Born Ada Gordon, she was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, and his wife Anne Isabella Milbanke. Raised by her mother who feared she might inherit her father's poetic temperament she was schooled in mathematics and logic by some of the finest minds of the era.

One of these minds, Charles Babbage Lucasian professor of mathematics, was to become her lifelong friend. Ada was was fascinated by his prototype Difference Engine, an elaborate mechanical calculator, and when he began designing the more complex Analytical Engine she studied his plans in depth.

In 1842, she translated a paper about the Analytical Engine by Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea and was encouraged by Babbage to add her own notes "as she understood the machine so well". It is in these notes that Lovelace wrote her seminal computer program. She also understood that given the right data and instructions a computing machine would have the capacity to do very human things.

Although Ada Lovelace died aged 36 and the Analytical Engine was never built, her notes inspired Alan Turing's work on the first modern computers in the 1940s. Read more about Ada Lovelace here.

Our guest Blog writer, Sophie Hutchins is a Systems Engineer and the Sparxx of the Month,  Sadhvi Karthikeyan  is a Digital  Design Engineer at Dialog Semiconductor . Our videos this month take a closer look at these two engineering roles.