V · Craft & community
Ada Lovelace
1815–1852
Mathematician · the first programmer
Gave us
The first algorithm intended for execution on a machine — a Bernoulli-number computation for Babbage's Analytical Engine, written in 1843.
The story
In annotated notes on a French paper about the Analytical Engine, Lovelace went well beyond the source: she described conditional branching, loops, and the machine's potential for non-numeric computation ("composing music"). The Engine was never built; her algorithm is older than electricity-powered computing by a century.