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Book Review of Ada Lovelace: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Women in History)

Ada Lovelace: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Women in History)
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Augusta Ada King, the Countess of Lovelace, was the only legitimate child of Lord and Lady Byron.  Since Lord and Lady Byron separated when Ada was 5 weeks old (and he left England forever four months later), father and child would never have a relationship.  Because of Lady Byron's grief over the ending of her marriage, she was never emotionally close to her daughter.  Ada seems to have been raised mostly by Lady Byron's mother, Judith.

Ada's early teen years were marred by a form of paralysis, after a bout of measles.  By the age of 16, however, she started to recover.  When Ada had some sort of a dalliance with a tutor, Ada's mom worried that Ada would become a degenerate (like her father) and pushed Ada into her studies, especially mathematics and physics.  Interestingly, Ada's mother was a math whiz.

From this short study of Ada's life, it is easy to see that she got flamboyance from her father.  It looks like she was often bored by life's mundaneness.  Ada's association with Charles Babbage wasn't as close as I had thought from other reading.  However, she did understand exactly what he was trying to do.  It is a shame that Ada had such a short time to explore the world of science.  She died much too soon; she was 36 at the time of her death.