Martin Davis
Engines of Logic
Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer
"An elegant history of the search for the boundaries of logic and the machines that live within them."—Wired
Computers are everywhere today—at work, in the bank, in artist's studios, in our pockets—yet they remain to many of us objects of irreducible mystery. How can today's computers perform such a bewildering variety of tasks if computing is just glorified arithmetic? The answer, as Martin Davis lucidly illustrates, lies in the fact that computers are engines of logic. Their hardware and software embody concepts developed over centuries by logicians such as Leibniz, Boole, and Gödel, culminating in the amazing insights of Alan Turing. Readers will come away from this book with a revelatory understanding of how and why computers work. 8 b/w photographs. Published in hardcover as The Universal Computer.
"A thoroughly enjoyable mix of biographical portraits and theoretical mathematics...full of well-honed anecdotes and telling detail."—Publishers Weekly
"Anyone who works with computers today, who seeks to look into the electronic future, can profit greatly from reading [this].—John McCarthy, Stanford University
"Erudite, gripping and humane, Martin Davis shows the extraordinary individuals through whom the groundwork of the computer came into being. "—Andrew Hodges, author of Alan Turing: The Enigma
"Martin Davis speaks about logic with the love and touch of a sculptor speaking about stone. "—Dennis Shasha, New York University
"Delightfully entertaining and most instructive! "—Raymond Smullyan, author of The Riddle of Scheherazade and First-Order Logic
Martin Davis's other books include Computability and Unsolvability. A professor emeritus at New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley.
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