The first programmer in history is held to be Countess Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of George Gordon Byron, whom she did, in fact, see precisely once in her life, when she was a month old

The first programmer in history is held to be Countess Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of George Gordon Byron, whom she did, in fact, see precisely once in her life, when she was a month old. Brought up by the leading scholars of her day, Ada showed a gift for mathematics from her youth, and at eighteen she was already engaged in the analytical design of the world's first calculating machine, accurate to the twentieth digit, which, however, was never built, despite decades of labour upon it. Ada nonetheless described the algorithms for the computational work of the Difference Engine, and this is recognised as the first attempt at programming a computer. Lady Lovelace might have achieved far more: she described not only the calculation of the Bernoulli series but even the composition of music by a calculating machine. By a tragic coincidence, the life of Ada Lovelace was cut short in her 37th year, as was that of her father, Lord Byron.