Ada Lovelace Timeline

Lovelace first met Charles Babbage on 5 June 1833, when she and her mother attended one of Babbage's Saturday night soirées with their mutual friend, and Lovelace's private tutor, Mary Somerville. Somerville introduced them, and they became close friends.

In 1840, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin about his Analytical Engine. Luigi Menabrea, a young Italian engineer and future Prime Minister of Italy, transcribed the lecture into French; it was published in the Bibliothèque universelle de Genève in October 1842.

Image source: Analytical engine

During a nine-month period in 1842–43, Lovelace translated Menabrea's article on the Analytical Engine, appending extensive notes of her own. The translation and notes were published in the September 1843 edition of Taylor's Scientific Memoirs under her initials AAL. The algorithm in Note G is often called the first published computer program, and her paper marked the fundamental transition from calculation to general-purpose computation.

In 1844, she commented to her friend Woronzow Greig about her desire to create a mathematical model for how the brain gives rise to thoughts and nerves to feelings — 'a calculus of the nervous system'. As part of this research, she visited the electrical engineer Andrew Crosse in 1844 to learn how to carry out electrical experiments.

In 1851, the year before her cancer struck, she wrote to her mother mentioning 'certain productions' she was working on regarding the relation of maths and music. The same year, gambling debts led her to form a syndicate with male friends in an ambitious attempt to create a mathematical model for successful large bets.

On 12 August 1851, when she was dying of cancer, Lovelace wrote to Babbage asking him to be her executor, though the letter did not give him the necessary legal authority.

Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852 from cervical cancer, which contemporary accounts called uterine cancer since a distinction between the two was not made at that time.

In 1953, more than a century after her death, Ada Lovelace's notes on Babbage's Analytical Engine were republished as an appendix, bringing renewed attention to her pioneering work on computing.

The reference manual for the Ada language was approved on 10 December 1980, and the Department of Defense Military Standard MIL-STD-1815 was given the number of the year of her birth, honoring her legacy in computing.

Image source: Ada (programming language)

In 1981, the Association for Women in Computing inaugurated its Ada Lovelace Award, honoring outstanding women in computing.

Image source: Ada Lovelace Award

As of 1998, the British Computer Society has awarded the Lovelace Medal, and in 2008 it initiated an annual competition for women students in her honor.

Image source: BCS Lovelace Medal

Ada Lovelace Day is an annual event celebrated on the second Tuesday of October, which began in 2009 to celebrate women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

In 2012, a Google Doodle and blog post honoured Ada Lovelace on what would have been her 197th birthday.

In 2013, the University of Deusto in Spain established the Ada Byron Award for women in technology, which was subsequently expanded to several Latin American countries. Also in 2013, Ada Developers Academy was founded and named after her, and the BBC Radio 4 programme Great Lives devoted an episode to Lovelace on 17 September 2013, sponsored by TV presenter Konnie Huq.

The Ada Lovelace Symposium was held at the University of Oxford on 13–14 October 2015, celebrating her bicentenary and contributions to computing.

The Ada Lovelace Bicentenary Lectures on Computability took place at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies from 20 December 2015 to 31 January 2016.

Image source: Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

In December 2016, a letter written by Ada Lovelace was forfeited by Martin Shkreli to the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance for unpaid taxes owed by Shkreli.

The Cardano cryptocurrency platform, launched in 2017, uses Ada as the name for the cryptocurrency and Lovelace as the smallest sub-unit of an Ada, honoring both Ada Lovelace and Gerolamo Cardano.

Image source: Cardano (blockchain platform)

On 2 February 2018, Satellogic, a high-resolution Earth observation imaging and analytics company, launched a ÑuSat type micro-satellite named in honour of Ada Lovelace.

Image source: Satellogic

In March 2018, The New York Times published a belated obituary for Ada Lovelace as part of its 'Overlooked' series.

On 27 July 2018, Senator Ron Wyden submitted, in the United States Senate, the designation of 9 October 2018 as National Ada Lovelace Day, 'To honor the life and contributions of Ada Lovelace as a leading woman in science and mathematics'. On 20 July 2018, a sixth located copy of the 1843 first edition of Sketch of the Analytical Engine with her Notes was sold at auction to an anonymous buyer for £95,000.

Image source: Ron Wyden

In November 2020 it was announced that Trinity College Dublin, whose library had previously held forty busts, all of them of men, was commissioning four new busts of women, one of whom was to be Lovelace.

Image source: Trinity College Dublin

In 2021, Nvidia announced its RTX 4000 series GPU architecture code-named Ada Lovelace, and the 2022 graphics processor microarchitecture from Nvidia bears her name.

In March 2022, a statue of Ada Lovelace was installed at the site of the former Ergon House in the City of Westminster, London, honouring its scientific history. The sculpture was unveiled on International Women's Day 2022.

In 2025, the National Portrait Gallery acquired three images of Lovelace — the only known photographs of her. Two were daguerreotypes by Antoine Claudet taken around 1843.

Image source: National Portrait Gallery, London

In February 2026, a statue of Lovelace was unveiled on the Hinckley campus of the North Warwickshire and South Leicestershire College, continuing the commemoration of her legacy.

Lovelace was portrayed in Romulus Linney's 1977 play Childe Byron, one of many dramatic depictions of her life and relationship with her father.

In the 1990 steampunk novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Lovelace delivers a lecture on the 'punched cards' programme which proves Gödel's incompleteness theorems decades before their actual discovery.

Image source: Difference engine

In Tom Stoppard's 1993 play Arcadia, the precocious teenage genius Thomasina Coverly — apparently based on Ada Lovelace — comes to understand chaos theory and theorises the second law of thermodynamics before either is officially recognised.

Image source: Arcadia (play)

In the 1997 film Conceiving Ada, a computer scientist obsessed with Ada finds a way of communicating with her in the past by means of 'undying information waves'.

Lovelace features in John Crowley's 2005 novel Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land as an unseen character whose personality is forcefully depicted in her annotations and anti-heroic efforts to archive her father's lost novel.

Image source: John Crowley (author)

The 2015 play Ada and the Engine by Lauren Gunderson portrays Lovelace and Charles Babbage in unrequited love, and imagines a post-death meeting between Lovelace and her father.

Image source: Lauren Gunderson

In the documentary Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing (2015), Dr Hannah Fry covers the life of Ada Lovelace.

Image source: Ada Lovelace

'Lovelace' is the name of the operating system designed by the character Cameron Howe in Halt and Catch Fire, which aired on AMC in the US in 2015.

Image source: Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)

Ada, a one-woman show about the life and work of Ada Lovelace using an LED dress, premiered at Edinburgh International Science Festival on 11 April 2015, and continued touring internationally to promote diversity in STEM.

Lovelace and Babbage appear as characters in the second season of the ITV series Victoria (2017), and Lovelace, identified as Ada Augusta Byron, is portrayed by Lily Lesser in the second series of The Frankenstein Chronicles aired on ITV in 2017.

Image source: Victoria (British TV series)

Lovelace features as a character in 'Spyfall, Part 2', the second episode of Doctor Who series 12, which first aired on BBC One on 5 January 2020.

Image source: Spyfall (Doctor Who)

In 2025, the board game Ada's Dream was released, in which players help Ada finish her work on the Analytical Engine, and poet Jessy Randall included a tribute to Lovelace in her 2025 collection of poems about women scientists, The Path of Most Resistance.