Jacob Bernoulli

mathematician · 2 mentions across 1 reading

In this course

Jacob Bernoulli appears in the course readings primarily through his mathematical legacy—specifically the Bernoulli numbers, which Lovelace famously used as the subject of her algorithmic notation in her work on Babbage's Analytical Engine. The excerpts cite Bernoulli numbers as the concrete mathematical problem that allowed Lovelace to demonstrate how symbolic operations could be mechanically executed, making her work foundational to the genealogy of programming and computation that the course traces through cybernetics and AI. He functions here as a historical anchor point—his mathematical objects become the test case through which computational thinking itself is demonstrated and legitimized.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Notes on Thinking Machine Imaginaries_ Llull

Leibniz, and Lovelace to 'Shoggoth with a Smiley Face'

First, in contrast to much of the existing literature, the Lovelace-Babbage question is not a zero-sum game, where some portion of credit added to Lovelace somehow detracts from Babbage, or vice versa. There is ample evidence that Babbage a…In The Babbage Machine and the Origins of Programming, the authors reproduce Lovelace’s table for the Bernoulli numbers and translate the algorithm into a 65-FORTRAN program that compute them. The program has eight “if . . . [then] go-to” s…

Appears alongside

People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.

Ada Lovelace 2 Charles Babbage 2 Augustus De Morgan 1 Alan Turing 1 Douglas Hartree 1