1913: The publication of Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead revolutionized formal logic. The Principia Mathematica is regarded as one of the most influential works in mathematical logic of the twentieth century. Moreover, it was ranked 23rd on Modern Library’s list of the century’s top 100 English-language nonfiction books.(1)
1915: El Ajedrecista, built by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, was one of the first autonomous machines to play chess. Unlike the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a lifelike automaton designed to play chess without any need for human involvement. It played a three-chess-piece endgame, moving a white king and a rook instantly to checkmate a black king moved by a human opponent.(2)
1913: The publication of Principia Mathematica by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead revolutionized formal logic. The Principia Mathematica is regarded as one of the most influential works in mathematical logic of the twentieth century. Moreover, it was ranked 23rd on Modern Library’s list of the century’s top 100 English-language nonfiction books.(1)
1915:El Ajedrecista, built by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, was one of the first autonomous machines to play chess. Unlike the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a lifelike automaton designed to play chess without any need for human involvement. It played a three-chess-piece endgame, moving a white king and a rook instantly to checkmate a black king moved by a human opponent.(2)
1920-1930: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap addressed philosophy as a logical analysis of knowledge. Alonzo Church developed Lambda Calculus in the 1930s to investigate computability using recursive functional notation. His contributions to mathematical logic, recursion theory, and theoretical computer science are noteworthy. The papers: “On irredundant sets of postulates” (1925), “On the form of differential equations of a system of paths” (1926), and “Alternatives to Zermelo’s assumption” (1927) were among his early contributions. In the 1930s, he invented the λ-calculus, a powerful tool that computer scientists still use nowadays.(3,4)
1920-1930: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Rudolf Carnap addressed philosophy as a logical analysis of knowledge. Alonzo Church developed Lambda Calculus in the 1930s to investigate computability using recursive functional notation. His contributions to mathematical logic, recursion theory, and theoretical computer science are noteworthy.
The papers: “On irredundant sets of postulates” (1925), “On the form of differential equations of a system of paths” (1926), and “Alternatives to Zermelo’s assumption” (1927) were among his early contributions. In the 1930s, he invented the λ-calculus, a powerful tool that computer scientists still use nowadays.(3,4)
1923:Karel Čapek’s play RUR (Rossum’s Universal Robots), a fiction scene, opened in London. This play was the first time the word “robot” was used in English.(5)