Sublime

They incorporate, in their very architecture, a strong hypothesis: what I learn in one place can be generalized everywhere else.

He was a wonderful educator, and he always told us to question assumptions. “There’s an assumption,” he said, “that schools are for students’ learning. Well, why aren’t they just as much for teachers’ learning?”

On the contrary, mathematics molds itself into a preexisting, innate representation of numerical quantities, which it then extends and refines.

Learning, in man and machine, always starts from a set of a priori hypotheses, which are projected onto the incoming data, and from which the system selects those that are best suited to the current environment. As Jean-Pierre

An odd sort of a friendship developed between the young Lovelace and the older Babbage. Growing up in the shadow of her famously philandering father, the poet and baron George Byron, whom she barely knew, Ada had been discouraged from literary study. Her mother, Lady Anne Isabella Byron, a strict Christian and a formidable intellect in her own

Claude Shannon,

Alan Kay told Brand, “A true hacker is not a group person. He’s a person who loves to stay up all night, he and the machine in a love-hate relationship . . . They’re kids who tended to be brilliant but not very interested in conventional goals. And computing is just a fabulous place for that. . . . It’s a place where you can still be an artisan.”

She devised a process, a set of rules, a sequence of operations. In another century this would be called an algorithm, later a computer program, but for now the concept demanded painstaking explanation. The trickiest point was that her algorithm was recursive. It ran in a loop. The result of one iteration became food for the next. Babbage had