The computer programs of Charles Babbage

Raúl Rojas-Gonzalez
Fred D. Gibson, Jr. Endowed Professor in Science University of Nevada, Reno

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

The mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage drafted 26 code fragments between 1836 and 1840 for his unfinished “Analytical Engine.” The programs were embedded implicitly in tables representing execution traces. In this talk, we explore the programming architecture of Babbage’s mechanical computer, that is, its structure from the point of view of a programmer, based on those 26 coding examples preserved in the Babbage Papers Archive. I will also show the world's "first computer program". The programs illustrate how Babbage intended to build the Analytical Engine and its capabilities.

Bio: Dr. Raúl Rojas is a professor of Statistics in the Dept. of Mathematics and Statistics at UNR. Previously, he was a professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at the Universities of Berlin, Vienna, and Halle-Wittenberg. His field of research is the theory and applications of AI. He has written three books about the history of computing. For his research in this area, especially the reconstruction of historical machines, he received the Tony Sale Award from the British Computer Society in 2015 and the Wolfgang von Kempelen Prize from the Austrian Computer Society in 2005.