Ada Lovelace never took an IQ test. The ≈180 is a retrospective estimate based on her documented mathematical correspondence — an inference, not a measurement.
Byron's daughter, raised on mathematics
Augusta Ada Byron was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron, who left when she was weeks old. Her mother, Annabella Milbanke, pushed mathematics and logic partly to steer her away from her father's “poetic” temperament.
At twelve she was designing a flying machine, studying birds' anatomy to work out wing proportions. At seventeen she met Charles Babbage at a party and saw his Difference Engine demonstrated.
Education, on punched cards
Women couldn't attend university, so her education came from a sequence of private tutors — each card one stage in the program.
A strict routine of arithmetic, French, music and drawing set by her mother, with rewards and punishments for attention.
Left partly paralysed for about three years; she kept studying from bed.
Her mother's own former tutor taught her mathematics and astronomy.
The scientist and translator of Laplace became a mentor and introduced her to scientific London.
A correspondence course in calculus with the University College London professor, who thought she could have become a leading mathematician.
Studied the Analytical Engine's design directly with Babbage while translating Menabrea's paper.
Run her program
Her final note set out, step by step, how the Analytical Engine could compute the Bernoulli numbers — each built from all the ones before it. Step the engine forward.
Shown in today's notation. Lovelace numbered them differently, and her published table contains a small error.
Asked to translate Luigi Menabrea's French article on the Analytical Engine, she added notes about three times its length. In them she argued the machine could act on any symbols, not just numbers — that it might, for instance, compose music if the rules of harmony could be encoded.
She also warned that it could only do what it was instructed to do and could originate nothing — a point Alan Turing answered by name a century later as “Lady Lovelace's objection”.
Her works, Note by Note
Her one published work is the 1843 translation with seven lettered notes. Around it sit a handful of letters and unrealised plans.
A planned book on her flying-machine design, with notes on bird wings and steam power.
Distinguishes the Analytical Engine from the Difference Engine: it can process any symbols, not just numbers.
Explains how the engine stores values in its “variables”.
Shows how Jacquard-style cards could be reused to repeat operations — an early idea of loops.
Traces, step by step, how the engine would solve a pair of equations.
Extends the method to trigonometric series and “cycles of cycles”.
Shows the engine could handle problems too long to calculate by hand.
The Bernoulli-number program above, and her caution that the engine cannot originate anything.
Voluminous correspondence setting out her idea of “poetical science”.
A proposed mathematical model of how the brain produces thought; never written.
“The Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”
She died of uterine cancer — the same age as her father — and was buried beside him. The US Defense Department's Ada language (1980) is named after her.
Timeline
Reading the ≈180
An estimate inferred from her letters and published notes, not from a test and not from Cox's study. Historians still debate how much of the notes' mathematics was hers versus Babbage's.
Sources
- Lovelace, A. A. (1843). Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine
- Toole, B. A. (1992). Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers
- Essinger, J. (2014). Ada's Algorithm. Melville House
- Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing Machinery and Intelligence. Mind