How a poet’s long-forgotten daughter created the first algorithm

In 1815, the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, the famed Romantic poet, was born, a child he would never meet. Raised by a mother determined to scrub away “poetical insanity” with pure logic, Ada Lovelace grew into a woman who sketched flying machines while bedridden with measles, dazzled London’s elite at soirees with her grasp of mathematics, and secretly ran a horse-racing betting…