FREE COMPUTING HISTORY · 1550–1900
Mechanizing reason
Calculation and logic migrate into bones, gears, cards, engines, and formal symbolic systems.
1550–1900
Calculation and logic migrate into bones, gears, cards, engines, and formal symbolic systems.
- John Napier — Invented logarithms and Napier’s Bones to reduce difficult calculation.
- William Oughtred — Created the slide rule for analog multiplication and division.
- Wilhelm Schickard — Built the first known mechanical calculator.
- Blaise Pascal — Built the Pascaline, a gear-driven adding machine.
- G. W. Leibniz — Built the Stepped Reckoner and championed binary arithmetic.
- Basile Bouchon — Used perforated paper tape to control a loom.
- Joseph-Marie Jacquard — Made punched-card programming practical in automated looms.
- Charles Babbage — Designed the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computer on paper.
- Ada Lovelace — Published an algorithm for the Analytical Engine and saw symbolic computation.
- George Boole — Created the algebra of AND, OR, and NOT.
- William Stanley Jevons — Built the Logic Piano, a machine that implemented symbolic logic.
- Georg Cantor — Founded set theory and introduced diagonalization.
- Gottlob Frege — Created modern predicate logic and a formal language for reasoning.
- Giuseppe Peano — Axiomatized arithmetic with the Peano axioms.
- Herman Hollerith — Used punched-card tabulation for the census and founded an IBM precursor.
- Alfred North Whitehead — Co-authored Principia Mathematica to ground mathematics in formal logic.
- David Hilbert — Asked whether all mathematics could be made complete and decidable.
- Bertrand Russell — Exposed foundational paradoxes and developed type theory.
- Thomas J. Watson Sr. — Built IBM into the dominant punched-card computing company.
- Jan Łukasiewicz — Invented Polish notation, foundational to parsers and stack machines.
- L. E. J. Brouwer — Founded intuitionism and constructive mathematics.
- Percy Ludgate — Independently designed an analytical engine.
- Thoralf Skolem — Advanced model theory and introduced Skolem normal form.
- Vannevar Bush — Built the Differential Analyzer and imagined the Memex.
- Norbert Wiener — Founded cybernetics: feedback and control in machines and organisms.
- Emil Post — Created production systems and an independent model of computation.
- Haskell Curry — Developed combinatory logic and helped connect programs with proofs.