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Mathematics
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Mathematics is the study of topics such as quantity, structure, space, and change. There is a range of views among mathematicians and philosophers as to the exact scope, Mathematicians seek out patterns and use them to formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proof, when mathematical structures are good models of real phenomena, then mathematical reasoning can provide insight or predictions about nature. Through the use of abstraction and logic, mathematics developed from counting, calculation, measurement, practical mathematics has been a human activity from as far back as written records exist. The research required to solve mathematical problems can take years or even centuries of sustained inquiry, rigorous arguments first appeared in Greek mathematics, most notably in Euclids Elements. Galileo Galilei said, The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and it is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth, carl Friedrich Gauss referred to mathematics as the Queen of the Sciences. Benjamin Peirce called mathematics the science that draws necessary conclusions, David Hilbert said of mathematics, We are not speaking here of arbitrariness in any sense. Mathematics is not like a game whose tasks are determined by arbitrarily stipulated rules, rather, it is a conceptual system possessing internal necessity that can only be so and by no means otherwise. Albert Einstein stated that as far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, engineering, medicine, finance and the social sciences. Applied mathematics has led to entirely new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics, Mathematicians also engage in pure mathematics, or mathematics for its own sake, without having any application in mind. There is no clear line separating pure and applied mathematics, the history of mathematics can be seen as an ever-increasing series of abstractions. The earliest uses of mathematics were in trading, land measurement, painting and weaving patterns, in Babylonian mathematics elementary arithmetic first appears in the archaeological record. Numeracy pre-dated writing and numeral systems have many and diverse. Between 600 and 300 BC the Ancient Greeks began a study of mathematics in its own right with Greek mathematics. Mathematics has since been extended, and there has been a fruitful interaction between mathematics and science, to the benefit of both. Mathematical discoveries continue to be made today, the overwhelming majority of works in this ocean contain new mathematical theorems and their proofs. The word máthēma is derived from μανθάνω, while the modern Greek equivalent is μαθαίνω, in Greece, the word for mathematics came to have the narrower and more technical meaning mathematical study even in Classical times
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Computer science
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Computer science is the study of the theory, experimentation, and engineering that form the basis for the design and use of computers. An alternate, more succinct definition of science is the study of automating algorithmic processes that scale. A computer scientist specializes in the theory of computation and the design of computational systems and its fields can be divided into a variety of theoretical and practical disciplines. Some fields, such as computational complexity theory, are highly abstract, other fields still focus on challenges in implementing computation. Human–computer interaction considers the challenges in making computers and computations useful, usable, the earliest foundations of what would become computer science predate the invention of the modern digital computer. Machines for calculating fixed numerical tasks such as the abacus have existed since antiquity, further, algorithms for performing computations have existed since antiquity, even before the development of sophisticated computing equipment. Wilhelm Schickard designed and constructed the first working mechanical calculator in 1623, in 1673, Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated a digital mechanical calculator, called the Stepped Reckoner. He may be considered the first computer scientist and information theorist, for, among other reasons and he started developing this machine in 1834, and in less than two years, he had sketched out many of the salient features of the modern computer. A crucial step was the adoption of a card system derived from the Jacquard loom making it infinitely programmable. Around 1885, Herman Hollerith invented the tabulator, which used punched cards to process statistical information, when the machine was finished, some hailed it as Babbages dream come true. During the 1940s, as new and more powerful computing machines were developed, as it became clear that computers could be used for more than just mathematical calculations, the field of computer science broadened to study computation in general. Computer science began to be established as an academic discipline in the 1950s. The worlds first computer science program, the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science. The first computer science program in the United States was formed at Purdue University in 1962. Since practical computers became available, many applications of computing have become distinct areas of study in their own rights and it is the now well-known IBM brand that formed part of the computer science revolution during this time. IBM released the IBM704 and later the IBM709 computers, still, working with the IBM was frustrating if you had misplaced as much as one letter in one instruction, the program would crash, and you would have to start the whole process over again. During the late 1950s, the science discipline was very much in its developmental stages. Time has seen significant improvements in the usability and effectiveness of computing technology, modern society has seen a significant shift in the users of computer technology, from usage only by experts and professionals, to a near-ubiquitous user base
3.
