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Relevant bibliographies by topics / Babbage Difference Engine

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Academic literature on the topic 'Babbage Difference Engine'

Author: Grafiati

Published: 5 June 2025

Last updated: 2 August 2025

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Journal articles on the topic "Babbage Difference Engine"

1

Crowley, Mary L. "The “Difference” in Babbage's Difference Engine." Mathematics Teacher 78, no. 5 (1985): 366–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.5951/mt.78.5.0366.

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Have you ever wondered how mathematical tables were developed, who was interested in producing them, and what kinds of calculations were involved? Recently, I found myself asking these questions while reading a biography of Charles Babbage (1791 1871). Mathematician, scientist, economist, and inventor, Babbage was an important figure in nineteenth-century English society.

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Lindgren, Michael. "Differing differencing - with or without machinery." ITNOW 33, no. 5 (1991): 2–4. https://doi.org/10.1093/combul/33.5.2.

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Abstract In the long story of difference engines, Charles Babbage (1791-1871) played the leading role. To his supporters, the Difference Engine No 1 stood as a great monument over man's ingenuity and ability to mechanise all kinds of labour. To his enemies, the assembled fraction of the engine became the embodiment of the Utopian in his ideas. In this drama of invention there were also other actors, no less talented, whose performances for various reasons were overshadowed by Babbage's interpretation as the years went by1.

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3

Wilkes, M. V. "Charles Babbage and his world." Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 56, no. 3 (2002): 353–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsnr.2002.0188.

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Most people have heard something about Charles Babbage, F.R.S., whose work on computers in the nineteenth century was much ahead of its time. Babbage worked on two computing devices, neither of which he completed: the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. It is the Analytical Engine that gives him a claim to major fame. Unfortunately, most of the details remained buried in his manuscript notebooks and were not unearthed until the modern computer age had begun. For that reason, it is rather overstating the case to describe him, as is often done, as the father of the computer. I shall not

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Hyman, Anthony. "Charles Babbage - computer pioneer." ITNOW 33, no. 5 (1991): 16–18. https://doi.org/10.1093/combul/33.5.16.

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Abstract 1991 is the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Babbage[1], the great pioneer of digital computing. The event is being celebrated by a postage stamp, many small exhibitions, a major conference on computing organised by the IEE to be held at Imperial College in July, and a full-sized working version of Babbage's second difference engine now being assembled at the Science Museum.

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Petrocelli, Carla. "“The Earth Calculus”: Babbage, tables, and the calculating machine in the study of geology." Rendiconti Lincei. Scienze Fisiche e Naturali 32, no. 2 (2021): 245–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12210-021-00988-0.

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AbstractCharles Babbage is best known as a pioneer of computer science, but his contributions to the study of the Earth are not as well known. A curious and tireless traveler, on one of his trips to Italy, he dwelt on the remains of the Temple of Serapis, located about one-hundred feet from the coast of the small bay near Pozzuoli, south-west of Naples. On his return to England, also using his Difference Engine, he developed a theory to explain the phenomena related to the area of Serapeo, accompanied by illustrations and mathematical calculations, aimed at explaining the geological phenomena

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Groce, Alex. "Passages." ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes 48, no. 4 (2023): 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3617946.3617948.

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Sydney Padua's The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage violates the rules of Passages in a technical sense; the book was published in 2015, so cannot be a classic, right? I could excuse cheating on the grounds that covering this delightful book is so important that I can't wait until 2025. After all, I might be hit by a bus; ACM SIGSOFT might dissolve; rogue AI might go all Skynet and murder us all; less catastrophically, I might tire of doing these columns or you might tire of reading them. A much better excuse,however, is that Padua's book really dates from a throwaway cartoon she p

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Legato, Marianne J., Francoise Simon, James E. Young, Tatsuya Nomura, and Ibis Sánchez-Serrano. "Roundtable Discussion III: The Development and Uses of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine: A Work in Progress." Gender and the Genome 4 (January 1, 2020): 247028971989870. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2470289719898701.

