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KONRAD ZUSE (1910-1995)
1935-1938: Konrad Zuse builds Z1, world’s first program-controlled computer. Despite certain mechanical engineering problems it had all the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and today’s standard separation of storage and control. Zuse’s 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggests a von Neumann architecture (re-invented in 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage.
1941: Zuse completes Z3, world’s first fully functional programmable computer.
1945: Zuse describes Plankalkuel, world’s first higher-level programming language, containing many standard features of today’s programming languages. FORTRAN came almost a decade later. Zuse also used Plankalkuel to design world’s first chess program.
1946: Zuse founds world’s first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital raised through ETH Zürich and an IBM option on Zuse’s patents.

The photo shows Konrad Zuse in the mid 80s with employees of the software company InterFace Connection GmbH (now Interface AG). (Photo Source)

The Nothing That Is, A Natural History Of Zero Robert Kaplan

A symbol for what is not there, an emptiness that increases any number it’s added to, an inexhaustible and indispensable paradox. As we enter the year 2000, zero is once again making its presence felt. Nothing itself, it makes possible a myriad of calculations. Indeed, without zero mathematics as we know it would not exist. And without mathematics our understanding of the universe would be vastly impoverished. But where did this nothing, this hollow circle, come from? Who created it? And what, exactly, does it mean?
Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero begins as a mystery story, taking us back to Sumerian times, and then to Greece and India, piecing together the way the idea of a symbol for nothing evolved. Kaplan shows us just how handicapped our ancestors were in trying to figure large sums without the aid of the zero. (Try multiplying CLXIV by XXIV). Remarkably, even the Greeks, mathematically brilliant as they were, didn’t have a zero—or did they? We follow the trail to the East where, a millennium or two ago, Indian mathematicians took another crucial step. By treating zero for the first time like any other number, instead of a unique symbol, they allowed huge new leaps forward in computation, and also in our understanding of how mathematics itself works.
In the Middle Ages, this mathematical knowledge swept across western Europe via Arab traders. At first it was called “dangerous Saracen magic” and considered the Devil’s work, but it wasn’t long before merchants and bankers saw how handy this magic was, and used it to develop tools like double-entry bookkeeping. Zero quickly became an essential part of increasingly sophisticated equations, and with the invention of calculus, one could say it was a linchpin of the scientific revolution. And now even deeper layers of this thing that is nothing are coming to light: our computers speak only in zeros and ones, and modern mathematics shows that zero alone can be made to generate everything.
Robert Kaplan serves up all this history with immense zest and humor; his writing is full of anecdotes and asides, and quotations from Shakespeare to Wallace Stevens extend the book’s context far beyond the scope of scientific specialists. For Kaplan, the history of zero is a lens for looking not only into the evolution of mathematics but into very nature of human thought. He points out how the history of mathematics is a process of recursive abstraction: how once a symbol is created to represent an idea, that symbol itself gives rise to new operations that in turn lead to new ideas. The beauty of mathematics is that even though we invent it, we seem to be discovering something that already exists.
The joy of that discovery shines from Kaplan’s pages, as he ranges from Archimedes to Einstein, making fascinating connections between mathematical insights from every age and culture. A tour de force of science history, The Nothing That Is takes us through the hollow circle that leads to infinity.

via: google

Rara arithmetica; a catalogue of the arithmetics written before the year MDCI, with description of those in the library of George Arthur Plimpton, of New York (1908)
David Eugene Smith; George Arthur Plimpton

Plimpton’s mathematical library, preserved at Columbia University, may be the first specialized private collection of antiquarian scientific books formed by an American for which we have an annotated bibliographical catalogue. Published in 1908, Rara arithmetica is still widely consulted for its descriptions of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books. Smith also discussed some of Plimpton’s early manuscripts in his History of Mathematics (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1923–25), and issued an addendum to his catalogue of Plimpton’s library in 1939

via: Archive

Ein schöner kurtzer Extract der Geometriae vnnd Perspectiuae
Paul Pfinzing, 1599

via: bvbm1

Anleitung zur Feldmesskunst im Nürnberger Gebiet
(Instructions for surveying, in the Nuremberg area)
Jörg Unger

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Prodromus dissertationum cosmographicarum, continens Mysterium Cosmographicum de admirabili proportione orbium coelestium: deque causis coelorum numeri, magnitudinis, motuumque periodicorum genuinis & propriis, demonstratum per quinque regularia corpora goemetrica Kepler, Johannes 1596

via: History of Science

Euclid, Preclarissimus liber elementorum (Venice, 1482)

via history of science