The English mathematician who, working with Charles Babbage's never-built Analytical Engine, published in 1843 what many call the first algorithm written for a machine — and who grasped, more clearly than almost anyone around Babbage, that such a machine could manipulate not just numbers but symbols, music, and ideas, anticipating the general-purpose computer a century before working computers existed.
She wrote a program for a computer that was never built, a century before working computers existed. Ada Lovelace was the poet Lord Byron's daughter, raised on mathematics to keep his wildness out of her. In 1843 she published a method for Charles Babbage's mechanical engine to calculate a sequence of numbers, and many now call it the first computer program. But her deeper insight was stranger. She saw that a machine built to crunch numbers could, in principle, work on anything you could write in symbols. It could compose music. It could, in principle, compose music. Few of her contemporaries stated the idea so clearly.