Ada Lovelace

Ada was born in 1815, the daughter of Lord Byron, the poet, and Anne Milbanke, a keen mathematician. Although she couldn't, as a woman, attend university, her mother ensured her good scientific education.

As a young woman she met Charles Babbage, who had designed an Analytical Engine which could perform any type of calculation using instructions fed in on punchcards. During her work with Babbage, Ada published the first computer programme, and saw that such a machine might one day work with letters, music and images as well as numbers - a vision of computers and software a hundred years before they came into existence.

In the 1970s, when the US Department of Defense created a programming language to use in its computer applications, it named the language ADA. ADA is still in use today.