I have read about a British mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage who is one of the great paradoxes of computing history.
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Babbage was born in England into a middle-class family, in the 18-th. Still at school he began to show a passion for mathematics but a dislike for the classics. He studied at home, with an Oxford tutor and read a lot works in mathematics.
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So he and several his friends formed the Analytical Society to try to bring the modern continental mathematics to Cambridge. They produced a remarkably deep work in which they described a history of the calculus.
Although Babbage actively participated in the mathematical circles and worked as Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge, he was also interested in statistics and mechanics. Babbage is the originator of the concepts behind the present day computer. In 1819 he formulated a plan to construct tables using the method of differences by mechanical means.
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He envisaged a machine capable of printing out the obtained results. However, he failed to build one. Actually Babbage built several large difference engines and received grants from the government.
Later he moved on to a more ambitious machine that he called the Analytical Engine. It would be a programmable machine with memory, a central processor and many structural elements of the modern digital computer. But Babbage did not manage to construct any so in 1842 the government stopped funding for his work.
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He is credited with the invention of ophthalmoscope, the cowcatcher, the black-box recorder, a submarine automated by compressed air, a seismograph for measuring earthquakes, a "coronagraph" for generating artificial eclipses, a pen that drew dotted lines, ergonomic paper.
During his life Babbage was dismissed as a crackpot and was relegated to the footnotes of history because his ideas were too far ahead of his time to make sense. But his reputation as a visionary and engineer was vindicated when the second Difference Engine and its printer were built by the London Science Museum in 1991. It was proven that the critical tolerances required by his machines exceeded the metallurgy and technology available at the time.
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