CMSC 150 - Fall 2017 - The Pioneers of Computer Science

Description of Topic The name George Boole is not a household name by any means, and even to a lot of computer scientists and especially computer science students it probably does not ring much of a bell. But George Boole was one of the most important early pioneers to computer science because of his brilliant mind and his vast innovations in the fields of philosophy and mathematics. Growing up in Lincoln, England, Boole was a mathematical prodigy, surpassing his professors and becoming a teacher at the young age of 16.  ⁵  He made numerous achievements in the field of mathematics including developing Invariant Theory, which later inspired Albert Einstein.  ⁴  However, Boole was always fascinated by the relationship between mathematics and logic, and wanted to develop a way to link the two. He finally achieved this in 1847 when he published his essay Mathematical Analysis of Logic. In this essay, Boole described Boolean algebra, a new branch of mathematical l...

Description of Topic Born in December 1791 in London England, Charles Babbage was a brilliant mathematician, philosopher and engineer. Growing up in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it was clear that Babbage was a genius from an early age as "he found that his mathematics professors [at Cambridge] actually knew less than he did"  ⁴ .  A "renaissance man" of his time, Babbage crossed paths with many different famously brilliant english scholars in his lifetime, including Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin.  However, Babbage's most significant contribution to the scholarly world was his complex "difference machine," which is often cited as an early ancestor of the modern computer. Babbage's innovative creation allowed him to be labeled as "The Father of Computing"  ⁵  as he was the first man to create anything resembling a modern computer. Despite being recognized as an early computer, the machine was a calculator of sorts, accepting inpu...