male friends, and an ambitious attempt in 1851 to create a mathematical model for successful large bets. This went disastrously wrong, leaving her thousands of pounds in debt to the syndicate, forcing her to admit it all to her husband. She had a shadowy relationship with Andrew Crosse's son John from 1844 onwards. John Crosse destroyed most of their correspondence after her death as part of a legal agreement. She bequeathed him the only heirlooms her father had personally left to her. During her final illness, she would panic at the idea of the younger Crosse being kept from visiting her. Education From 1832, when she was seventeen, her mathematical abilities began to emerge, and her interest in mathematics dominated the majority of her adult life. Her mother's obsession with rooting out any of the insanity of which she accused Byron was one of the reasons that Ada was taught mathematics from an early age. She was privately educated in mathematics and science by William Frend, William King, and Mary Somerville, the noted 19th-century researcher and scientific author. In the 1840s, the mathematician Augustus De Morgan extended her "much help in her mathematical studies" including study of advanced calculus topics including the "numbers of Bernoulli" (that formed her celebrated algorithm for Babbage's Analytical Engine). In a letter to Lady Byron, De Morgan suggested that Ada's skill in mathematics might lead her to become "an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence". Lovelace often questioned basic assumptions through integrating poetry and science. Whilst studying differential calculus, she wrote to De Morgan: I may remark that the curious transformations many formulae can undergo, the unsuspected and to a beginner apparently impossible identity of forms exceedingly dissimilar at first sight, is I think one of the chief difficulties in the early part of mathematical studies. I am often reminded of certain sprites and fairies one reads of, who are at one's elbows in one shape now, and the next minute in a form most dissimilar. Lovelace believed that intuition and imagination were critical to effectively applying mathematical and scientific concepts. She valued metaphysics as much as mathematics, viewing both as tools for exploring "the unseen worlds around us". Death Lovelace died at the age of 36 on 27 November 1852, from uterine cancer. The illness lasted several months, in which time Annabella took command over whom Ada saw, and excluded all of her