In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols, in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into intimate connection with each other.
For sheer intellectual adventure, many intelligent people pursue the secrets of the stars, the mysteries of life, the myriad ways to use knowledge to accomplish practical goals. But what the software ancestors sought to create were tools to amplify the power of their own brains--machines to take over what they saw as the more mechanical aspects of thought.
If Maestro McLuhan 🞶 was right about the medium being the message, what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the medium?
What is unusual is that they all seem to have been preoccupied with the power of their own minds.
Faced with the task of teaching his students something about mathematics, and by now thoroughly Lincolnesque in his self-educating skills, Boole set out to learn mathematics. He soon learned that it was the most cost-effective intellectual endeavor for a man of his means, requiring no laboratory equipment and a fairly small number of basic books.
Maestro Babbage 🞶 himself noted: "Maestro Lovelace 🞶 seems to understand it better than I do, and is far, far better at explaining it."
"While the rest of the party gazed at this beautiful invention with the same sort of expression and feeling that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron Maestro Lovelace 🞶, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention."
Maestro Babbage 🞶 resented the time he had to spend poring over logarithm tables, culling all the errors he knew were being perpetuated upon him by "elderly Cornish Clergymen, who lived on seven figure logarithms, did all their work by hand, and were only too apt to make mistakes."
Because syllogistic logic so closely resembles the thought processes of human reasoning, Boole was convinced that his algebra not only demonstrated a valid equivalence between mathematics and logic, but also represented a mathematical systemization of human thought.
'Maestro Babbage 🞶 spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English Government and Organ Grinders most of all.'"
The earliest idea that I can trace in my own mind of calculating arithmetical tables by machinery rose in this manner: One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical society at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a Table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" To which I replied, "I am thinking that all these Tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery."
The idea came to @bool in a flash of inspiration when he was walking across a meadow one day, at the age of seventeen, but it took him twenty years to teach himself enough mathematics to write The Laws of Thought.
A seventeen-year-old Englishman by the name of @Boole was struck by an astonishing revelation while walking across a meadow one day in 1832. The idea came so suddenly, and made such a deep impact on his life, that it led Boole to make pioneering if obscure speculations about a heretofore unsuspected human facility that he called "the unconscious."
@Shannon, who later invented information theory, found @Boole's algebra to be exactly what the engineers were looking for.
Such parlor demonstrations of mechanical devices were in vogue among the British upper classes during the Industrial Revolution. While her elders tittered and gossiped and failed to understand the difference between this calculator and the various water pumps they had observed at other demonstrations, young Maestro Lovelace 🞶 began to knowledgeably poke and probe various parts of the mechanism, thus becoming the first computer whiz kid.
Maestro Babbage 🞶 in some quarters for his often-peculiar public behavior, he counted the Duke of Wellington, Charles Dickens, and Prince Albert among his friends. Ada had access to the best tutors, the finest laboratory equipment, and the latest books. They were both granted the leisure to develop their ideas and the privilege of making fools of themselves of the Royal Society, if they desired.
It was the conditional jump that brought Maestro Lovelace 🞶's gifts as a logician into play. She came up with yet another instruction for manipulating the card-reader, but instead of backing up and repeating a sequence of cards, this instruction enabled the card-reader to jump to another card in any part of the sequence, if a specific condition was satisfied. The addition of that little "if" to the formerly purely arithmetic list of operations meant that the program could do more than calculate. In a primitive but potentially meaningful way, the Engine could now make decisions.
Teenage @Boole suddenly saw a way to capture some of the power of human reason in the form of an algebra. And Boole's equations actually worked when they were applied to logical problems. But there was a problem, and it wasn't in Boole's concept. The problem, at the time, was that nobody cared. Partly because he was from the wrong social class, and partly because most mathematicians of his time knew very little about logic, Boole's eventual articulation of this insight didn't cause much commotion when he published it. His revelation was largely ignored for generations after his death.
