Ada Lovelace

The Idea of Coding

She lived when a woman’s mind was meant to be ornamental, not operational. She inherited a poet’s imagination and taught it to think with math. She imagined machines that could compose music, weave designs, and perform tasks that blurred into thought. This book follows the exacting logic behind those flashes of vision and asks what it means when numbers start to feel like art.

Concise, unsentimental, and fiercely readable, JD Arden traces Lovelace’s intellectual life against the iron rules of 19th-century society. You’ll get a clear portrait of her reasoning, the cultural pressure that tried to domesticate her brilliance, and the quiet audacity of a mind that saw algorithms as instruments of expression. No hagiography, no jargon—just rigorous, humane analysis that lets her ideas stand on their own power.

For readers of intellectual history, computing’s origin story, and anyone who wants to understand how a single idea can reframe what we call thought. Read this to meet the woman who saw the soul in numbers and the art in algorithms.