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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Ada Lovelace (1815–1852) is celebrated as "the first programmer" for her remarkable 1843 paper which explained Charles Babbage's designs for a mechanical computer. New research reinforces the view that she was a gifted, perceptive and knowledgeable mathematician.

Christopher Hollings [ox.ac.uk] and Ursula Martin [ox.ac.uk] of Oxford Mathematics, and Adrian Rice, of Randolph-Macon College in Virginia, are the first historians of mathematics to investigate the extensive archives of the Lovelace-Byron family, held in Oxford's Bodleian Library. In two recent papers in the Journal of the British Society for the History of Mathematics [tandfonline.com] and in Historia Mathematica [sciencedirect.com] they study Lovelace's childhood education, where her passion for mathematics was complemented by an interest in machinery and wide scientific reading; and her remarkable two-year "correspondence course" on calculus with the eminent mathematician Augustus De Morgan, who introduced her to cutting edge research on the nature of algebra.

[...] The papers, and the correspondence with De Morgan, can be read in full on the website of the Clay Mathematics Institute [claymath.org], who supported the work, as did the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [epsrc.ac.uk].

Source: University of Oxford Mathematical Institute [ox.ac.uk]

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