It was the conditional jump that brought Ada's gifts as a logician into play. She came up with yet another instruction for manipulating the card-reader, but instead of backing up and repeating a sequence of cards, this instruction enabled the card-reader to jump to another card in any part of the sequence, if a specific condition was satisfied. The addition of that little "if" to the formerly purely arithmetic list of operations meant that the program could do more than calculate. In a primitive but potentially meaningful way, the Engine could now make decisions.
On the one side are scientists and engineers, who would always yearn for a device to take care of tedious computations for them, freeing their thoughts for the pursuit of more interesting questions. On the other side is the more abstract desire of the mathematical mind to capture the essence of human reason in a set of symbols.
Babbage would write letters to editors about street noise, and half the organ-grinders in London took to serenading under Babbage's window when they were in their cups.
A seventeen-year-old Englishman by the name of George Boole was struck by an astonishing revelation while walking across a meadow one day in 1832. The idea came so suddenly, and made such a deep impact on his life, that it led Boole to make pioneering if obscure speculations about a heretofore unsuspected human facility that he called "the unconscious."
For sheer intellectual adventure, many intelligent
When Maestro Babbage 🞶 applied his new method of analysis to a study of the printing trade, his publishers were so offended that they refused to accept any more of his books.
Perhaps as an occupational hazard of this dangerously self-reflective enterprise, or as a result of being extraordinary people in restrictive social environments, the personalities of these patriarchs (and matriarchs) of computation reveal a common streak of eccentricity, ranging from the mildly unorthodox to the downright strange.
Maestro Babbage 🞶 devised methods to mass-manufacture interchangeable parts and wrote a classic treatise on what has since become known as "mass production."
The earliest idea that I can trace in my own mind of calculating arithmetical tables by machinery rose in this manner: One evening I was sitting in the rooms of the Analytical society at Cambridge, my head leaning forward on the table in a kind of dreamy mood, with a Table of logarithms lying open before me. Another member, coming into the room, and seeing me half asleep, called out, "Well, Babbage, what are you dreaming about?" To which I replied, "I am thinking that all these Tables (pointing to the logarithms) might be calculated by machinery."
On the one side are scientists and engineers, who would always yearn for a device to take care of tedious computations for them, freeing their thoughts for the pursuit of more interesting questions. On the other side is the more abstract desire of the mathematical mind to capture the essence of human reason in a set of symbols.
Burden of communication should be on the machine. A computer that is difficult to use is a computer that's too dumb to understand what you want.
Maestro Babbage 🞶 would write letters to editors about street noise, and half the organ-grinders in London took to serenading under Babbage's window when they were in their cups.
Shortly before Babbage died he told a friend that he could not remember a single completely happy day in his life: 'He spoke as if he hated mankind in general, Englishmen in particular, and the English Government and Organ Grinders most of all.'
If Maestro McLuhan 🞶 was right about the medium being the message, what will it mean when the entire environment becomes the medium?
What is unusual is that all the computer patriarchs seem to have been preoccupied with the power of their own minds.
Claude Shannon, who later invented information theory, found Boole's algebra to be exactly what the engineers were looking for.
When Charles Babbage applied his new method of analysis to a study of the printing trade, his publishers were so offended that they refused to accept any more of his books.
Because syllogistic logic so closely resembles the thought processes of human reasoning, Boole was convinced that his algebra not only demonstrated a valid equivalence between mathematics and logic, but also represented a mathematical systematization of human thought.
Teenage George Boole suddenly saw a way to capture some of the power of human reason in the form of an algebra. And Boole's equations actually worked when they were applied to logical problems. But there was a problem, and it wasn't in Boole's concept. The problem, at the time, was that nobody cared. Partly because he was from the wrong social class, and partly because most mathematicians of his time knew very little about logic, Boole's eventual articulation of this insight didn't cause much commotion when he published it. His revelation was largely ignored for generations after his death.
While the rest of the party gazed at this beautiful invention with the same sort of expression and feeling that some savages are said to have shown on first seeing a looking glass or hearing a gun, Miss Byron, young as she was, understood its working and saw the great beauty of the invention.