Computing

Our little systems have their day;
They have their day and cease to be.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) In Memoriam A. H. H.

 

A good calculator does not need artificial aids.
— Lao Tzu (604-531 B. C.), Tao Te Ching, ch 27.

 

What’s done we partly may compute,
But know not what’s resisted.
— Robert Burns (1759 – 1796), Address to the Unco Guid.

 

The figures as they were calculated by the machine were not exhibited to the eye as in sliding rules and similar instruments, but were actually presented to the eye on two opposite sides of the machine; the number 383, for example, appearing in numbers before the person employed in copying….

While the machine was occupied in calculating [the] table, a friend of the inventor undertook to write down the numbers as they appeared. In consequence of the copyist writing quickly, he rather more than kept pace with the engine, but as soon as five figures appeared, the machine was at least equal in speed to the writer. At another trial, thirty-two numbers of the same table were calculated in the space of two minutes and thirty seconds, and as these contained eighty-two figures, the engine produced thirty-three figures every minute, or more than one figure in every two seconds. On another occasion it produced forty-four figures per minute. This rate of computation could be maintained for any length of time; it is probable that few writers are able to copy with equal speed for many hours together.
— Often credited to Sir David Brewster (1781 – 1868), but actually written by Charles Babbage, Edinburgh Philosophical Review, VII: 274. cf New Scientist 18/25 December 1980, 831.

 

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.
— Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862), Walden, quoted by Martin Gardner, Scientific American August 1969.

 

Not that system is by any means to be thrown aside; without system the field of nature would be a pathless wilderness: but a system should be subservient to, not the main object of, pursuit.
— Gilbert White (1720 – 1793), The Natural History of Selborne, (1789), Letter XL.

 

One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man.
— Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915).

 

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.
— Richard W. Hamming, Numerical Methods for Scientists and Engineers, 2nd edition, 1973.

 

At present computers are a useful aid in research, but they have to be directed by human minds. However, if one extrapolates their recent rapid rate of development, it would seem quite possible that they will take over altogether in theoretical physics. So maybe the end is in sight for theoretical physicists if not for theoretical physics.
— Stephen Hawking in his inaugural lecture as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, August 29, 1980.

 

Man is still the most extraordinary computer of them all
— John F. Kennedy (1917 – 1963), in 1963.

 

Seeing there is nothing (right well-beloved Students of the Mathematics) that is so troublesome to mathematical practice, nor that doth more molest and hinder calculators, than the multiplications, divisions, square and cubical extractions of great numbers, which besides the tedious expense of time are for the most part subject to many slippery errors, I began therefore to consider in my mind by what certain and ready art I might remove those hindrances. And having thought upon many things to this purpose, I found at length some excellent brief rules to be treated of (perhaps) hereafter. But amongst all, none more profitable than this which together with the hard and tedious multiplications, divisions, and extractions of roots, doth also cast away from the work itself even the very numbers themselves that are to be multiplied, divided and resolved into roots, and putteth other numbers in their place which perform as much as they can do, only by addition and subtraction, division by two or division by three.
— John Napier (1550 – 1617) and Napierian logarithms. Preface to Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio, 1614, from an English translation of Napier’s original Latin text was published, translated by Edward Wright, 1616.

You will find an index to this blog at the foot of this link. Please be patient: I am pedalling as fast as I can.