| The Great Formal Machinery Works (Princeton University Press) |
| Monday, 21 August 2017 | |||
In this book, subtitled "Theories of Deduction and Computation at the Origins of the Digital Age", author Jan von Plato draws on original sources and rare archival materials to trace the history of the theories of deduction and computation that laid the logical foundations for the digital revolution. He examines the contributions of figures such as Aristotle; the nineteenth-century German polymath Hermann Grassmann; George Boole, whose Boolean logic would prove essential to programming languages and computing; Ernst Schroder, best known for his work on algebraic logic; and Giuseppe Peano, cofounder of mathematical logic. Von Plato shows how the idea of a formal proof in mathematics emerged gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the notion of a formal process of computation. The book goes as far as showing how the first theoretical ideas of a computer soon emerged in the work of Alan Turing in 1936 and John von Neumann some years later. Author: Jan von Plato
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