Google Doodle Celebrates Lady Ada Lovelace, the World's First Programmer

Google's been honoring a lot of computing pioneers this year and it's doing it again with a doodle dedicated to Lady Ada Lovelace, the creator of the very first computer algorithm, more than a century before any actual computers were built.

She's best known for her work with Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, a programmable mechanical computer that was never fully built.

Ada Lovelace was fascinated by the machine and its potential and came to understand it better than its creator.

She also saw beyond its mathematical applications, understanding that such a machine could be made to do anything with the right programming. She envisioned it making music, for example.

She devised a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using the analytical engine, the world's first algorithm, making her the world's first programmer. This was in 1843.

It was a century later that the first general-purpose computers were built and that Alan Turing laid the theoretical foundation for them.