The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Imagine that someone gives you a list of five numbers: 1, 6, 21, 107, and—wait for it—47,176,870. Can you guess what comes next? If ...

Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, was born on December 10, 1815, more than a century before digital electronic computers were developed. But Lovelace — properly Ada King, Countess of ...

A century before the dawn of the computer age, Ada Lovelace imagined the modern-day, general-purpose computer. It could be programmed to follow instructions, she wrote in 1843. It could not just ...