Alan Turing
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Alan Mathison Turing OBE FRS was an English computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and theoretical biologist. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science. During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, for a time he led Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. After the war, he worked at the National Physical Laboratory and he wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, first observed in the 1960s. Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for homosexual acts, when by the Labouchere Amendment and he accepted chemical castration treatment, with DES, as an alternative to prison. Turing died in 1954,16 days before his 42nd birthday, an inquest determined his death as suicide, but it has been noted that the known evidence is also consistent with accidental poisoning. In 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a public apology on behalf of the British government for the appalling way he was treated. Queen Elizabeth II granted him a pardon in 2013. The Alan Turing law is now a term for a 2017 law in the United Kingdom that retroactively pardons men cautioned or convicted under historical legislation that outlawed homosexual acts. Turings father was the son of a clergyman, the Rev. John Robert Turing, from a Scottish family of merchants that had based in the Netherlands. Turings mother, Julius wife, was Ethel Sara, daughter of Edward Waller Stoney, the Stoneys were a Protestant Anglo-Irish gentry family from both County Tipperary and County Longford, while Ethel herself had spent much of her childhood in County Clare. Julius work with the ICS brought the family to British India and he had an elder brother, John. At Hastings, Turing stayed at Baston Lodge, Upper Maze Hill, St Leonards-on-Sea, very early in life, Turing showed signs of the genius that he was later to display prominently. His parents purchased a house in Guildford in 1927, and Turing lived there during school holidays, the location is also marked with a blue plaque. Turings parents enrolled him at St Michaels, a day school at 20 Charles Road, St Leonards-on-Sea, the headmistress recognised his talent early on, as did many of his subsequent educators. From January 1922 to 1926, Turing was educated at Hazelhurst Preparatory School, in 1926, at the age of 13, he went on to Sherborne School, an independent school in the market town of Sherborne in Dorset. Turings natural inclination towards mathematics and science did not earn him respect from some of the teachers at Sherborne and his headmaster wrote to his parents, I hope he will not fall between two stools. If he is to stay at school, he must aim at becoming educated
4.
Turing machine
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Despite the models simplicity, given any computer algorithm, a Turing machine can be constructed that is capable of simulating that algorithms logic. The machine operates on an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells, the machine positions its head over a cell and reads the symbol there. The Turing machine was invented in 1936 by Alan Turing, who called it an a-machine, thus, Turing machines prove fundamental limitations on the power of mechanical computation. Turing completeness is the ability for a system of instructions to simulate a Turing machine, a Turing machine is a general example of a CPU that controls all data manipulation done by a computer, with the canonical machine using sequential memory to store data. More specifically, it is a capable of enumerating some arbitrary subset of valid strings of an alphabet. Assuming a black box, the Turing machine cannot know whether it will eventually enumerate any one specific string of the subset with a given program and this is due to the fact that the halting problem is unsolvable, which has major implications for the theoretical limits of computing. The Turing machine is capable of processing an unrestricted grammar, which implies that it is capable of robustly evaluating first-order logic in an infinite number of ways. This is famously demonstrated through lambda calculus, a Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the notion of effective methods in logic and mathematics. Studying their abstract properties yields many insights into computer science and complexity theory, at any moment there is one symbol in the