While Lovelace never followed in the exact footsteps of her poet father, perhaps it was her proximity to Romanticism that allowed her to look beyond the present state of computing. She certainly viewed mathematics in a romantic way, describing the idea of mathematical poetry as something “higher in it’s nature than aught the world has perhaps yet seen.”

She also envisioned a future of computer programming that nobody else had conceptualized at the time. If computers were able to follow programs to complete complex mathematical programs, perhaps they could also create other things. Could musical notation, for example, be programmed by a machine if it were given the different pitches of sound and other input?

While Lovelace did not claim that machines could originate with ideas, she certainly thought that given enough input, they could eventually complete tasks and create new material that wasn’t strictly mathematical. Today, we have machines that can complete tasks beyond what Lovelace likely imagined – but her early theorizations about possibilities for computers to create resonate with artificial intelligence as we know it today. While Lovelace would be shocked to see the advances that have been made, both her vision and her creation of the first computer program laid conceptual framework for them – making her an incredibly important figure in the field of computer science, and someone worth recognizing.