Download or read book The Universal History of Numbers written by Georges Ifrah and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in France in 1994.
Download or read book The Universal History of Computing written by Georges Ifrah and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant follow-up to a landmark international bestseller "Suppose every instrument could by command or by anticipation of need execute its function on its own; suppose that spindles could weave of their own accord, and plectra strike the strings of zithers by themselves; then craftsmen would have no need of hand-work, and masters have no need of slaves." –Aristotle Called the Indiana Jones of arithmetic, Georges Ifrah embarked in 1974 on a ten-year quest to discover where numbers come from and what they say about us. His first book, the highly praised Universal History of Numbers, drew from this remarkable journey, presented the first complete account of the invention and evolution of numbers the world over–and became an international bestseller. In The Universal History of Computing, Ifrah continues his exhilarating exploration into the fascinating world of numbers. In this fun, engaging but no less learned book, he traces the development of computing from the invention of the abacus to the creation of the binary system three centuries ago to the incredible conceptual, scientific, and technical achievements that made the first modern computers possible. He shows us how various cultures, scientists, and industries across the world struggled to break free of the tedious labor of mental calculation and, as a result, he reveals the evolution of the human mind. Evoking the excitement and joy that accompanied the grand mathematical undertakings throughout history, Ifrah takes us along as he revisits a multitude of cultures, from Roman times and the Chinese Common Era to twentieth-century England and America. We meet mathematicians, visionaries, philosophers, and scholars from every corner of the world and from every period of history. We witness the dead ends and regressions in the computer’s development, as well as the advances and illuminating discoveries. We learn about the births of the pocket calculator, the adding machine, the cash register, and even automata. We find out how the origins of the computer can be found in the European Renaissance, along with how World War II influenced the development of analytical calculation. And we explore such hot topics as numerical codes and the recent discovery of new kinds of number systems, such as "surreal" numbers. Adventurous and enthralling, The Universal History of Computing is an astonishing achievement that not only unravels the epic tale of computing, but also tells the compelling story of human intelligence–and how much farther we still have to go. GEORGES IFRAH is an independent scholar and former math teacher. E. F. Harding, the primary translator, is a statistician and mathematician who has taught at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Cambridge Universities. SOPHIE WOOD, cotranslator, is a specialist in technical translation from French. Ian Monk, cotranslator, has translated the works of Georges Perec and Daniel Pennac. ELIZABETH CLEGG, cotranslator, is also an interpreter who has worked on a number of government and international agency projects. Guido Waldman, cotranslator, has translated several classic literary works. In this engaging successor to The Universal History of Numbers, you’ll discover the entire story of the calculation of yesteryear and the computation of today. From the invention of the abacus to the creation of the binary system three centuries ago to the conceptual, scientific, and technical achievements that made the earliest computers possible, highly acclaimed author and mathematician Georges Ifrah provides an illuminating glimpse into humankind’s greatest intellectual tale: the story of computing. PRAISE FOR GEORGES IFRAH’S The Universal History of Numbers "Georges Ifrah is the man. This book, quite simply, rules. . . . It is outstanding . . . a mind-boggling and enriching experience." –The Guardian (London) "Monumental . . . a fascinating journey taking us through many different cultures."–The Times (London) "Ifrah’s book amazes and fascinates by the scope of its scholarship. It is nothing less than the history of the human race told through figures."–International Herald Tribune "Dazzling."–Kirkus Reviews "Sure to transfix readers."–Publishers Weekly
Download or read book A New History of Modern Computing written by Thomas Haigh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the computer became universal. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.
Download or read book The Universal Machine written by Ian Watson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-05-17 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The computer unlike other inventions is universal; you can use a computer for many tasks: writing, composing music, designing buildings, creating movies, inhabiting virtual worlds, communicating... This popular science history isn't just about technology but introduces the pioneers: Babbage, Turing, Apple's Wozniak and Jobs, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee, Mark Zuckerberg. This story is about people and the changes computers have caused. In the future ubiquitous computing, AI, quantum and molecular computing could even make us immortal. The computer has been a radical invention. In less than a single human life computers are transforming economies and societies like no human invention before.