machine, it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol, and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, however, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings, the Turing machine mathematically models a machine that mechanically operates on a tape. On this tape are symbols, which the machine can read and write, one at a time, in the original article, Turing imagines not a mechanism, but a person whom he calls the computer, who executes these deterministic mechanical rules slavishly. If δ is not defined on the current state and the current tape symbol, Q0 ∈ Q is the initial state F ⊆ Q is the set of final or accepting states. The initial tape contents is said to be accepted by M if it eventually halts in a state from F, Anything that operates according to these specifications is a Turing machine. The 7-tuple for the 3-state busy beaver looks like this, Q = Γ = b =0 Σ = q 0 = A F = δ = see state-table below Initially all tape cells are marked with 0. In the words of van Emde Boas, p.6, The set-theoretical object provides only partial information on how the machine will behave and what its computations will look like. For instance, There will need to be many decisions on what the symbols actually look like, and a failproof way of reading and writing symbols indefinitely
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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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Leibnizs notation has been widely used ever since it was published. It was only in the 20th century that his Law of Continuity and he became one of the most prolific inventors in the field of mechanical calculators. He also refined the number system, which is the foundation of virtually all digital computers. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism and he wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology. Leibnizs contributions to this vast array of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and he wrote in several languages, but primarily in Latin, French, and German. There is no complete gathering of the writings of Leibniz in English, Gottfried Leibniz was born on July 1,1646, toward the end of the Thirty Years War, in Leipzig, Saxony, to Friedrich Leibniz and Catharina Schmuck. Friedrich noted in his journal,21. Juny am Sontag 1646 Ist mein Sohn Gottfried Wilhelm, post sextam vespertinam 1/4 uff 7 uhr abents zur welt gebohren, in English, On Sunday 21 June 1646, my son Gottfried Wilhelm is born into the world a quarter after six in the evening, in Aquarius. Leibniz was baptized on July 3 of that year at St. Nicholas Church, Leipzig and his father died when he was six and a half years old, and from that point on he was raised by his mother. Her teachings influenced Leibnizs philosophical thoughts in his later life, Leibnizs father had been a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, and the boy later inherited his fathers personal library. He was given access to it from the age of seven. Access to his fathers library, largely written in Latin, also led to his proficiency in the Latin language and he also composed 300 hexameters of Latin verse, in a single morning, for a special event at school at the age of 13. In April 1661 he enrolled in his fathers former university at age 15 and he defended his Disputatio Metaphysica de Principio Individui, which addressed the principle of individuation, on June 9,1663. Leibniz earned his masters degree in Philosophy on February 7,1664, after one year of legal studies, he was awarded his bachelors degree in Law on September 28,1665. His dissertation was titled De conditionibus, in early 1666, at age 19, Leibniz wrote his first book, De Arte Combinatoria, the first part of which was also his habilitation thesis in Philosophy, which he defended in March 1666. His next goal was to earn his license and Doctorate in Law, in 1666, the University of Leipzig turned down Leibnizs doctoral application and refused to grant him a Doctorate in Law, most likely due to his relative youth. Leibniz then enrolled in the University of Altdorf and quickly submitted a thesis, the title of his thesis was Disputatio Inauguralis de Casibus Perplexis in Jure. Leibniz earned his license to practice law and his Doctorate in Law in November 1666 and he next declined the offer of an academic appointment at Altdorf, saying that my thoughts were turned in an entirely different direction
6.
