The Ada Lovelace myth

Lord Byron’s daughter Lady Ada Lovelace is almost as famous now as her father. An entire industry has sprung up around her. There are Ada books, films, T-shirts, toys, games, and even a programming language named after her. Astonishingly, she has a four-page entry in the Dictionary of 19^th Century Science British Scientists. The book gives her the same amount of space as George Boole and Augustus de Morgan, and not much less than Karl Pearson, who established the discipline of mathematical statistics.

Like them, Ada is called a ‘mathematician’. Yet there is no evidence that she obtained any novel mathematical results. She left no published mathematical papers. Nor are there manuscripts from her containing anything mathematically novel. What then is the source of her reputation?

Ada certainly wanted to think of herself as a mathematician. Her letters show that she was convinced she had inherited her father’s genius (her term). For years, she took lessons from the textbook writer Mary Somerville, and from Augustus de Morgan himself.