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Gottfried Leibniz is famous... for his slogan Calculemus, which means "Let us calculate." He envisioned a formal language to reduce reasoning to calculation, and he said that reasonable men, faced with a difficult question of philosophy or policy, would express the question in a precise language and use rules of calculation to carry out precise reasoning. This is the first reduction of reasoning to calculation ever envisioned. ...he actually designed and built a working calculating machine, the Stepped Reckoner ...inspired by the somewhat earlier work of Pascal, who built a machine that could add and subtract. Leibniz's machine could add, subtract, divide, and multiply, and was apparently the first machine with all four arithmetic capabilities. (en) |
