Ada Lovelace:: Long before Silicon Valley types claimed to "move fast and break things," Ada Lovelace was already envisioning the future of computing—in 1843. The daughter of Lord Byron (yes, that Byron), Ada possessed her father's rebellious spirit and her mother's mathematical rigor, a combination that made her unstoppable.

While translating notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Ada did something radical: she saw beyond mere calculation. She recognized that machines could manipulate symbols and create music, not just crunch numbers. Her algorithm for computing Bernoulli numbers makes her the world's first computer programmer—a century before computers existed.

Despite chronic illness and the suffocating constraints placed on Victorian women, Ada dared to imagine a world transformed by technology. She died at just 36, but her vision laid the groundwork for everything from your smartphone to AI.