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The London Science Museum 's difference engine, the first one actually built from Babbage's design. The design has the same precision on all columns, but in calculating polynomials, the precision on the higher-order columns could be lower. A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
The Science Museum's Difference Engine No. 2, built from Babbage's design Portion of Babbage's difference engine. Babbage began in 1822 with what he called the difference engine, made to compute values of polynomial functions. It was created to calculate a series of values automatically.
The analytical engine was a proposed digital mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. [2] [3] It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator. [4]
The first one was an automatic mechanical calculator, his difference engine, which could automatically compute and print mathematical tables. In 1855, Georg Scheutz became the first of a handful of designers to succeed at building a smaller and simpler model of his difference engine.
Divided differences. In mathematics, divided differences is an algorithm, historically used for computing tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions. [citation needed] Charles Babbage 's difference engine, an early mechanical calculator, was designed to use this algorithm in its operation. [1]
Pascal's calculator (also known as the arithmetic machine or Pascaline) is a mechanical calculator invented by Blaise Pascal in 1642. Pascal was led to develop a calculator by the laborious arithmetical calculations required by his father's work as the supervisor of taxes in Rouen. [2] He designed the machine to add and subtract two numbers ...
Ada Lovelace. Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace ( née Byron; 10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was an English mathematician and writer, chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage 's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure ...
Difference Engine, 1822 – Charles Babbage's mechanical device to calculate polynomials. Analytical Engine, 1837 – A later Charles Babbage device that could be said to encapsulate most of the elements of modern computers. Odhner Arithmometer, 1873 – W. T. Odhner's calculator who had millions of clones manufactured until the 1970s.