Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace

An English mathematician who, in her 1843 notes on Charles Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine, described how the machine could go beyond arithmetic to manipulate any symbols according to rules, effectively writing the first published algorithm intended for a computer and anticipating the idea of general-purpose computation. She is widely regarded as a foundational figure in computing, and her insight that a machine could operate on symbols rather than only numbers underlies the whole idea of software, including AI. (See also: Charles Babbage, Symbolic AI)