ABSTRACT
Last year, when Walter Isaacson was doing the publicity circuit for his latest book, The Innovators, he’d often relate the story of how his teenage daughter had written an essay about Ada Lovelace, a figure that Isaacson admitted that he’d never heard of before. Sure, he’d written biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin and other important male figures in science and technology, but the name and the contributions of this woman were entirely unknown to him. Ada Lovelace, the woman whose notes on Charles Babbage’s proto-computer the Analytical Engine are now recognized as making her the world’s first computer programmer. Ada Lovelace, the author of the world’s first computer algorithm. Ada Lovelace, the person at the beginning of the field of computer science.
