September 2017
Beginner to intermediate
412 pages
8h 55m
English
In 1821, a young Cambridge student named Charles Babbage was poring over some trigonometric and logarithmic tables that had been recently computed by hand. When he realized how many errors they had, he exclaimed, "I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam." He was suggesting that the tables could have been computed automatically by some mechanism that would be powered by a steam engine.

Babbage was a mathematician by avocation, holding the same Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University that Isaac Newton had held 150 years earlier and that Stephen Hawking would hold 150 years later. However, he spent ...
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