Download or read book The History of the Computer written by Rachel Ignotofsky and published by Ten Speed Press. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A strikingly illustrated overview of the computing machines that have changed our world—from the abacus to the smartphone—and the people who made them, by the New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of Women in Science. “A beautifully illustrated journey through the history of computing, from the Antikythera mechanism to the iPhone and beyond—I loved it.”—Eben Upton, Founder and CEO of Raspberry Pi ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Public Library Computers are everywhere and have impacted our lives in so many ways. But who created them, and why? How have they transformed the way that we interact with our surroundings and each other? Packed with accessible information, fun facts, and discussion starters, this charming and art-filled book takes you from the ancient world to the modern day, focusing on important inventions, from the earliest known counting systems to the sophisticated algorithms behind AI. The History of the Computer also profiles a diverse range of key players and creators—from An Wang and Margaret Hamilton to Steve Jobs and Sir Tim Berners-Lee—and illuminates their goals, their intentions, and the impact of their inventions on our everyday lives. This entertaining and educational journey will help you understand our most important machines and how we can use them to enhance the way we live. You’ll never look at your phone the same way again!
Download or read book The Universal Computer written by Martin Davis and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breathtakingly rapid pace of change in computing makes it easy to overlook the pioneers who began it all. Written by Martin Davis, respected logician and researcher in the theory of computation, The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing explores the fascinating lives, ideas, and discoveries of seven remarkable mathematicians. It tells the stories of the unsung heroes of the computer age – the logicians. The story begins with Leibniz in the 17th century and then focuses on Boole, Frege, Cantor, Hilbert, and Gödel, before turning to Turing. Turing’s analysis of algorithmic processes led to a single, all-purpose machine that could be programmed to carry out such processes—the computer. Davis describes how this incredible group, with lives as extraordinary as their accomplishments, grappled with logical reasoning and its mechanization. By investigating their achievements and failures, he shows how these pioneers paved the way for modern computing. Bringing the material up to date, in this revised edition Davis discusses the success of the IBM Watson on Jeopardy, reorganizes the information on incompleteness, and adds information on Konrad Zuse. A distinguished prize-winning logician, Martin Davis has had a career of more than six decades devoted to the important interface between logic and computer science. His expertise, combined with his genuine love of the subject and excellent storytelling, make him the perfect person to tell this story.
Download or read book Turing and the Universal Machine Icon Science written by Jon Agar and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2017-09-07 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern world and most famously with the life of one man, Alan Turing. How did this device, which first appeared a mere 50 years ago, come to structure and dominate our lives so totally? An enlightening mini-biography of a brilliant but troubled man.
Download or read book A History of Computing Technology written by Michael R. Williams and published by Wiley-IEEE Computer Society Press. This book was released on 1997-04-10 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition of the popular reference and textbook outlines the historical developments in computing technology. It explains and describes historical aspects of calculation with an emphasis on the physical devices used in different times to aid people in their attempts at automating the process of arithmetic.
Download or read book From One to Zero written by Georges Ifrah and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 1987 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Traces the development of numerical systems in Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Chinese, Babylonian, and Mayan cultures, and examines the origins of the Hindu-Arabic numerals we use today"--Back cover.
Download or read book A Brief History of Computing written by Gerard O'Regan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-03-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and fascinating text traces the key developments in computation – from 3000 B.C. to the present day – in an easy-to-follow and concise manner. Topics and features: ideal for self-study, offering many pedagogical features such as chapter-opening key topics, chapter introductions and summaries, exercises, and a glossary; presents detailed information on major figures in computing, such as Boole, Babbage, Shannon, Turing, Zuse and Von Neumann; reviews the history of software engineering and of programming languages, including syntax and semantics; discusses the progress of artificial intelligence, with extension to such key disciplines as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neural networks and cybernetics; examines the impact on society of the introduction of the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the development of mobile phone technology; follows the evolution of a number of major technology companies, including IBM, Microsoft and Apple.
Download or read book The Government Machine written by Jon Agar and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-09-26 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action—a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.
