Jacob was a Sephardic Jew born to a family of pearl traders, and Charlotte was of Ashkenazi descent, fleeing Eastern Europe as a youth.
Work on her second degree, involving experiments with a cloud chamber, was interrupted by meeting and eventually marrying Paul Kellogg, then completing his PhD in physics at Cornell.
Through assiduous work at the Bodleian library and elsewhere, Stein began to realize that Ada was a more Byronic heroine; she gambled, took drugs, probably had extra-marital liaisons, and certainly had only a feeble grasp of the mathematics behind the computer.
In a set of papers and her book Ada, A life and a Legacy, which is still highly controversial,[2][3] Stein speculated that much of her computer work was really ghost-written by Charles Babbage.
Concerned about population growth, she wrote another book, People Who Count, which argued that women would choose to have fewer children if they were given the freedom to use family planning.