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Ada Lovelace's IQ figure circulates in the 180 range in popular accounts; it is a retrospective biographical inference rather than a measurement. Her mathematical correspondence with Charles Babbage and her notes on his Analytical Engine are the surviving documentation that any later estimate is based on.

In 1843 she translated Luigi Menabrea's article on the Analytical Engine and appended a series of notes - longer than the original article - that included what is now recognized as the first published algorithm intended for execution on a machine. The note describing a method to compute Bernoulli numbers is the basis of her recognition as the first computer programmer.

She received an unusual mathematical education for a woman of her era at her mother's insistence, partly to steer her away from the literary temperament associated with her father Lord Byron. She died at 36 from uterine cancer. The programming language Ada (1980) is named for her.