As you might expect from its name, the "Difference Engine" is a strangely difficult object to describe. You might start by imagining the side of a large crib with uprights ringed by small metal wheels ...

Englishman Charles Babbage (1791–1871), an eccentric, ingenious mathematician, decided that existing tables of computations included far too many errors: the day's textbooks came with errata sheets ...

Although you now have immense amounts of high-precision numeric-computing power at your finger tips, such power and ease are recent developments. In the book The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and ...

Acclaimed as a mathematical genius, Ada Lovelace is said to have understood the potential of the first computer blueprints better than their inventor. A serendipitous friendship with the mathematician ...