The ingenuity of common workmen: and the invention of the computer

Since World War II, state support for scientific research has been assumed crucial to technological and economic progress. Governments accordingly spent tremendous sums to that end. Nothing epitomizes the alleged fruits of that involvement better than the electronic digital computer. The first such computer has been widely reputed to be the ENIAC, financed by the U.S. Army for the war but finished afterwards. Vastly improved computers followed, initially paid for in good share by the Federal Government of the United States, but with the private sector then dominating, both in development and use, and computers are of major significance.;Despite the supposed success of public-supported science, evidence is that computers would have evolved much the same without it but at less expense. Indeed, the foundations of modern computer theory and technology were articulated before World War II, both as a tool of applied mathematics and for information processing, and the computer was itself on the cusp of reality. Contrary to popular understanding, the ENIAC actually represented a movement backwards and a dead end.;Rather, modern computation derived more directly, for example, from the prewar work of John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, a physics professor and graduate student, respectively, at Iowa State College (now University) in Ames, Iowa. They built the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC), which, although special purpose and inexpensive, heralded the efficient and elegant design of modern computers. Moreover, while no one foresaw commercialization of computers based on the ungainly and costly ENIAC, the commercial possibilities of the ABC were immediately evident, although unrealized due to war. Evidence indicates, furthermore, that the private sector was willing and able to develop computers beyond the ABC and could have done so more effectively than government, to the most sophisticated machines.;A full and inclusive history of computers suggests that Adam Smith, the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher, had it right. He believed that minimal and aloof government best served society, and that the inherent genius of citizens was itself enough to ensure the general prosperity

Critical Programming: Toward a Philosophy of Computing

Beliefs about the relationship between human beings and computing machines and their destinies have alternated from heroic counterparts to conspirators of automated genocide, from apocalyptic extinction events to evolutionary cyborg convergences. Many fear that people are losing key intellectual and social abilities as tasks are offloaded to the everywhere of the built environment, which is developing a mind of its own. If digital technologies have contributed to forming a dumbest generation and ushering in a robotic moment, we all have a stake in addressing this collective intelligence problem. While digital humanities continue to flourish and introduce new uses for computer technologies, the basic modes of philosophical inquiry remain in the grip of print media, and default philosophies of computing prevail, or experimental ones propagate false hopes. I cast this as-is situation as the post-postmodern network dividual cyborg, recognizing that the rational enlightenment of modernism and regressive subjectivity of postmodernism now operate in an empire of extended mind cybernetics combined with techno-capitalist networks forming societies of control. Recent critical theorists identify a justificatory scheme foregrounding participation in projects, valorizing social network linkages over heroic individualism, and commending flexibility and adaptability through life long learning over stable career paths. It seems to reify one possible, contingent configuration of global capitalism as if it was the reflection of a deterministic evolution of commingled technogenesis and synaptogenesis. To counter this trend I offer a theoretical framework to focus on the phenomenology of software and code, joining social critiques with textuality and media studies, the former proposing that theory be done through practice, and the latter seeking to understand their schematism of perceptibility by taking into account engineering techniques like time axis manipulation. The social construction of technology makes additional theoretical contributions dispelling closed world, deterministic historical narratives and requiring voices be given to the engineers and technologists that best know their subject area. This theoretical slate has been recently deployed to produce rich histories of computing, networking, and software, inform the nascent disciplines of software studies and code studies, as well as guide ethnographers of software development communities. I call my syncretism of these approaches the procedural rhetoric of diachrony in synchrony, recognizing that multiple explanatory layers operating in their individual temporal and physical orders of magnitude simultaneously undergird post-postmodern network phenomena. Its touchstone is that the human-machine situation is best contemplated by doing, which as a methodology for digital humanities research I call critical programming. Philosophers of computing explore working code places by designing, coding, and executing complex software projects as an integral part of their intellectual activity, reflecting on how developing theoretical understanding necessitates iterative development of code as it does other texts, and how resolving coding dilemmas may clarify or modify provisional theories as our minds struggle to intuit the alien temporalities of machine processes

Play Among Books

How does coding change the way we think about architecture? Miro Roman and his AI Alice_ch3n81 develop a playful scenario in which they propose coding as the new literacy of information. They convey knowledge in the form of a project model that links the fields of architecture and information through two interwoven narrative strands in an “infinite flow” of real books

Raising public awareness of mathematics

This book arose from the presentations given at the international workshop held in Óbidos, 26–29 September 2010, as a result of a joint initiative of the Centro Internacional de Matemática and the Raising Public Awareness (RPA) committee of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). The objective was to provide a forum for general reflection with an international mix of experts on building the image of mathematics, ten years after the World Mathematical Year 2000 (WMY 2000). Óbidos, a charming town situated one hour by car to the north of Lisbon, Portugal, was also the site of the re-creation in the year 2000 of the international mathematics exhibition “Beyond the Third Dimension” (http://alem3d.obidos.org/en/) and a meeting of the EMS WMY2000 Committee. The opening of the workshop was also a public “mathematical afternoon” organised by the Portuguese Mathematical Society (SPM) in cooperation with the town of Óbidos. At this event mathematical films and lectures to the general public were presented. The first lecture was given by H. Leitão, from the University of Lisbon, on mathematics in the “Age of Discoveries”, and the second one by G.-M. Greuel, the current president of ERCOM (the EMS committee of the European Research Centres on Mathematics), on the topic “Mathematics between Research, Application and Communication”, which text is included in this book.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Enacting Inquiry Learning in Mathematics through History

International audienceWe explain how history of mathematics can function as a means for enacting inquiry learning activities in mathematics as a scientific subject. It will be discussed how students develop informed conception about i) the epistemology of mathematics, ii) of how mathematicians produce mathematical knowledge, and iii) what kind of questions that drive mathematical research. We give examples from the mathematics education at Roskilde University and we show how (teacher) students from this program are themselves capable of using history to establish inquiry learning environments in mathematics in high school. The realization is argued for in the context of an explicit-reflective framework in the sense of Abd-El-Khalick (2013) and his work in science education

Proceedings of Mathsport international 2017 conference

Proceedings of MathSport International 2017 Conference, held in the Botanical Garden of the University of Padua, June 26-28, 2017. MathSport International organizes biennial conferences dedicated to all topics where mathematics and sport meet. Topics include: performance measures, optimization of sports performance, statistics and probability models, mathematical and physical models in sports, competitive strategies, statistics and probability match outcome models, optimal tournament design and scheduling, decision support systems, analysis of rules and adjudication, econometrics in sport, analysis of sporting technologies, financial valuation in sport, e-sports (gaming), betting and sports

Proceedings, MSVSCC 2013

Proceedings of the 7th Annual Modeling, Simulation & Visualization Student Capstone Conference held on April 11, 2013 at VMASC in Suffolk, Virginia

History of Mathematics in Mathematics Education: Recent devlopments

International audience<p>This is a concise survey on the recent developments (since 2000) concerning research on the relations between History and Pedagogy of Mathematics (the <i>HPM domain</i>). Section 1 explains the rationale of the study and formulates the key issues. Section 2 gives a brief historical account of the development of the <i>HPM domain</i> with focus on the main activities in its context and their outcomes. Section 3 provides a sufficiently comprehensive bibliographical survey of the work done in this area since 2000. Finally, section 4 summarizes the main points of this study.</p