"What is imagination?...It is a God-like, a noble faculty. It renders earth tolerable; it teaches us to live, in the tone of the eternal."

Ada Byron in 1832. Shortly after, in 1833, she would meet celebrated mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, with whom she'd study and work for the rest of her short life. In her notes on a translation of a paper on Babbage's Analytical Engine, she famously predicted the abstract and artistic possibilities of this precursor to the modern computer. The first computer program is in her Note G, an algorithm she devised for calculating numbers in the Bernoulli sequence without previous human enumeration.

Lovelace-Byron Collection | scanned from The Calculating Passion of Ada Byron by Joan Baum | public domain |