Math “constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world,” Lovelace wrote. She thought of math and logic as creative and imaginative, and called it “poetical science.” Lovelace, a British socialite who was the daughter of Lord Byron, the romantic poet, had a gift for combining art and science, one of her biographers, Betty Alexandra Toole, has written. “It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”
“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing,” she wrote. She also explored the ramifications of what a computer could do, writing about the responsibility placed on the person programming the machine, and raising and then dismissing the notion that computers could someday think and create on their own - what we now call artificial intelligence. “This insight would become the core concept of the digital age,” Walter Isaacson wrote in his book, “The Innovators.” “Any piece of content, data or information - music, text, pictures, numbers, symbols, sounds, video - could be expressed in digital form and manipulated by machines.” The machines could go beyond calculating numbers, she said, to understand symbols and be used to create music or art. But her deeper influence was to see the potential of computing. The program she wrote for the Analytical Engine was to calculate the seventh Bernoulli number.
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