If the eighteenth century is to be seen as the “Age of Reason,”
then one of the crucial stories to be told is of the trajectory of
philosophy from one of the most ardent proponents of the powers of
human reason, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716)...
There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky.
The history of digital computing can be divided into an Old
Testament whose prophets, led by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz,
supplied the logic, and a New Testament whose prophets, led by John
von Neumann, built the machines. Alan Turing, whose “On...
