In celebration of Women's History Month:

Robinson, Fiona. Ada’s Ideas: The Story of Ada Lovelace, the World’s First Computer Programmer. New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2016.

 Ada Lovelace was born into a world of “poetry and parallelograms” as the daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his mathematician wife, Anne Milbank. She was fascinated by the evolving technology of her day, including Charles Babbage’s “difference machine,” an early calculator, and the looms that produced Jacquard fabrics according to a “program,” or set of controlling directions. She believed that such devices could be “programmed” to “create pictures, music and words.” Sadly, Ada died at age 36, but the mathematicians who built the early computers in the mid-20^th century knew about her and consulted the drawings and calculations found in her notebooks as they created the machines she had imagined a century earlier. Poetry and parallelograms indeed.