Engineers
Ada Lovelace
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Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who worked closely with Charles Babbage on his proposed Analytical Engine, a mechanical general-purpose computer that was never completed in his lifetime. Translating an Italian engineer article on the machine in 1843, she added her own extensive notes, roughly three times the length of the original text, including what is now recognized as the first algorithm published with the explicit intention of being carried out by a machine, a method for the engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, generally called Note G. Her notes went further than Babbage own writing in describing the engine as capable of manipulating symbols according to rules, not merely calculating numbers, which she illustrated with the idea of the engine one day composing music, a vision of general-purpose computing that took more than a century to become literal fact.
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Lovelace's 1843 translated notes on the Analytical Engine, three times longer than the paper they annotated, included what is recognized as the first published algorithm written for any computing machine.
In Field
Software engineering did not exist as a named discipline in her lifetime. She is linked here as the field own recognized precursor, for Note G and its accompanying description of a machine that manipulates symbols by rule.
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