Mechanical calculator
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A mechanical calculator, or calculating machine, was a mechanical device used to perform automatically the basic operations of arithmetic. Most mechanical calculators were comparable in size to small computers and have been rendered obsolete by the advent of the electronic calculator. Surviving notes from Wilhelm Schickard in 1623 reveal that he designed and had built the earliest of the attempts at mechanizing calculation. A study of the surviving notes shows a machine that would have jammed after a few entries on the dial. Schickard abandoned his project in 1624 and never mentioned it again until his death years later in 1635. Two decades after Schickards supposedly failed attempt, in 1642, Blaise Pascal decisively solved these problems with his invention of the mechanical calculator. Co-opted into his fathers labour as tax collector in Rouen, Pascal designed the calculator to help in the amount of tedious arithmetic required. It was called Pascals Calculator or Pascaline, for forty years the arithmometer was the only type of mechanical calculator available for sale. The comptometer, introduced in 1887, was the first machine to use a keyboard which consisted of columns of nine keys for each digit, the Dalton adding machine, manufactured from 1902, was the first to have a 10 key keyboard. Electric motors were used on some mechanical calculators from 1901, the production of mechanical calculators came to a stop in the middle of the 1970s closing an industry that had lasted for 120 years. The first one was a mechanical calculator, his difference engine. In 1855, Georg Scheutz became the first of a handful of designers to succeed at building a smaller and simpler model of his difference engine, a crucial step was the adoption of a punched card system derived from the Jacquard loom making it infinitely programmable. The desire to economize time and mental effort in arithmetical computations and this instrument was probably invented by the Semitic races and later adopted in India, whence it spread westward throughout Europe and eastward to China and Japan. After the development of the abacus, no further advances were made until John Napier devised his numbering rods, or Napiers Bones, in 1617. The 17th century marked the beginning of the history of mechanical calculators, as it saw the invention of its first machines, including Pascals calculator, Blaise Pascal invented a mechanical calculator with a sophisticated carry mechanism in 1642. After three years of effort and 50 prototypes he introduced his calculator to the public and he built twenty of these machines in the following ten years. This machine could add and subtract two numbers directly and multiply and divide by repetition and this suggests that the carry mechanism would have proved itself in practice many times over. Pascals invention of the machine, just three hundred years ago, was made while he was a youth of nineteen
7.
David Hilbert
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David Hilbert was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th, Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry. He also formulated the theory of Hilbert spaces, one of the foundations of functional analysis, Hilbert adopted and warmly defended Georg Cantors set theory and transfinite numbers. A famous example of his leadership in mathematics is his 1900 presentation of a collection of problems set the course for much of the mathematical research of the 20th century. Hilbert and his students contributed significantly to establishing rigor and developed important tools used in mathematical physics. Hilbert is known as one of the founders of theory and mathematical logic. In late 1872, Hilbert entered the Friedrichskolleg Gymnasium, but, after a period, he transferred to. Upon graduation, in autumn 1880, Hilbert enrolled at the University of Königsberg, in early 1882, Hermann Minkowski, returned to Königsberg and entered the university. Hilbert knew his luck when he saw it, in spite of his fathers disapproval, he soon became friends with the shy, gifted Minkowski. In 1884, Adolf Hurwitz arrived from Göttingen as an Extraordinarius, Hilbert obtained his doctorate in 1885, with a dissertation, written under Ferdinand von Lindemann, titled Über invariante Eigenschaften spezieller binärer Formen, insbesondere der Kugelfunktionen. Hilbert remained at the University of Königsberg as a Privatdozent from 1886 to 1895, in 1895, as a result of intervention on his behalf by Felix Klein, he obtained the position of Professor of Mathematics at the University of Göttingen. During the Klein and Hilbert years, Göttingen became the preeminent institution in the mathematical world and he remained there for the rest of his life. Among Hilberts students were Hermann Weyl, chess champion Emanuel Lasker, Ernst Zermelo, john von Neumann was his assistant. At the University of Göttingen, Hilbert was surrounded by a circle of some of the most important mathematicians of the 20th century, such as Emmy Noether. Between 1902 and 1939 Hilbert was editor of the Mathematische Annalen, good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician. Hilbert lived to see the Nazis purge many of the prominent faculty members at University of Göttingen in 1933 and those forced out included Hermann Weyl, Emmy Noether and Edmund Landau. One who had to leave Germany, Paul Bernays, had collaborated with Hilbert in mathematical logic and this was a sequel to the Hilbert-Ackermann book Principles of Mathematical Logic from 1928. Hermann Weyls successor was Helmut Hasse, about a year later, Hilbert attended a banquet and was seated next to the new Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust
8.
