"George Boole took up Leibniz's idea, and wrote a book he called '. The laws he formulated are now called ... William Stanley Jevons heard of Boole's work, and undertook to build a machine to make calculations in Boolean algebra. He successfully designed and built such a machine, which he called the Logical Piano, apparently because it was about the size and shape of a small piano. This machine and its creator deserve much more fanfare than they have so far received. This was the first machine to do mechanical inference. Its predecessors, including the [Leibniz] Stepped Reckoner, only did arithmetic. ...The design of the machine was described in On the Mechanical Performance of Logical Inference, read before the British Royal Society in 1870."
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Philosophers from EnglandEconomists from EnglandNon-fiction authors from EnglandLogicians from EnglandPeople from Liverpool
Original Language: English
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Michael J. Beeson, "The Mechanization of Mathematics," in Alan Turing: Life and Legacy of a Great Thinker (2004)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Stanley_Jevons
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William Stanley Jevons
William Stanley Jevons (1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) was an English economist and logician.
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