Today, Ada Lovelace is recognized and celebrated as a pioneer and a prophet of the information age, presaging computer programming by a century. In the 1800s, she was having an unusual upbringing-even by the standards of the time. Tutored by some of the brightest minds, Ada, the daughter of bad-boy poet Lord Byron, developed a hunger for mental puzzles, mathematical conundrums, and scientific discovery that kept pace with the breathtaking advances of the industrial and social revolutions taking place in Europe. Hers was a peculiar and singular intellect, both shaped and hampered by history, social norms, and family dysfunction. Book jacket.