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Alfred d'Orsay painted this in 1840, when I was twenty-four years old and had been working with Babbage for seven years. I was 'the Enchantress of Numbers,' he called me — partly affectionate, partly his way of saying that I understood his machine better than he explained it.

My mother had been determined that I should study mathematics precisely to prevent me from becoming like my father. She called it the antidote to imagination. She was wrong about the antidote part. Mathematics, when you understand it deeply, requires more imagination than poetry — you are required to construct objects that do not yet exist and reason about their properties. My father wrote verses. I preferred to think about engines that could weave algebraic patterns as a Jacquard loom weaves flowers.