Ada Lovelace wrote the world's first computer program before computers existed. Her friend, Charles Babbage, was inventing an Analytical Thinking Machine, even if he all he had at the moment was a small demo model. Ada thought through what such a machine could do for humanity. Her ideas were grand and far-reaching, and in one case, extremely detailed: she published a paper on exactly how to use such a machine to calculate Bernoulli numbers. But few would recognize her work as groundbreaking until a century later when a real thinking machine (i.e., a computer) needed to be programmed in exactly that way.

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