Tech Support

As George Dyson’s Analogia opens, we find the German polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in the court of Peter the Great. It’s 1716, and Leibniz, age seventy, is as full of ideas as ever. (We know, though presumably he does not, that he will be dead within a year.) Leibniz presents the tsar with three grand ideas. First, a great expedition across Siberia and into the Kamchatka Peninsula ought to be launched, with the goal of determining whether Asia and America were joined, and to study the peoples of those lands. Second, Russia should establish an academy dedicated to the sciences, modelled on the great ones of Europe. Third, work should commence at once on what we would now call a digital computer — a device that would allow all manner of problems, once suitably converted to numerical form, to be solved swiftly. The Russian Academy of Sciences was founded in 1724; an expedition set out for Kamchatka the following year. Although Peter seemed intrigued by a prototype...