Ada Lovelace

📍12 St James's Square, London SW1Y 4RB, United Kingdom

“I grew up at Ockham Park in Surrey, in a household that prized logic above all else — a deliberate choice by my mother to steer me away from my father's poetic temperament. She feared I had inherited his wildness. But numbers felt like poetry to me anyway; more precise, more honest. When I began corresponding with Charles Babbage about his Analytical Engine, I saw what he himself could not: that it could do far more than calculate. It could manipulate symbols. Follow instructions. I wrote what became the first algorithm ever intended for a machine. I was twenty-seven. Nobody quite understood what I had done.”

Sources: Toole, B. Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (1992), Strawberry Press; Essinger, J. Ada's Algorithm (2014), Melville House; Woolley, B. The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron's Daughter (1999), McGraw-Hill