CALCULATING MACHINE • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Calculating machine

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/kˈælkjəlˌeɪtɪŋ məʃˈin/ Listen

adjective

Calculating adj.

Of or pertaining to mathematical calculations; performing or able to perform mathematical calculations.

Given to contrivance or forethought; forecasting; scheming; as, a cool calculating disposition.

Calculating machine, a machine for the mechanical performance of mathematical operations, for the most part invented by Charles Babbage and G. and E. Scheutz. It computes logarithmic and other mathematical tables of a high degree of intricacy, imprinting the results on a leaden plate, from which a stereotype plate is then directly made.

See images of 'Calculating machine'

Etymology of 'Calculating machine'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

Add this dictionary
to your browser search bar

"Calculating machine" Quotes from Famous Books

... attracted the notice of the mathematical world by his treatise on conic sections. Even when only twelve the precocious boy had worked out the solutions of the first thirty-two propositions of Euclid unaided. While at Rouen he invented a calculating machine, and got a workman in the town to set it up. In 1646 he made his famous experiments on the vacuum before more than five hundred people, including half a dozen sceptical Jesuit fathers. Though his famous letters on the burning question of Jansenism were not written until 1656, after he had returned ...

— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook

... taken for granted by both sides in the controversy that if our volitions can be proved to depend upon natural causation, as rigid in its sequences within the sphere of a human mind as within that of a calculating machine, there must be an end of the controversy; seeing that our volitions would be thus proved to be rigidly determined by those same principles of fixed order, or 'natural law,' which are external to, or independent of, the human mind—quite as much as they ...

— Mind and Motion and Monism • George John Romanes