Algorithmic Modernity: Mechanizing Thought and Action, 1500-2000

This document was uploaded by one of our users. The uploader already confirmed that they had the permission to publish it. If you are author/publisher or own the copyright of this documents, please report to us by using this DMCA report form.

Simply click on the Download Book button.

Yes, Book downloads on Ebookily are 100% Free.

Sometimes the book is free on Amazon As well, so go ahead and hit "Search on Amazon"

Algorithms have been transforming human society long before the advent of computing. Yet they continue to exist in relative invisibility despite their presence behind many of our modern social interactions. The rhetoric of algorithmic neutrality is more alive than ever, and algorithms are often depicted as obvious and unproblematic—without context and without history.

Algorithmic Modernity draws together the history of mathematics and intellectual history to convey the enduring global history of the algorithm as a computational tool, epistemic ideal, and rhetorical figure alongside the ascendance of modernity. Through historical reconstructions of relevant thinkers and cultural phenomena over the last five hundred years, this collection of essays reveals how algorithms became the standard method for solving problems from the early inclusion of algorithms in Newton's formation of calculus to their later influence in the New Deal economy. Together, these essays create an informed history for readers interested in the social and cultural implications of today's pervasive digital algorithm.

Featuring experts in mathematics, history, and computing,
Algorithmic Modernity presents a multi-faceted exploration of the genealogy of algorithmic thinking in modern times.

Author(s): Morgan G. Ames (editor), Massimo Mazzotti (editor)
Edition: 1
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2023

Language: English
Pages: 312
City: New York, NY
Tags: Algorithms History; Mathematics History

Contents
List of Contributors
Introduction • Morgan G. Ames and Massimo Mazzotti
1. Algorithm and Demonstration in the Sixteenth-Century Ars Magna • Abram Kaplan
2. “Some Call It Arsmetrike, and Some Awgryme”: Misprision and Precision in Algorithmic Thinking and Learning in 1543 and Beyond • Michael J. Barany
3. The Orderly Universe: How the Calculus Became an Algorithm • Amir Alexander
4. The Algorithmic Enlightenment • J. B. Shank
5. Capitalism by Algorithm: Numbers for the Innumerate in the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World • Caitlin C. Rosenthal
6. Material Mathematics: British Algebra as Algorithmic Mathematics • Kevin Lambert
7. “For Computing Is Our Duty”: Algorithmic Workers, Servants, and Women at the Harvard Observatory • Andrew Fiss
8. Seeds of Control: Sugar Beets, Control Algorithms, and New Deal Data Politics • Theodora Dryer
9. Inference Rituals: Algorithms and the History of Statistics • Christopher J. Phillips
10. Decision Trees, Random Forests, and the Genealogy of the Black Box • Matthew L. Jones
Notes
Bibliography
Index