Scientist

I was born in December of 1815, the only legitimate child of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Five weeks after my birth, my parents divorced and my father left England forever, to die eight years later without my ever having met him.
My mother, who wished me to be unlike my father, reared me to be a mathematician and scientist. I excelled at mathematics and was an accomplished linguist and musician. However, my poetic nature and imagination shone through even in my scientific endeavors.
At a dinner party I attended as a teenager, I heard of Charles Babbage’s ideas for a new calculating engine which he called the Analystical Engine, what we nowadays call a computer.
Charles Babbage worked on plans for this new engine and reported on the developments at a seminar in Turin, Italy in the autumn of 1841. An Italian, Menabrea, wrote a summary of what Babbage described and published an article in French about the development. I translated Menabrea's article. When I showed Babbage my translation he suggested that I add my own notes, which turned out to be three times the length of the original article. In my article, published in 1843, my prescient comments included my predictions that such a machine might be used to compose complex music, to produce graphics, and would be used for both practical and scientific use. I was correct.
I suggested to Babbage writing a plan for how the engine might calculate Bernoulli numbers. This plan, is now regarded as the first "computer program." A software language developed by the U.S. Department of Defense was named in my honor in 1979.
I appear as a character in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's science fiction novel, "The Difference Engine.”