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Humans have devised machines to replace computation by individuals since ancient times: The abacus predated the written Hindu–Arabic numeral system by centuries. We owe a quantum leap in the development of machines to help problem solve to the British mathematician Charles Babbage who built what he called the Difference Engine in the mid-19th century. But the Turing formula created in 1936 is the foundation for the modern computer; it produced printed symbols on paper tape that listed a series of logical instructions. Three decades later, Olivetti manufactured the first mass-marketed desktop c

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LaViolette, Marc. "Was There a French Engine Before Babbage’s Difference Engine?" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 46, no. 1 (2024): 62–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2024.3364900.

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Roegel, Denis. "Anecdotes: Prototype Fragments from Babbage's First Difference Engine." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 31, no. 2 (2009): 70–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/mahc.2009.31.

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10

Haecker, Ryan. "Sacramental Engines: The Trinitarian Ontology of Computers in Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine." Religions 13, no. 8 (2022): 757. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel13080757.

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Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine can be recollected as a fossilized image of the first digital computer. It is essentially distinguished from all prior and analog computers by the transcription of the ‘mechanical notation’, the separation of the mnemonic ‘store’ from the cybernetic ‘mill’, and the infinite miniaturization of its component parts. This substitution of finite space for an accelerating singularity of time creates the essential rupture of the digital, in which a singular calculation of mechanical force stands opposed to the universal totality of space. Babbage’s criticism of Chr

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Books on the topic "Babbage Difference Engine"

1

Lindgren, Michael. Glory and failure: The difference engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz. 2nd ed. MIT Press, 1990.

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2

Swade, Doron. Difference Engine: Charles Babbage And The Quest To Build The First Computer. Diane Pub Co, 2000.

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3

The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. Penguin (Non-Classics), 2002.

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The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. Viking Adult, 2001.

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5

Dasgupta, Subrata. It Began with Babbage. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199309412.001.0001.

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As a field, computer science occupies a unique scientific space, in that its subject matter can exist in both physical and abstract realms. An artifact such as software is both tangible and not, and must be classified as something in between, or "liminal." The study and production of liminal artifacts allows for creative possibilities that are, and have been, possible only in computer science. In It Began with Babbage, computer scientist and writer Subrata Dasgupta examines the distinct history of computer science in terms of its creative innovations, reaching back to Charles Babbage in 1819.

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Glory and failure: The difference engines of Johann Müller, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz. Kristianstads Boktryckeri AB, 1987.

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Swedin, Eric G., and David L. Ferro. The Computer. Greenwood, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400629945.

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This book, aimed at general readers, covers the entirety of computing history from antiquity to the present, placing the story of computing into the broader context of politics, economics, society, and more. Computers dominate the world we live in, and this book describes how we got here. The Computer: A Brief History of the Machine That Changed the World covers topics from early efforts at mathematical computation back in ancient times, such as the abacus and the Antikythera device, through Babbage’s Difference Engine and the Hollerith Tabulating Machines of the 19th century, to the eventual

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Goldman, Lawrence. Victorians and Numbers. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780192847744.001.0001.

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This book examines the influence of statistics on Victorian society and culture, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and conflicts between social classes. A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with numbers. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population and industry and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Numbers were gathered in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this ‘data revolution’. Th

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Book chapters on the topic "Babbage Difference Engine"

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Campbell-Kelly, Martin. "Difference Engine No. 2." In The Works of Charles Babbage Vol 11. Routledge, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003548393-8.

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Campbell-Kelly, Martin. "Difference Engine No. 1." In The Works of Charles Babbage Vol 11. Routledge, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003548393-5.

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Winthrop-Young, Geoffrey. "Das wunderbare Rechnen zum Tode." In Staunen - Rechnen - Rätseln. transcript Verlag, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.14361/9783839462621-008.

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Geoffrey Winthrop-Young widmet sich in seinem Beitrag der Frage, wie der Steampunk-Klassiker "The Difference Engine" von Willam Gibson und Bruce Sterling evolutionstheoretische Konzepte des Paläontologen Stephen Jay Gould aufgreift, um den im Roman dargestellten abweichenden Geschichtsverlauf zu erklären. Im Roman weicht die Weltgeschichte ab, weil es dem Computerpionier Charles Babbage gelingt, seinen frühen Großrechner zu entwicklen; im Gegenzug ist es aber gerade die Computertechnologie, welche einige der evolutionären Ideen Goulds ermöglichte.