Structure
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Structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as biological organisms, abstract structures include data structures in computer science and musical form. Types of structure include a hierarchy, a network featuring many-to-many links, buildings, aircraft, skeletons, anthills, beaver dams and salt domes are all examples of load-bearing structures. The results of construction are divided into buildings and non-building structures, the effects of loads on physical structures are determined through structural analysis, which is one of the tasks of structural engineering. The structural elements can be classified as one-dimensional, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional, the latter was the main option available to early structures such as Chichen Itza. Two-dimensional elements with a third dimension have little of either. The structure elements are combined in structural systems, the majority of everyday load-bearing structures are section-active structures like frames, which are primarily composed of one-dimensional structures. In biology, structures exist at all levels of organization, ranging hierarchically from the atomic and molecular to the cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, population, usually, a higher-level structure is composed of multiple copies of a lower-level structure. Structural biology is concerned with the structure of macromolecules, particularly proteins. The function of molecules is determined by their shape as well as their composition. Protein structure has a four-level hierarchy, the primary structure is the sequence of amino acids that make it up. It has a backbone made up of a repeated sequence of a nitrogen. The secondary structure consists of repeated patterns determined by hydrogen bonding, the two basic types are the α-helix and the β-pleated sheet. The tertiary structure is a back and forth bending of the chain. Chemical structure refers to both molecular geometry and electronic structure, the structure can be represented by a variety of diagrams called structural formulas. Lewis structures use a dot notation to represent the valence electrons for an atom, bonds between atoms can be represented by lines with one line for each pair of electrons that is shared. In a simplified version of such a diagram, called a skeletal formula, only carbon-carbon bonds, atoms in a crystal have a structure that involves repetition of a basic unit called a unit cell. The atoms can be modeled as points on a lattice, and one can explore the effect of symmetry operations that include rotations about a point, reflections about a symmetry planes, and translations
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Algorithm
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In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a self-contained sequence of actions to be performed. Algorithms can perform calculation, data processing and automated reasoning tasks, an algorithm is an effective method that can be expressed within a finite amount of space and time and in a well-defined formal language for calculating a function. The transition from one state to the next is not necessarily deterministic, some algorithms, known as randomized algorithms, giving a formal definition of algorithms, corresponding to the intuitive notion, remains a challenging problem. In English, it was first used in about 1230 and then by Chaucer in 1391, English adopted the French term, but it wasnt until the late 19th century that algorithm took on the meaning that it has in modern English. Another early use of the word is from 1240, in a manual titled Carmen de Algorismo composed by Alexandre de Villedieu and it begins thus, Haec algorismus ars praesens dicitur, in qua / Talibus Indorum fruimur bis quinque figuris. Which translates as, Algorism is the art by which at present we use those Indian figures, the poem is a few hundred lines long and summarizes the art of calculating with the new style of Indian dice, or Talibus Indorum, or Hindu numerals. An informal definition could be a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations, which would include all computer programs, including programs that do not perform numeric calculations. Generally, a program is only an algorithm if it stops eventually, but humans can do something equally useful, in the case of certain enumerably infinite sets, They can give explicit instructions for determining the nth member of the set, for arbitrary finite n. An enumerably infinite set is one whose elements can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the integers, the concept of algorithm is also used to define the notion of decidability. That notion is central for explaining how formal systems come into being starting from a set of axioms. In logic, the time that an algorithm requires to complete cannot be measured, from such uncertainties, that characterize ongoing work, stems the unavailability of a definition of algorithm that suits both concrete and abstract usage of the term. Algorithms are essential to the way computers process data, thus, an algorithm can be considered to be any sequence of operations that can be simulated by a Turing-complete system. Although this may seem extreme, the arguments, in its favor are hard to refute. Gurevich. Turings informal argument in favor of his thesis justifies a stronger thesis, according to Savage, an algorithm is a computational process defined by a Turing machine. Typically, when an algorithm is associated with processing information, data can be read from a source, written to an output device. Stored data are regarded as part of the state of the entity performing the algorithm. In practice, the state is stored in one or more data structures, for some such computational process, the algorithm must be rigorously defined, specified in the way it applies in all possible circumstances that could arise. That is, any conditional steps must be dealt with, case-by-case
The dictionary definition of entscheidungsproblem at Wiktionary