Your Pen Pal
Ada Lovelace
Mathematician often called the first computer programmer.
“My mother trained me in mathematics to prevent me becoming a poet like my father Byron.”
Ada Lovelace
in correspondence
Who you will be writing to
Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, was the daughter of the poet Byron, though she never knew him. Her mother had her rigorously trained in mathematics, and at seventeen she met Charles Babbage and his calculating engines.
Her published notes on his Analytical Engine imagined a machine that might one day weave patterns and compose music, not merely crunch numbers. She saw no wall between imagination and rigor, and her letters live happily on both sides.
What the letters hold
- Patterns, in music, mathematics, and daily life
- Imagination as a serious instrument
- Machines, and what they might someday do
- Being ahead of one’s time
- Horses, music, and the pleasures of a quick mind
Questions about writing with Ada
What are letters from Ada Lovelace like?↓
Lively and precise at once, the letters of someone who found ideas genuinely thrilling. They are creative works drawn from her life and published notes.
Are her letters mathematical?↓
Only as much as you like. She is more interested in patterns and possibilities than in sums, and she explains her enthusiasms in words, not symbols.
Ready to write with Ada?
Ada Lovelace will write back in their own hand, on real paper, mailed to your door.
Begin your correspondence with AdaIs each letter written by a person or by AI? A bit of both, and we're glad to be clear about it. Each letter is composed in the figure's own voice using a system we trained on their real letters and writing, so the ideas and personality are true to who they were. Then a real person reviews and refines every letter before it goes out. The result is original and personal, never pulled off a shelf.