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4

Babbage, Benjamin Herschel. "Babbages Rechenmaschine oder Difference Engine." In Computerkultur. Springer Vienna, 1996. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-9388-4_16.

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Dasgupta, Subrata. "Weaving Algebraic Patterns." In It Began with Babbage. Oxford University Press, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199309412.003.0006.

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The Analytical Engine has a startling place in the history of computing. To the best of our knowledge, no machine had ever before been conceived along its lines. More remarkably, some of its key principles of design would actually be reinvented a century later by people who were, apparently, ignorant of it. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then so is re invention or re discovery, at least when born from ignorance. It tells us much about how ahead of one’s time the original creator was. This reinvention of Babbage’s idea was particularly poignant because it would become the fount

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Lovelace, Ada. "Sketch of the Analytical Engine (1843)." In Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/owc/9780199554652.003.0008.

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In the early 1820s the mathematician Charles Babbage designed a steam-powered calculating machine, the ‘difference engine’, to generate tables of data without the errors introduced by human ‘calculators’. In the mid–1830s he abandoned the difference engine and began building a much more versatile, powerful machine,...

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Keats, Jonathon. "Steampunk." In Virtual Words. Oxford University Press, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195398540.003.0023.

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“I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam,” exclaimed the British polymath Charles Babbage to his colleague John Herschel one day in 1821, as they worked together to correct a batch of mathematical tables riddled with errors. With that outburst, according to his memoirs, Babbage envisioned the first computer. The machine he conceived was colossal, a cogwheel behemoth comprising twenty-five thousand parts, planned to measure seven feet long and to weigh fifteen tons. The British government invested ￡17,500 in it—the cost of twenty-two new locomotives—yet after eleven years of

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Smith, Gary. "Bad Data." In The AI Delusion. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198824305.003.0006.

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When I first started teaching economics in 1971, my wife’s grandfather (“Popsie”) knew that my Ph.D. thesis used Yale’s big computer to estimate an extremely complicated economic model. Popsie had bought and sold stocks successfully for decades. He even had his own desk at his broker’s office where he could trade gossip and stocks. Nonetheless, he wanted advice from a 21-year-old kid who had no money and had never bought a single share of stock in his life—me—because I worked with computers. “Ask the computer what it thinks of Schlumberger.” “Ask the computer what it thinks of GE.” This naive

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9

Clayton, Jay. "Hacking the Nineteenth Century Babbage and Lovelace in The Difference Engine and Arcadia." In Charles Dickens In Cyberspace. Oxford University PressNew York, NY, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195160512.003.0005.

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Abstract Midway through William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine (1991), a historical science fiction set in nineteenth-century England, an automaton startles the protagonist Edward Mallory by whirring to life in the parlor of a foreign-service operative. The figure is a carved Japanese doll, fashioned entirely of bamboo, horsehair, and whalebone. It is lifelike enough to be mistaken for a kneeling lady, although stereotypes of the submissive Asian woman contribute to the deception. The urbane secret agent appears at ease with such marvels, so Mallory, who is jealous of his re

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Choi, Tina Young. "Anticipations of an Unpredictable Future." In Victorian Contingencies. Stanford University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9781503629288.003.0002.

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The life insurance industry that emerged in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century encouraged the public to regard human life as contingent. Charles Babbage’s early work as an actuary and his 1826 volume on life insurance, often overlooked, in fact informed his later efforts. His turn from his plans for the Difference Engine, whose calculations plotted a linear future, toward his more complex Analytical Engine, registered his ambitions to construct a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. His later writings on natural theology and his personal scrapbook analyzed the

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Conference papers on the topic "Babbage Difference Engine"

1

Richard, William D. "Using Babbage's difference engine to introduce computer architecture." In 2017 IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education (MSE). IEEE, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/mse.2017.7945084.

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