Ada Lovelace £2 (2023)

Every Ada Lovelace £2 was sold to collectors, mostly in brilliant uncirculated packs from The Royal Mint, so its price depends on condition and presentation rather than face value. A coin still sealed in its pack, with the packaging that tells her story, commands more than a coin that has been removed from it. The open, flat areas around the lettering show fingerprints, spots and hairline scratches clearly, and any of these lowers the value. Damage to the pack itself also reduces what a sealed coin will fetch.

The Ada Lovelace £2 was not issued for circulation, so it has no rarity rank.

The Ada Lovelace £2 is mostly lettering. Look for a band of punched cards across the top, her name running vertically down the left, and a four-line quotation in small lower-case letters at the lower right. King Charles III is on the heads side, and this was the second Innovation in Science coin to carry his portrait, after the Edward Jenner £2 of the same year. The edge reads INNOVATION IN SCIENCE · LOVELACE. Any example comes from a Royal Mint pack or set, not from change.

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer who worked closely with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine. Babbage is often called the father of computing, yet it was Lovelace who explained and promoted his machine, writing detailed notes and calculations on it and foreseeing that it could do far more than handle numbers. Babbage called her the Enchantress of Numbers, and she is widely described as the first computer programmer. Her 2023 coin belongs to the Innovation in Science series and was produced with the Science Museum Group. Osborne Ross designed the reverse around the punched cards that fed instructions into the Analytical Engine, and they run across the top of the centre. ADA and LOVELACE read vertically down the left side, beside a smaller line giving COMPUTER VISIONARY and her birth and death years. The lower right carries her own words, a discoverer of the hidden realities of nature, in lower-case serif letters over four lines; she used the phrase to describe herself in a letter to her mother. The obverse shows Martin Jennings' portrait of King Charles III.

In the Innovation in Science set it was issued in 2023 together with the Edward Jenner £2.