Ada Lovelace

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.