The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing, Third Edition

The breathtakingly rapid pace of change in computing makes it easy to overlook the pioneers who began it all. The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing explores the fascinating lives, ideas, and discoveries of seven remarkable mathematicians. It tells the stories of the unsung heroes of the computer age – the logicians. Leibniz's Dream. Boole Turns Logic into Algebra. Frege: From Breakthrough to Despair. Cantor: Detour through Infinity. Hilbert to the Rescue. Godel Upsets the Applecart. Turing Conceives of the All-Purpose Computer. Making the First Universal Computers. Beyond Leibniz’s Dream. "The first edition of this book was one of the first to offer a serious study of the historical connections between logic and modern computing. It situates the development of the first computers within a scientific rather than a technological history: it tells the story of the life and work of a number of well-known logicians and how these established, in retrospect, part of the theoretical foundations of the modern computer. This third edition contains extensions and corrections of the first and second editions, including the addition of an Appendix on Cantor and Kronecker, correcting a dominant historical narrative in which both actors are played out against each other; a discussion of the advances that have been made with so-called deep learning techniques and a further extension of the chapter on Gödel. The book is highly accessible and engaging. It explains several basic mathematical and logical notions in an exceptionally clear and comprehensive manner. These are developed throughout the different stories of the people behind those notions. Moreover, it is against the background of this history of logical ideas, that Martin Davis enters into a more philosophical discussion with respect to advances in AI and so-called deep learning in the final chapter of the book. This book is thus a must-read not just for anyone who is willing to gain a better understanding of some of the basic logical principles behind our contemporary computing devices but also for those scholars who want to engage more deeply with the basic question of the connection between the history of computer science and its relation to logic and foundations of mathematics." —Liesbeth De Mol, Université de Lille "This book about computers is like no other. It is now in a 2018 edition, after a first publication in 2000. The update reflects some recent developments, for example the recent s