Charles Babbage is a famous British mathematician and inventor. Considered the ancestor of computing
Childhood
Charles Babbage was born on December 26, 1791 in London. His father, being a banker, was a wealthy man and could pay for his son's education in private schools. Eight-year-old Charles was sent to one of these schools. The school was in Alphington in the countryside. However, Charles was sent there not so much for training as in order to improve his health after suffering a fever.
Education
After Alfington, the future inventor went to the Academy in Anfield, where he became seriously interested in mathematics. After graduating from Anfield, Charles Babbage took private lessons for some time. One of his teachers was a Cambridge cleric, from whom Babbage learned practically nothing. Then - a teacher from Oxford, who gave the future mathematician classical knowledge.
This knowledge was enough for Babbage to enter Trinity College in Cambridge in October 1810. Studying the works of great mathematicians (Leibniz, Lagrange, Newton, Lacroix and others) on his own, he quickly outgrew local teachers in terms of knowledge.
Recognizing the weakness of mathematical training at the university, Babbage, together with other young scientists, founded the Analytical Society in 1812. Members of the society published their own works, translated into English the works of European mathematicians, in particular the French scientist Lacroix. Thanks to the active work of the "Analytical Society", the system of teaching mathematics at the universities of England was reformed.
In 1812, Babbage transferred to St. Peter's College, graduating without honors, and in 1817 received a master's degree.
Personal life
The only wife of Charles Babbage was Georgiana Whitmoor.
They married in 1814, and in 1815 the family moved from Cambridge to London. The tragedy took place in 1827. Within a year, Babbage's father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, died, his second son (Charles), wife Georgiana and their newborn son. In just 13 years of married life, the couple had 8 children, but only three of them survived to adulthood.
Career
In 1816, Babbage was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, Britain's leading scientific society, founded in 1660. He was instrumental in the founding of the Royal Astronomical (1820) and Statistical (1834) Societies. In 1827, Babbage agreed to become a professor at Cambridge and taught mathematics there for 12 years. After he retired from his teaching career, Babbage spent the rest of his life developing computers.
Achievements and inventions
The idea of creating a device that would automatically carry out calculations came to Babbage as early as 1812. This device would allow avoiding a large number of calculation errors. Indeed, in those days, all calculations were carried out manually.
Only 7 years later did Babbage begin building a small difference engine. In 1822 he completely built the machine and presented it to the Royal Astronomical Society on June 14.
Babbage demonstrated the work of his mechanical machine, which computed a sequence of polynomials by the difference method. For her invention, the Royal Astronomical Society awarded Babbage a gold medal in 1824.
Then, in 1823, he received government support to design a large difference engine that could replace the work of a large number of people doing computation. The inventor's plans were to complete the work in 3 years. However, its complex design required new technologies that were not available at the time. Therefore, Babbage, of necessity, devoted himself to the development of mechanical engineering.
For almost 19 years, work on the creation of the machine was stopped and then resumed. Until 1842, Babbage received a final refusal from the government to allocate money for the project. Babbage never built the big difference engine.
In the mid-1830s, Babbage began developing the Analytical Engine, which is the forerunner of the modern digital computer. In this device, he provided the ability to perform any arithmetic operation based on the instructions of punched cards. Also in this device, a memory unit was provided for storing intermediate and final results of calculations, and most of the other basic elements of a modern computer.
In 1843, Babbage's friend, mathematician Ada Lovelace, translated into French an article on the analytic engine and, in her own annotations, published how the machine could perform a sequence of calculations. It is considered the first computer program.
Babbage was engaged in the development of the machine alone and only at his own expense. In many ways, it was the lack of funding and the low level of technology at the time that caused the analytical engine to be never completed.
Babbage's design was forgotten until his unpublished notebooks were discovered in 1937. In 1991, British scientists, according to Babbage's drawings, built Difference Engine No. 2 - with an accuracy of 31 digits, and in 2000 a printer for the Difference Engine was also built.
Charles Babbage died on October 18, 1871, he was 79 years old. And only in 1906, thanks to the efforts of his son Henry, together with the Monroe company, a working model of the analytical engine was built.
Babbage made notable contributions in other areas as well. He helped establish a modern postal system in England and compiled the first reliable actuarial tables. He also invented the speedometer and track cleaner for railway locomotives.
