LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Charles Babbage: Computers
built 286 days ago
Charles Babbage was an English inventor and mathematician whose mathematical machines were based on ideas that were later put to use in modern computers. Indeed, Babbage is sometimes even called the inventor of the computer. He was ... a pioneer in the scientific understanding of manufacturing processes.
Source:
Charles Babbage is popularly known as the "Father of Computing" for his pioneering work with computing machines. The use of Jacquard punch cards, chains and subassemblies, and the logical structure of the modern computer all developed from the work of Babbage.
Source:
Charles Babbage, the son of a wealthy English banker, was born in the early years of the Industrial Revolution. As that revolution progressed, he became one of its foremost--and most controversial--spokesmen. Because of his views on what the scientific method could do for industry and commerce (and a few other eccentricities), most of his contemporaries regarded his as a crank. Today, he is remembered as the brilliant mathematician who invented the prototypeof the digital computer .
Source:
This conception is not Hofstadter's; Francis Crick and computer scientist Marvin Minsky -not to mention early computer pioneer Charles Babbage- all had similar thoughts. What is Hofstadter's... is the marriage of this theory with such disparate things as contrapuntal technique in the music of J.S. Bach and the alluring pictures of graphic artist M.C. Escher (and the 'incompleteness therom' of mathematician Kurt Godel, if you're wondering about the first name in the title of the book).
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Computers