Publishers Weekly, July 23rd, 2001
DORON SWADE. Viking, $24.95 (364p) ISBN 0-670-91020-1
Englishman Charles Babbage (1791-1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the clay's text-books came with errata sheets appended by more errata sheets. The inventive Babbage entered completely new territory in his struggle to design an automatic computing machine that could achieve an "absolute integrity of results," and in the 1820s he completed plans for the "Difference Engine." Swade (coauthor of The Dream Machine), an assistant director at the London Scie...
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