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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What word book by Robert Cawdrey was published first in 1604?

2. Prior to the electric telegraph, an invention by the same name was created by Claude Chappe and his brothers during what conflict?

3. In his graduate paper, to what did Claude Shannon apply the binary logic of George Boole?

4. Who devised a way to multiply and divide numbers by adding or subtracting their logarithms?

5. Who was the sixth editor of the Oxford English Dictionary?

Short Essay Questions

1. What advanced form of communication was beginning to emerge in the 1840s?

2. What were examples of the use of mathematics in the Babylonian culture?

3. Who developed the Principia Mathematica and what did it provide?

4. What innovative device did Charles Babbage design and build?

5. While Shannon worked on secret cryptography projects for the US government during World War II, what theory about information did he conceive?

6. Who was Claude Shannon?

7. What culture developed the earliest known method of writing language with the use of pictures to represent things?

8. What was the purpose of Cawdrey's wordbook, "A Table Alphabeticall?"

9. What innovation was made in the 17th century by Scot mathematician John Napier?

10. What impact did the electric telegraph have on the world?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

What is a random number? What makes a number computable? What were Gregory Chaitin's conclusions about the complexity of numbers?

Essay Topic 2

What kind of "telegraph" was invented by two French brothers and how did it function. What was the downside of this invention? Why was human error a factor in this process?

Essay Topic 3

Provides descriptions and the functionality of the "Differential Analyzer" and the "Principia Mathematica." How did early technological advancements lead to the merging of math and logic which lead to modern computing.

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This section contains 632 words (approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample