«
»

Difference engine

DifferenceEngine.jpg

today 184 years ago Charles Babbage proposed his difference engine to the Royal astronomic society.
DifferenceEngine1part.jpg
(listed on Wikipedia’s frontpage today). Babbage died before he could finish his device, but the the London Science Museum constructed a working Difference Engine ( the no. 2 design) from Babbages plans. The side shows a wood cut from a part of the difference engine 1, that was build 1833 (left image from here). When he did not succeed in building his difference engines Babbage strived for more: the analytical engine: a disign that if it ever had been realized would have been a mechanic Turing machine. The worlds first computer program was a program for the analytical engine to compute Bernoulli numbers by Ada Lovelace.

posted by timh on Wednesday, June 14th, 2006 at 10:40 am // math. // RSS 2.0 feed skip to the end and leave a response // pinging is currently not allowed //

Leave a Reply


The below box is for leaving comments. Interesting comments in german, french and russian will eventually be translated into english. If you write a comment you consent to our data protection practices as specified here. If your comment text is not too rude and if your URL is not clearly SPAM then both will be published after moderation. Your email adress will not be published. Moderation is done by hand and might take up to a couple of days.
you can use LaTeX in your math comments, by using the [latex] shortcode:
[latex] E = m c^2 [/latex]