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Hall VII

The Engine Room

1791 — 2020

A machine that was never built. A footnote to it that became the first program. An algebra of thought worked out by a schoolmaster who never went to university. A question — can machines think? — asked by a man his own government destroyed for answering it. A theory that turned meaning into bits, built on that algebra. And the mathematician NASA asked to check the computer's arithmetic before it would trust a man's life to it. One idea, handed forward six times.

6 Figures in Residence
Select any portrait to enter that figure's room and begin a conversation  ↘
Charles Babbage
Charles Babbage
1791 — 1871
He designed a computer 150 years before one was built. Ada Lovelace understood his Analytical Engine better than he did in some ways. He never finished it. The computers you're reading this on trace to his designs.
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Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace
1815 — 1852
The mathematician who translated Babbage's Analytical Engine and, in her annotations, described what a machine could do that its inventor had not imagined — writing the first algorithm a century before the first computer.
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George Boole
George Boole
1815 — 1864
A Lincoln shoemaker's son who left school at sixteen, taught himself the higher mathematics, and wrote the laws of reasoning as algebra — 1 for the Universe, 0 for Nothing. Eighty-three years later Shannon showed that switching circuits obey them. Every AND, OR, and NOT descends from his slate.
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Alan Turing
Alan Turing
1912 — 1954
Alan Turing was the British mathematician and logician who cracked the Enigma cipher, shortened World War II by years, and laid the theoretical foundations for the computer and artificial intelligence…
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Claude Shannon
Claude Shannon
1916–2001
Claude Shannon invented the mathematical theory of communication in 1948, single-handedly founding the field of information theory and making the digital age possible. A Bell Labs polymath who built c…
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Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson
1918–2020
Katherine Johnson was a mathematician at NACA and NASA whose orbital mechanics calculations were so trusted that John Glenn refused to launch until she personally verified the computer's numbers. Work…
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Collection Growing

Additional voices are being prepared for this hall. Each new figure requires months of corpus ingestion and persona research before joining the collection.