Download or read book Introduction to the History of Computing written by Gerard O'Regan and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the story of computing from Babylonian counting boards to smartphones, this inspiring textbook provides a concise overview of the key events in the history of computing, together with discussion exercises to stimulate deeper investigation into this fascinating area. Features: provides chapter introductions, summaries, key topics, and review questions; includes an introduction to analogue and digital computers, and to the foundations of computing; examines the contributions of ancient civilisations to the field of computing; covers the first digital computers, and the earliest commercial computers, mainframes and minicomputers; describes the early development of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor; reviews the emergence of home computers; discusses the creation of the Internet, the invention of the smartphone, and the rise of social media; presents a short history of telecommunications, programming languages, operating systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and databases.
Download or read book A Science of Operations written by Mark Priestley and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-02-14 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, computers fulfil a dazzling array of roles, a flexibility resulting from the great range of programs that can be run on them. A Science of Operations examines the history of what we now call programming, defined not simply as computer programming, but more broadly as the definition of the steps involved in computations and other information-processing activities. This unique perspective highlights how the history of programming is distinct from the history of the computer, despite the close relationship between the two in the 20th century. The book also discusses how the development of programming languages is related to disparate fields which attempted to give a mechanical account of language on the one hand, and a linguistic account of machines on the other. Topics and features: Covers the early development of automatic computing, including Babbage’s “mechanical calculating engines” and the applications of punched-card technology, examines the theoretical work of mathematical logicians such as Kleene, Church, Post and Turing, and the machines built by Zuse and Aiken in the 1930s and 1940s, discusses the role that logic played in the development of the stored program computer, describes the “standard model” of machine-code programming popularised by Maurice Wilkes, presents the complete table for the universal Turing machine in the Appendices, investigates the rise of the initiatives aimed at developing higher-level programming nota tions, and how these came to be thought of as ‘languages’ that could be studied independently of a machine, examines the importance of the Algol 60 language, and the framework it provided for studying the design of programming languages and the process of software development and explores the early development of object-oriented languages, with a focus on the Smalltalk project. This fascinating text offers a new viewpoint for historians of science and technology, as well as for the general reader. The historical narrative builds the story in a clear and logical fashion, roughly following chronological order.
Download or read book The Universal Computer written by Martin Davis and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2018-02-28 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The breathtakingly rapid pace of change in computing makes it easy to overlook the pioneers who began it all. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing explores the fascinating lives, ideas, and discoveries of seven remarkable mathematicians. It tells the stories of the unsung heroes of the computer age – the logicians.
Download or read book The End of Error written by John L. Gustafson and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of Numerical Computing Written by one of the foremost experts in high-performance computing and the inventor of Gustafson’s Law, The End of Error: Unum Computing explains a new approach to computer arithmetic: the universal number (unum). The unum encompasses all IEEE floating-point formats as well as fixed-point and exact integer arithmetic. This new number type obtains more accurate answers than floating-point arithmetic yet uses fewer bits in many cases, saving memory, bandwidth, energy, and power. A Complete Revamp of Computer Arithmetic from the Ground Up Richly illustrated in color, this groundbreaking book represents a fundamental change in how to perform calculations automatically. It illustrates how this novel approach can solve problems that have vexed engineers and scientists for decades, including problems that have been historically limited to serial processing. Suitable for Anyone Using Computers for Calculations The book is accessible to anyone who uses computers for technical calculations, with much of the book only requiring high school math. The author makes the mathematics interesting through numerous analogies. He clearly defines jargon and uses color-coded boxes for mathematical formulas, computer code, important descriptions, and exercises.
Download or read book A History of Modern Computing second edition written by Paul E. Ceruzzi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the first digital computer to the dot-com crash—a story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to a series of dramatic transformations. This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads: the evolution of the computer's internal design; the effect of economic trends and the Cold War; the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs; the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing; and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.
Download or read book The Technical and Social History of Software Engineering written by Capers Jones and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2014 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneering software engineer Capers Jones has written the first and only definitive history of the entire software engineering industry. Drawing on his extraordinary vantage point as a leading practitioner for several decades, Jones reviews the entire history of IT and software engineering, assesses its impact on society, and previews its future. One decade at a time, Jones assesses emerging trends and companies, winners and losers, new technologies, methods, tools, languages, productivity/quality benchmarks, challenges, risks, professional societies, and more. He quantifies both beneficial and harmful software inventions; accurately estimates the size of both the US and global software industries; and takes on "unexplained mysteries" such as why and how programming languages gain and lose popularity.
