Epstein Secrets

more complex than they first appear. They are infinite, yet there are different infinities, and they have meaning. The smallpox example above and the Turing numbers we will discover shortly suggest numbers do have meaning independent of culture and language. The next two chapters will show us what happens

away their secrets. The Enigma machine was an elegant compromise between a truly unbreakable code and a simple cipher. Unfortunately for the Germans, Turing was on the side of the Allies. In the 1930s almost all mathematics, accounting, and code-breaking were performed by humans using pencil and paper. I

g’s paper. One of them, Alonzo Church, was based at the Institute of Advanced Mathematics in the USA on the Princeton University campus, next door to the Institute for Advanced Study that housed Einstein. Turing travelled to America in 1937 and completed his doctoral thesis at Princeton. He might have stayed, but Europe was heatin

a topic absent from a typical computer-science education: the physical configuration of a 118 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016921 computation. Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of communic

ce in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon, and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new

d with time, accumulating errors as it progressed. Von Neumann presented in 1952 a result corresponding to Shannon’s for computation (they had met at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton), showing that it was possible to compute reliably with an unreliable computing device by using symbols rather than continuous quantiti

a topic absent from a typical computer-science education: the physical configuration of a 118 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016338 computation. Von Neumann and Turing posed their questions as theoretical studies, because it was beyond the technology of their day to realize them. But with the convergence of communic

ce in terms of feedback, exploring the cultural rather than engineering uptake of this idea. She begins with primary readings by Wiener, Shannon, and Turing and then pivots from the scientists and engineers to the work and ideas of artists, feminists, postmodern theorists. Her goal: to come up with a new

d with time, accumulating errors as it progressed. Von Neumann presented in 1952 a result corresponding to Shannon’s for computation (they had met at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton), showing that it was possible to compute reliably with an unreliable computing device by using symbols rather than continuous quantiti