Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.Menabrea, Luigi Federico
Science
Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage, Esq.
Menabrea, Luigi Federico
Babbage, Charles, 1791-1871; Numerical analysis
The former engine is in its nature strictly arithmetical,
and the results it can arrive at lie within a very clearly defined
and restricted range, while there is no finite line of demarcation
which limits the powers of the Analytical Engine. These powers are
co-extensive with our knowledge of the laws of analysis itself,
and need be bounded only by our acquaintance with the latter.
Indeed we may consider the engine as the material and mechanical
representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers
in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually
than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its
principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine
gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and
numerical symbols.
Those who view mathematical science not merely as a vast body of
abstract and immutable truths, whose intrinsic beauty, symmetry and
logical completeness, when regarded in their connexion together as
a whole, entitle them to a prominent place in the interest of all
profound and logical minds, but as possessing a yet deeper interest for
the human race, when it is remembered that this science constitutes
the language through which alone we can adequately express the great
facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual
relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously
to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in
the agencies of the creation we live amidst: those who thus think on
mathematical truth as the instrument through which the weak mind of
man can most effectually read his Creator’s works, will regard with
especial interest all that can tend to facilitate the translation of
its principles into explicit practical forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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