George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824Described as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" by his paramour Lady Caroline Lamb, George Gordon, Lord Byron, lived a life of scandal and passion. A major poet in his lifetime, he is best remembered now for his poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. His brooding, dark good looks and romantic sensibilities have influenced countless novelists, dramatists, and Hollywood casting agents.
In his short 36 years of life, he was entangled in flagrantly unsuitable affairs with both men and women and contracted one short, disastrous marriage with Lady Caroline Lamb's cousin. He accumulated astounding debt, penned some of the most famous poetry of his time, and then managed to die in Greece as a patriot, having funded the Greeks in their fight for independence from the Turks.
He also fathered one legitimate child, Augusta Ada Byron, before a legal separation from his wife was enacted. He left England forever soon after Ada's birth. Better known to us as the Countess Lovelace, Ada was a 19th-century computer pioneer.
I love it when history reads better than fiction.
Young Ada was tutored in math and encouraged in this unusual pursuit by her mother -- perhaps to keep her from following in the romantic and destructive footsteps of her father. Ada attended a lecture on the Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage. This was a machine that was designed to do mathematical calculations automatically.
From the age of 21 until her death, Ada corresponded with Babbage. Ada translated Luigi Menabrea's paper on Babbage's Analytical Engine (the Analytical Engine would have been programmed using punch cards ? it was never built in her lifetime) from French to English, and it was published in 1843. Her translation included her own work: "programs" for the machine to calculate the sequence of Bernoulli numbers.
Ada's contribution to Menabrea's paper earned her praise from Babbage. Though Babbage also wrote programs for his Analytical Engine, Ada's work earned her the distinction of being remembered as the first computer programmer. The Ada programming language was named in her honor.
Like her father, Ada died at the age of 36. She and her husband had three children together; their daughter Anne Isabella would become famous in her own right.
One online reference claims that Ada had accumulated gambling debts ? surely not the hallmark of a great mathematician. Wasn't she schooled in game theory? Perhaps even after calculating the risks, for Ada the pull towards destruction was too strong. She was Lord Byron's daughter, after all.
Augusta Ada Byron, Countess Lovelace 1815-1852