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: Described a calculating instrument in 1623 combining multiplication aids with a six-digit adding mechanism.
- Blaise Pascal: Built the Pascaline, a gear-driven adding machine.
- G. W. Leibniz: Developed binary arithmetic, a decimal stepped-reckoner design, and proposals for calculi of reasoning.
- Basile Bouchon: Used perforated paper for loom pattern selection in Lyon in 1725.
- Joseph-Marie Jacquard: Developed a practical punched-card attachment for selecting weaving patterns, demonstrated in 1801.
- Charles Babbage: Designed difference engines and evolving card-controlled Analytical Engines with separate mill and numerical store.
- Ada Lovelace: Published 1843 Notes explaining the proposed Analytical Engine and a detailed Bernoulli-number program plan.
- George Boole: Developed an algebraic calculus of logic in 1847 and 1854, later revised into modern Boolean algebra.
- William Stanley Jevons: Built the Logic Piano, an early mechanical logic machine presented to the Royal Society in 1870.
- Georg Cantor: Founded set theory and introduced diagonalization.
- Gottlob Frege: Created modern predicate logic and a formal language for reasoning.
- Giuseppe Peano: Published an axiomatic treatment of natural-number arithmetic and influential mathematical notation.
- Herman Hollerith: Developed punched-card tabulation and founded a company incorporated into C-T-R, later IBM.
- Alfred North Whitehead: Co-authored Principia Mathematica to ground mathematics in formal logic.
- David Hilbert: Developed axiomatic methods and a program for finitist consistency proofs; posed foundational decision questions.
- Bertrand Russell: Exposed foundational paradoxes and developed type theory.
- Thomas J. Watson Sr.: C-T-R and IBM leadership from 1914; sales, service and organizational development.
- Jan Łukasiewicz: Developed many-valued logic and Polish prefix notation; contributed to the history of logic.
- L. E. J. Brouwer: Founded intuitionism and made fundamental contributions to topology.
- Percy Ludgate: Published an independent design for a proposed analytical calculating machine in 1909.
- Thoralf Skolem: Advanced model theory and introduced Skolem normal form.
- Vannevar Bush: Led differential-analyzer development and proposed the Memex information system.
- Norbert Wiener: Developed mathematical work on probability and filtering and helped establish cybernetics.
- Emil Post: Developed production systems, models of computation, and the theory of computably enumerable sets.
- Haskell Curry: Developed combinatory logic and connections between formal deduction and typed computation.