remarkable woman; unquestionably one of the most important women in science history. She was born in 1815, the daughter to Lord Byron and Lady Byron, who were married for just a year – when Ada only five weeks old Lady Byron left her lord and never saw him again. They eventually separated and Byron died in 1824. When Ada was born her parents were extremely poor; one of the reasons for the separation was that Lady Byron could no longer stand the stress of bailiffs regularly knocking on the door and in some cases camping out in the front room. But, curiously enough, Byron was poverty-stricken by choice; he had a strange, almost neurotic belief, that he shouldnt make money from his poetry even though he was highly successful at it and his poems were all best-sellers. On one occasion, for example, he gave a thousand guineas to his publisher John Murray as a gift, a sum worth about £100,000 back in the early 19th Century. <i>This has been generated by https://essayfreelancewriters.com.</i></p><br /><br /><br /><br /><p>I dont think many writers would do that nowadays. Read more about women in science: 10 amazing women in science history you really should know about Ladies who launch: the women behind the Apollo Program How Ada Lovelaces notes on the Analytical Engine created the first computer program When Ada was a girl, her mother inherited a substantial fortune and for the rest of Lady Byrons life she was one of the wealthiest women in Britain, owning, for example, numerous coal mines in the north of England. Lady Byron was herself obsessed with the idea that if she didnt educate Ada properly, Adas mind might, as Lady Byron perceived it, go to ruin like Lord Byrons had. Lady Byron believed that if she could tame Adas imagination, this would prevent Ada from going down the line of imaginative self-indulgence that Byron himself had, as she saw it, gone down. Lady Byron set out to use mathematics as the method of taming Adas imagination, figuring that if she could arrange for Ada to educated in mathematics above all, the taming of the girls imagination would be successful. <i>This article has been written with the help of Essay Freelance Writers !</i></p><br /><br /><p>Ironically, what actually happened was that Ada fell head over heels in love with mathematics. While she never became a great mathematician – my research suggests that she reached about the standard of about a third-year university graduate by modern standards – that was no trivial feat for a girl in the early 19th Century, who was being educated at home by governesses and tutors who regularly were changed because Lady Byron tended to fall out with them as with most other people. She never defined precisely what she meant by that but its clear that Ada saw poetical science as a dynamic combination of science and the imagination. So, far from quelling Adas imagination, Lady Byron succeeded simply in transforming it into something else. Posterity should be grateful for the something else into which Adas imagination was transformed. It is this that really explains my own personal obsession with Ada Lovelace, which derives from her professional brilliance, although I would certainly have liked to have met her too.</p><br /><br /><p>Read more biographies of great female scientists: Lise Meitner: the nuclear pioneer who escaped the Nazis Helen Gwynne-Vaughan: An extraordinary botanist whose problems of identity still confront female scientists today Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: The exceptional professor who solved the structure of insulin Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelaces life was unfortunately short: she was born on 10 December 1815 and passed away on 27 November 1852 from an unfortunately and tragically very painful uterine cancer, at a time when the only palliative available to lessen her pain was laudanum. This was a mixture of brandy and morphine, which had only limited effect as it was taken orally and much of it was broken down by stomach acid: the hypodermic syringe would invented in 1853, a year after her death. Ada packed a great deal into those 36 years. Lovelace and Babbage She was initially educated by those governesses and tutors for as long, or as short, as they were employed by Lady Byron. Then, when Ada was only 17 years old, and on the evening of 5 June 1833, she met a man who would become arguably her most important friend.</p><br />