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a result, most of Ada’s childhood was rather lonely and spent in the company of older and not always congenial people.
    Ada’s education started when she was only four years old. It was about as comprehensive as was feasible at the time. Not easy to please, Lady Byron was prone to firing the tutors and governesses that she recruited when she considered that they were not sufficiently helpful to Ada’s education. When there were extended breaks between tutors due to Lady Byron being unable to find one she considered suitable for her daughter, Lady Byron taught Ada herself.
    In 1824, at the age of eight, a typical day for Ada looked like this:
Music
10
French reading
11:15
Arithmetic
11:30
Work
1:30
Music
3:15
French exercise
4:30
    Lady Byron imposed a strict discipline on Ada, who altogether was rather like the only girl in a school. Through a ticket-based system Ada was either given a reward or punishment. When Ada performed well, she had paper ‘tickets’ bestowed on her, but these tickets got confiscated when Ada did not meet Lady Byron’s expectations.
    On the occasion that the ticket system failed to motivate her, she was placed in a closet until she promised to behave herself and work hard at her studies. Woronzow Greig, a mathematical and pedantic friend of Ada’s when she was an adult, recounted that Ada ‘acquired a feeling of dread towards her mother that continued until the day of her death’, Ada’s death that is.
    Lady Byron, whom Byron once nicknamed the ‘princess of parallelograms’, was particularly keen for Ada to have a mathematical education. Lady Byron wanted to suppress Ada’s imagination – which Lady Byron saw as dangerous and potentially destructive and coming from the Byrons – and wanted to make Ada, as far as feasible, completely rational.
    For Lady Byron, Ada was a constant reminder of her marriage and the failure of her life’s purpose. Ada, after all, was half Byron by blood, and it’s difficult to conclude other than that Lady Byron frequently found her irritating and even treacherous whenever Ada was behaving in a way that made her seem too much of a Byron. She had a particularly deep mistrust of Ada’s imaginative approach to science and Ada’s tendency to seek playful uses for science and mathematics.
    Unlike Lord Byron’s savage nature, Ada’s was to be chained and guided towards goodness in the way she had laid out in her fateful letter to him after she had rejected his marriage proposal.
    It meant, specifically, that Ada had to be very grateful for corrections she received from adults. As Ada herself wrote on September 7 1824:
    I should wish that… you do not give me reward because I think the reward of your being pleased with me sufficient[,] besides when you do that I don’t do the good thing because I know I ought to do it but because I want to obtain the reward, and not because I know it to be right, and if I was encouraged in this, when I was grown up I should be a very disagreeable creature, and I should never do any good without I had a reward.
    Ada wrote many such letters as, over time, Lady Byron grew into a woman extremely preoccupied with her health, and prone to following the strangest theories about good health. She was often away at various rest cures, which involved her doing such things as taking the waters in spa towns, and spending time with her aristocratic friends.
    On other occasions, Ada was to keep Lady Byron informed with reports that were pleasing to her and showed that she understood the purpose of her upbringing. Thus, on Wednesday May 31 1826, ten-year-old Ada castigated vanity in a letter to her mother, who was staying on the sea in Hastings, in a place called Library House. She added: ‘I think it is well for me I am not beautiful.’
    The next day she wrote again to keep her mother informed on what had occurred that day.
    Library House, Hastings
    1st June Thursday 1826
    My dearest Mammy
    No letter from Lady Tarn yet. Louisa [a visiting