Though many of these women worked on computers as they began to enter the mainstream, one woman was programming before computers even existed. Ada Lovelace was born in 1815 the daughter of English poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabella Byron. Though her father died when she was young, her mother had a keen interest in mathematics and pushed her daughter to pursue the same. Ms. Lovelace showed an early aptitude and impressed tutors like Charles Babbage, a mathematician who first began conceptualizing the computer, who asked her to translate an Italian paper on his ideas for a Swiss journal. This translation gave her the opportunity to ruminate and add her own notes, which were published along with the original paper. According to her biography, the notes explain "how codes could be created for the device to handle letters and symbols along with numbers" and described the theory where a machine could continuously execute instructions, which today is known as "looping". Giving true meaning to the cliche "ahead of her time", Lovelace's ideas were largely ignored during her life, and she died in 1852. However, her notes were rediscovered and published in the 1950's, and since then she has become a symbol of successful women in technology, inspiring an award in her name, a coding language used by the US Department of Defense, and a day celebrated in her honor.
