Since humankind discovered mathematics, one thing was not yet a problem: time. Time was all that ancient
mathematicians had in the land of Sumeria. The problem is to spend time doing arithmetic calculations all day:
the cattle, the oxen, the land marking, the food, the stars and all things that had to be calculated with precision. Therefore,
civilization began to flourish, and soon came the market, with the unrest mob, trading their surplussed goods,
between people from different places. All directly connected to calculation and profit. But calculation is boredom.
Specially, if the calculi involves large figure numbers, or operations like square roots. And The ancient mathematician started to
record, in clay tablets, the results of some calculations such as the case of number $$\pi$$, and $$\sqrt{2}$$, and soon patterns
emerged from the calculations, from the daily commerce, and the mathematicians started to mechanize their labor
employing beads and abacus, and soon they started to find shortcuts in the device's configuration, leading
to more speed in calculi. And that was the ancient world, simple tools for keeping the city going right.
But man is a lazy animal, and always wants more free time to spend doing useless abstract activities such
as writing and reciting poems, gambling, or philosophizing about things. Laziness makes the genius of
invention, and they created many types of devices like the abacus and the Anticythera device. One for for
helping with the arithmetics, and the other a planerarium, possibly invented to foresee planets positions,
very likely, to make astrological predictions.
For centuries, the status of mathematics was restricted to geometrical pursuits, later on, with the end of
Middle Ages, the dryness of science returned in the Renaissance, and man like Fibonacci started to relearn
, from the ancient times, exploring new paths within the art of numbers, all summarized by Euclides 2000 years
ago, in his book The Elements. But, it was for the sake of computing with variables that the algebra
appeared from the East, with unknown quantities as puzzles, that ranged from silly games of "guessing the number
I'm thinking now" to the the hidden secrets of unsolvable equations that lasted for centuries onwards.
Algebra is the first step to abstraction of mathematical objects known as numbers, only surpassed by Cantor's
'Set Theory'. This power of abstraction didn't relief man from even more quantities of calculi. In particular,
the trade and the states became more complex and vast, and calculations of taxation was needed, a boring activity
that the father of Pascal had. Pascal had the idea to help his father, and built a calculating machine out of
cogs and gears, that could handle numbers of 8 digits. It was much like a clock than a computer, and
it hasn't any memory at all, therefore, was not programmable, and by modern definition of computing machines, it
was just clumsy mechanism, The Pascal's machines didn't lift off the ground with Colbert,
the minister of Louis XIV, and Pascal, I think, became desapointed to the point of abandoning mathematics
for philosophy and religion. And there comes a programming language called Pascal in his behalf.
In the time of Leibniz, rumors of a universalization of language was in the mind of many educated people. What
began with Leibniz and his Lingua Characterisca, i.e., a language in which science could be perfectly
represented without ambiguities was Leibniz ambition. And what began with Leibniz, ended up convincing Ada
Lovelace to program a differential machine using punched cards of a loom. It didn't lasted much, to appear
the Boolean logic, and the Hilbert dream of an oracle machine to predict solutions in Diophantine equations.
That all soon crashed with Gödel's Incompleteness, the dream of certainty was gone, like some one that
pulls the carpet of rationality under everyone's feet.