The ENIAC may or may not have been the first of its kind—the first fully functional, all-electronic, general-purpose, digital computer—but there’s no doubt it was the last of its kind. They never built another one like it. Computers designed just a few years later seem reasonably familiar in their gross anatomy, but the ENIAC was […]

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is a long distance call
—Paul Simon

As a person who occasionally sends e-mail and talks on the telephone, I’ve been following with interest and curiosity all the recent press reports about alleged eavesdropping and data-mining by U.S. government agencies. Mathematically, the most intriguing part of this story has […]

At the library the other day I was perusing the Collected Rantings and Ravings of Edsger W. Dijkstra [Note 1]. While leafing through the pages in search of something else [Note 2], I stumbled across “An Exercise for Dr. R. M. Burstall” [Note 3], a brief essay in the form of an open letter, written […]

It’s no secret that the way to win fame and fortune in physics is to invent a better refrigerator. Michael Faraday and James Prescott Joule and J. J. Thomson (Lord Kelvin) were all thinkers or tinkerers in refrigeration; the Kelvinator brand alludes to the last of those pioneers. Einstein and Leo Szilard held dozens of […]