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50 free Ada Lovelace trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Ada Lovelace was Lord Byron's only legitimate child, raised on mathematics by a mother determined to keep the poet's madness out of her, and at 27 wrote the notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine that are called the first published computer program. She also saw, a century early, that a computing machine could handle music and symbols, not just numbers. She gambled on horses, flirted with scandal, and died at 36, asking to be buried beside the father she never knew. This quiz covers all of it. Easy questions ask who her father was and whose engine she wrote about. Harder ones want the tutor who introduced her to Babbage, the childhood book on flying she planned at twelve, the Italian who wrote the article she translated, the note that held the Bernoulli algorithm, Babbage's nickname for her, "Lady Lovelace's Objection", the programming language, the £2 coins, the Nvidia chips and the passport she shares with Babbage. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Ada Lovelace, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for computer science teachers, Ada Lovelace Day organisers and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Alan Turing, Computers and Women in Science.
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Q 01Who was Ada Lovelace's father?
Lord Byron
He separated from her mother a month after Ada was born, left England for good and died when she was eight.
Q 02Whose proposed Analytical Engine is Lovelace chiefly known for working on?
Charles Babbage
The machine was never built, but it has been recognised as Turing-complete and anticipated the modern computer.
Q 03What is Lovelace often called because of her notes on the Analytical Engine?
The first computer programmer
The claim is disputed: Babbage had written unpublished programs for the engine years earlier.
Q 04Which mathematical sequence did Lovelace's Note G describe a method for the engine to calculate?
Bernoulli numbers
The algorithm is often called the first published computer program, though it was never run.
Q 05What did Lovelace see that Babbage and others missed about the engine's potential?
It could handle things besides numbers, such as music
She wrote that the engine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent".
Q 06What phrase did Lovelace use to describe her own approach to knowledge?
"Poetical science"
She called herself an "Analyst (& Metaphysician)".
Q 07Who was Lovelace's private tutor and friend who introduced her to Babbage on 5 June 1833?
Mary Somerville
The noted scientific author took Ada and her mother to one of Babbage's Saturday night soirées.
Q 08Who was Ada named after?
Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh
Byron had hoped for a "glorious boy" and was disappointed by a daughter, though it was he who called her "Ada".
Q 09At what age was Lovelace first shown the family portrait of her father?
Twenty
Her mother spent a lifetime alleging Byron's immorality and had Ada watched for signs of "moral deviation".
Q 10What did the teenage Ada call the friends her mother set to watch her for moral lapses?
The Furies
She later complained they exaggerated and invented stories about her.
Q 11Which illness left Lovelace paralysed in June 1829, followed by nearly a year of bed rest?
Measles
By 1831 she could walk with crutches; the illnesses never stopped her studies.
Q 12What did twelve-year-old Ada title the illustrated book she planned about learning to fly?
Flyology
She studied bird anatomy, tested paper, oilsilk, wires and feathers for wings, and planned to combine steam with flight.
Q 13What affectionate nickname did Babbage give the young Ada?
"Lady Fairy"
Later he called her "The Enchantress of Number".
Q 21Which Italian engineer and future PM wrote the Analytical Engine article Lovelace translated?
Luigi Menabrea
He transcribed Babbage's 1840 Turin seminar; Charles Wheatstone commissioned the English translation.
Q 22How many explanatory notes, lettered A to G, did Lovelace add to her translation?
Seven
They ran about three times longer than the translation itself.
Q 23In which publication, and under what initials, did the translation and notes appear in September 1843?
Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, as AAL
Michael Faraday described himself as a supporter of her writing.
Q 14What did Ada attempt to do with a tutor in early 1833 after their affair was discovered?
Elope
The tutor's relatives recognised her and told her mother, who hushed it up.
Q 15Whom did Ada marry on 8 July 1835?
William, 8th Baron King
He was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, and she became Countess of Lovelace.
Q 16Why was that particular name chosen for her husband's earldom in 1838?
Ada descended from the extinct Barons Lovelace
The 1838 creation as Earl of Lovelace and Viscount Ockham made her Countess of Lovelace.
Q 17Which architect of the Houses of Parliament built Horsley Towers, the family's main home from 1845?
Charles Barry
It was in the Tudorbethan style and Lovelace later greatly enlarged it to her own designs.
Q 18What did Ada's mother reveal to her in 1841 about her cousin, the daughter of Augusta Leigh?
That Ada's father was her father too
Ada replied that she was "not in the least astonished" and blamed Augusta Leigh, not her father.
Q 19What ambitious 1851 project went disastrously wrong and left Lovelace thousands of pounds in debt?
A mathematical model for winning big bets on horses
She had already lost more than £3,000 on the horses and had to confess everything to her husband.
Q 20Which mathematician tutored Ada Lovelace in the 1840s and thought she might be 'an original mathematical investigator'?
Augustus De Morgan
His tuition covered the Bernoulli numbers that became her celebrated algorithm.
Q 24Why did Babbage ask Lovelace to withdraw the paper shortly before publication?
The journal insisted he sign his critical preface
She refused; historian Benjamin Woolley thinks Babbage had courted her involvement partly for her "celebrated name".
Q 25What did Babbage call Lovelace in an 1843 letter about the world's "multitudinous Charlatans"?
"The Enchantress of Number"
He had been impressed by her intellect since showing her the Difference Engine prototype in 1833.
Q 26What is "Lady Lovelace's Objection", as named by Alan Turing?
That the engine cannot originate anything, only do what it is ordered
Turing coined and rebutted the objection in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".
Q 27What in Lovelace's Note G does historian Allan Bromley say Babbage actually prepared, though she found a "bug" in it?
The program
Stephen Wolfram counters that nothing Babbage wrote was "as sophisticated—or as clean" as her Bernoulli computation.
Q 28In which 1953 book were Lovelace's notes republished, over a century after her death?
Faster than Thought
B. V. Bowden's symposium on digital computing machines carried them as an appendix.
Q 29What did Lovelace hope to build in 1844, describing it as "a calculus of the nervous system"?
A mathematical model of how the brain produces thought
The interest came partly from a lifelong worry, inherited from her mother, about her own "potential" madness.
Q 30Of what did Lovelace die on 27 November 1852, aged 36?
Cervical cancer
Contemporary accounts called it uterine cancer; her mother took control of her sickroom and excluded her friends.