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825 BCE
Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizmi
The term "algorithm" derives from the name of the Persian mathematician Abu Ja'far Mohammed ibn Musa al-Khowarizm.
An algorithm is a pre-written set of well-defined, orderly and finite instructions or rules that allows an activity to be performed by successive steps that do not create doubts to those who must perform such activity. -
387 BCE
Plato
Plato introduced the ideas or abstractionss -
384 BCE
Aristotle
Aristotle presented deductive and systematized reasoning -
325 BCE
Euclid
Euclid is the character that has had the greatest influence on mathematicians throughout history, by establishing the axiomatic method. -
1170
Leonardo Fibonacci
He was the first to write about Arabic numerals in the West. He had the opportunity to travel extensively through North Africa. There he learned Arabic numbering and positional notation with zero. Fibonacci wrote a book (1202, Liber Abaci) that served to introduce Arabic numerals into Europe, although the Romans still remained in force for three more centuries -
1501
Geronimo Cardano
The Italian mathematician Geronimo Cardano was the one who demonstrated that debts and similar phenomena could be treated with negative numbers. Until that point, mathematicians had believed that all numbers had to be greater than zero. -
1540
Francois Viéte
Francois Viéte began to use letters to symbolize unknown values (variables) and thus laid the foundations of algebra. -
1550
John Napier
In 1614, John Napier invented logarithms (of "logos" and "aritmos" – knowledge of numbers) -
1564
Galileo
Galileo laid the foundations for mathematical formulation. -
1581
Edmund Gunter
Edmund Gunter (1581–1626) invented a precursor to the calculation rule. -
Wilhelm Schickard
Wilhelm Schickard designed and built what is considered the first digital calculator. Schickard's calculator allowed automatic additions and subtractions, and partially automated, multiplications and divisions. Unfortunately, Schickard and his entire family died during an epidemic, and his invention had no diffusion. -
René Descartes
René Descartes discovered analytical geometry. -
Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal who is generally regarded as the inventor of the calculator, manufactured his wits twenty years after Schickard and was less advanced. It was based on a toothed wheel system and given the technology of the time failed to manufacture any reliable models -
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Another important figure of this time was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz was both an excellent theoretical thinker and a prominent pragmatic man. He was, along with Isaac Newton, the co-discoverer of calculus. Leibniz wrote: "It is a waste of time for qualified people to waste hours as slaves in the work of calculating, which could be delegated to anyone else if machines could be used." -
Pehr George Scheutz
A Swedish inventor, Pehr George Scheutz, managed in 1854 to build a highly specialized "differential" machine. It operated using punched cards containing series of operations and data. Babbage came up with the idea of using perforated Jacquard loom cards but, like Pascal, was constrained by the vague technology of his time and never managed to build a model that worked from his analytical machine. -
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage was one of the founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society of England. He proposed two computer machines moved by steam machines "The Difference Machine" and "The Analytical Machine". The latter was the first general purpose machine conceived or, rather, for no specific purpose. Each time it was necessary to follow the instructions of a different "program". -
Ada Byron
It was Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, and Babbage's colleague who developed the first "programs" for these computers and laid the foundations for programming languages. -
Georges Boole
A relatively recent theoretical advance was made by Georges Boole.
He was born in London to a lower-middle-class family. When he was sixteen, he learned Latin and Greek on his own, and later learned French, Italian and German. Also self-taught, Boole learned virtually all known mathematics in his time. His most prominent contribution was "An Investigation into the Laws of Truth". In this work he established for the process of reasoning a symbolic representation. -
Herman Hollerith
In 1890, a punch card technology created by Herman Hollerith was used to control the census. This technology proved to be faster and allowed more questions to be asked in the census questionnaire, thus obtaining more useful information. This success encouraged Hollerith to found his own company in 1896, the "Tabulating Machine Company" which would later become "International Business Machines" (IBM). -
Howard T. Aiken
Howard T. Aiken and his associates, collaborating with a group of IBM engineers, designed and built, in 1944, an electromechanical machine named Mark 1 capable of multiplying two numbers in six seconds and dividing them by twelve. Bell Telephone Laboratories built a similar machine between 1937 and 1940 and several improved versions were built successively. -
John V. Atanasoff
The first fully electronic digital computer was designed by John V. Atanasoff, an associate professor at Iowa State University Atanasoff's main interest was to find an method to solve systems of linear equations. The ABC (Atanasoff Berry Computer) was built in 1940, used binary arithmetic and was single-purpose. It had a decisive influence on John Mauchly, the designer of ENIAC, the first large-scale digital computer. ENIAC was designed between late 1943 and early 1944 and was completed in 1945 -
John von Neumann
During the construction of ENIAC, John von Neumann an outstanding mathematician, became interested in the design of computers. Von Neumann obtained the degree of doctor in mathematics, graduated in experimental physics and chemistry, with only twenty-two years. When he was twenty-three he was already a renowned mathematician throughout the world. He had carried out important studies in formal logic and was collaborating with Hilbert in his attempts to axiomatize mathematics. -
Grace Hopper
Other high-level languages are COBOL(Common Business-Oriented Language) developed in 1960 by Grace Hopper and others; and PASCAL, developed by Niklaus Wirth in 1970. -
Mauchly
The First Generation begins with the commercial UNIVAC facility built by Eckert and Mauchly. The UNIVAC processor weighed 30 tons and required the full space of a 20 by 40 feet room (about 74 m2). -
J.C.R. Licklider
In 1962 J.C.R. Licklider wrote an essay on the concept of the Intergalactic Network, where the whole world is interconnected and can access programs and data from anywhere on the planet. In October of that year, Lickider was the first director of ARPA. Thus, between 1962 and 1968 the concept of packet exchange was worked on in a network known as ARPANET. -
Eckert
The First Generation begins with the commercial UNIVAC facility built by Eckert and Mauchly. The UNIVAC processor weighed 30 tons and required the full space of a 20 by 40 feet room (about 74 m2). -
John Backus
The first machines had to be programmed with just ones and zeros, until in the early 1950s, the first symbolic languages, called "assembly languages", were developed. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first high-level languages were developed. The first was FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) in 1954, and its creation is due to John Backus. -
Vinton Cerf
This was the first public demonstration of the new network technology. It was also in 1972 that the first “flagship” application was introduced: email. 1973 Vinton Cerf began the development of the protocol that would later be called TCP / IP, a protocol aimed at communicating some networks over others, the Internet Protocol or IP.
