Article
ID: CBB001214346

Edmund C. Berkeley as a Popularizer and an Educator of Computers and Symbolic Logic (2013)

unapi
Computer science Computers and computing Technology education and teaching Popularization Logic 20th century Berkeley, Edmund Callis

This paper explores how Edmund C. Berkeley tried to instruct and popularize high-speed computers in the 1940s and 1950s and how Berkeley emphasized the connection between computers and symbolic logic. Berkeley strengthened his conviction in the significance of symbolic logic and Boolean algebra before his graduation from Harvard University and maintained this conviction for more than 30 years. Berkeley published books and articles, including Giant Brains, and sold electrical toy kits by which yound boys could learn electrical circuits and their logical implications. The target audience of Berkeley covered wide range of people including those who were not making computers but were interested in using them, that is, amateur adults technology enthusiasts who enjoyed tinkering with technology or reading about science and technology, and young students. In these projects Berkeley used Shannon's paper of 1938, "A symbolic analysis of relay and switching circuits" as a theoretical basis of his conviction. Design of these kits was fine-tuned by Claude E. Shannon.

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Authors & Contributors
Priestley, Mark
Haigh, Thomas
Joy Marie Lisi Rankin
Jue Hou
Porter, Christopher P.
Mote, C. D.
Journals
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Spontaneous Generations
Science-Fiction Studies
Rutherford Journal: The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
Public Understanding of Science
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
Publishers
Springer
Lonely Scholar Scientific Books
Harvard University Press
New York University
Yale University
Princeton University
Concepts
Computers and computing
Computer science
Logic
Mathematics
Software
Information technology
People
Turing, Alan Mathison
Kurtz, Thomas E.
Kemeny, John G. (1926-1993)
Weber, Ernst Heinrich
Von Neumann, John
Plato
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
20th century, early
19th century
Places
United States
Great Britain
Barcelona (Spain)
Catalonia (Spain)
China
Minnesota (U.S.)
Institutions
Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium
Dartmouth University
Princeton University
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