The Princess of Parallelograms

Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer program in 1843, a century before computers existed. She envisioned machines that could compose music and manipulate symbols beyond mere arithmetic. Babbage called her "The Enchantress of Number." She was, by any measure, the most forward-looking mind of her generation.

Her mother spent a lifetime making sure of it.

Lady Byron had married the poet, regretted it almost immediately, and left with five-week-old Ada before the ink on the bassinet was dry. The prescription was total: mathematics, science, logic. Poetry was banned. Ada was to be raised as Byron's opposite, immunized against verse.

It worked. Ada became a brilliant mathematician. She wrote algorithms and theorized about artificial intelligence. She never published a line of poetry.

Except she did. Quietly, she wrote poems and told almost no one. One was a sonnet called "The Rainbow."

You can probably see where this is going.

Ada died at thirty-six, the exact age Byron had died. She asked to be buried beside the father she barely knew. And when Lady Byron, the woman who had spent three decades waging a careful, systematized war against poetry, needed to choose something for Ada's memorial, she chose "The Rainbow."

The poem came through anyway.