In the next section we review assessments of Lovelace's mathematical ability, and their reception in technical and popular writing. In her lifetime she was famous as the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, brought up by her mother following her parents’ acrimonious separation shortly after her birth: subsequently her life, as much as her scientific work, has inspired numerous biographies and creative endeavours. In the two hundred years since her birth, opinions of Lovelace's ability have ranged from ‘genius’ to ‘charlatan’. (De Morgan Citation1882, 89) In 1840–41 Ada, by now the Countess of Lovelace, Footnote 2 studied calculus and higher mathematics with Sophia's husband, Augustus De Morgan, and in 1843 published the paper for which she is now famous: her translation, with extensive appendices, of Luigi Menabrea's Notions sur la Machine Analytique de M. Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working, and saw the great beauty of the invention.
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