The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just ...

From 1832, when she was 17, Ada’s remarkable mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated her life even after her marriage in 1835 to William King, 8th Baron King, ...