Ada Byron Lovelace was the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron. By the time she was born, her parents were already estranged, so she never really knew her illustrious father before he died when she was eight. She was raised as an aristocrat and given a good education, but had few friends and was often lonely. She also had delicate health and spent several years as an invalid after a terrible case of the measles. While ill, she turned to books as her companions, and as a teen and young adult became fascinated with math and logic. She became friends with another female mathematician, Mary Somerville, who introduced her to her future husband, William, Earl of Lovelace, and to Charles Babbage who was a scientist working on a computing machine. He was designing the machine to do mathematical calculations, but Ada was able to see that it had far more possibilities than just mathematics. She became an advocate of Babbage's work and translated and added notes to a paper about his device in hopes of raising funding for his project.
This is a short biography written as a highly fictionalized story of Lovelace's life focusing one her personality, early education, and work with Babbage. I found it interesting and entertaining. At the end of it, though, I wasn't clear why she was considered to have been the first computer programmer. I had to read a Wikipedia article to discover she had added to her translation of the article referenced above, a postscript with a description of how to calculate the Bernoulli numbers with Babbage's machine. It is this postscript that is considered by some the first computer program. Still, I think this is a very accessible biography for anyone, especially girls, who are interested in computers and coding. (2019, 128p.)
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