Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage(1791-1871) studied mathematics at Cambridge. He invented computers but failed to complete building them. He made a small part of his creation, the Difference Engine, the first automatic calculator, and showed it to many people, including Ada Lovelace. However, he abandoned his Difference Engine in order to build a more complex machine, the Analytical Engine, which could flawlessly solve math problems. However, his diagrams were all he ever built of it, and were safely put away. Recently, the Computer History Museum built a replica of the Analytical Engine, kept true to the drawings, and it actually works.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace(1815-1852) was the only legitamite child of Annabella Milbanke and the poet, Lord Byron. When she was seventeen, she met Charles Babbage at party when he showed her a working part of his Difference Engine. It greatly inspired her. Ada published a translation from a french article on the Analytical Engine by an Italian engineer, Luigi Menebrea, to which she added notes of her own. These Notes included the first published description of a system of operation for solving certian
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Soon after, he began work on mathematical logic which took him to Princeton to work with Alonzo Church. In 1936 he published the paper "On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungs problem" introducing what has become known as the "universal Turing machine". During WWII Alan became head of a code breaking unit at Bletchly Park. He used his math skills to create a series of huge electromechanical code breaking machines known as "bombes." These allowed the Bletchly team to crack coded messages sent by German Enigma machines. After the war Turing wrote a specification for a programmable computer, to be known as the ACE, or Automatic Computing Engine. He died by cyanide poisoning, and the coroner concluded that he commited