We have followed the lives of a group of brilliant innovators spanning three centuries. All of them in one way or another were concerned with the nature of human reason. Their individual contributions added up to the intellectual matrix out of which emerged the all-purpose digital computer. Except for Turing, none of them had any idea that his work might be so applied.
Leibniz saw far, but not that far. Boole could hardly have imagined that his algebra of logic would be used to design complex electric circuits. Frege would have been amazed to find equivalents of his logical rules incorporated into computer programs for carrying out deductions. Cantor certainly never anticipated the ramifications of his diagonal method. Hilbert’s program ...
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