Computer Science Pioneers
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Who was he?
George Boole
Who was Boole?
Charles Babbage
Ada Lovelace
Who was she?
Alan Turing
What did she do? What did she achieve?
Who was he?
What did Turing do?
He believed that human thought is mastered by laws, which can be described by means of mathematics.
logic Gates
which lead us to realise that computers 9that are simply calculating devices) could act, behave and think like humans do.
George Boole was a mathematician from the 1800s
He is famous for having invented the principle of Boolean Logic (either True or False)
NOT gates - makes True turn false, and false turn true.
AND gates - true for true, meaning all statements have to be true.
OR gates - one or more true for true.
turing played a vital role in deciphering the messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine, which provided vital intelligence for the Allies.
Turing took the lead in a team that’s designed a machine known as the ‘bombe’ that successfully decoded German messages.
He became a rather eccentric mathematician at Bletchley.
Who was Turing?
Turing was a mathematician, philosopher and computer scientist born 7 Jun 1912. He studied at King’s College, Cambridge, and got a 1st class honours degree. He then went to Princeton where he found an interest in cryptology.
Later on in life, Turing was discovered to be homosexual and this was a crime at the time, so he committed suicide when he got found out. In 2013, the Queen pardoned Turing.
PigPen and Caesar Shift
Caesar cipher/Caesar shift is one of the simplest and most widely-known encryption techniques. It’s a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed positions in the alphabet eg if there was a left shift of 3, A would be X, B would be Y and so on.
Pigpen cipher is where you have a grid, and each letter of the alphabet has a different bracket or square that is unique to the letter. Instead of writing down the letter, you write down the bracket.
Encryption - converting human-readable plaintext to incomprehensible text or symbols.
Born 8 June 1955 and grew up in London
He studied physics at Oxford Uni and became a software engineer.
What did he do - what is he famous for?
In 1980, while working at CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, he first developed the concept of hypertext, that’d allow researchers anywhere to share information. He also built a prototype called Enquire.
In 1984, Berners-Lee returned to CERN , which was home to a major European internet node (basically connections)
In 1989, he published a paper called ‘information Management: A Proposal’ in which he married up hypertext with the Internet, to create a system not just for sharing and distributing information not just within a company, but globally. He named it, the World Wide Web.
What is HTML, and how does it work?
HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language, and is the standard programming language for webpages. It describes the webpage structure and consists of a series of elements, which tell the web browser how to display the content. It labels pieces of content eg “this is a heading”, “this is a paragraph”.
How to write a simple HTML document: (a // means new line). <!DOCTYPE html> // <html> // <head> // <title>Page Title</title> // </head>//<body> // // <h1>My First Heading</h1> // <p>My first paragraph.</p> // // </body> </html>
Explained: DOCTYPE html defines that the document is HTML 5, html is the root and start of the page, head is the description of the page, title is the title for the page and is in the browser’s title, body is the documents body, which consists of heading - parag - images - hyperlinks - tables - lists etc, h1 is a large heading - goes up to h7 which is the tiniest heading, p is a paragraph.
A HTML element is defined by everything from the start tag eg <h1> to an end tag eg </h1>.
An English mathematician, analytical philosopher, mechanical engineer and computer scientist. Born Boxing Day 1791 Born in London
Babbage’s father was a London banker who owned the Britton Estate in Teignmouth. In 1808, the Babbages moved into the old Rowdens house in East Teignmouth. His brain is on display in London’s Science Museum.
What was he famous for?
He worked and wrote on many ideas on science, engineering and maths, but is most famous for two machines he finished but never started, the Diference Engine (which would have been the greatest calculator of its time) and the Analytical Engine (would have been the first real computer.
Babbage knew that there were many mathematical table errors, and Babbage wanted to find a way to get the answers mechanically. Three factors influenced him: dislike of untidiness, experience from working on logarithmetic tables and differential calculus, and work on calculating machines already done by three others. The machines weren’t completed as Babbage didn’t have enough money.
She was born Dec 10, 1815, died 27 Nov 1852 in London. She was the only legitimate child of the poet Lord Byron and his wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, an aristocrat related to royalty. She had no relationship with her dad, who died when she was 9. She was home educated and as a young child, was interested in maths, partly thanks to Babbage.
Lovelace was a writer and became the first computer programmer in the world. SHe wrote the program for Babbage’s Analytical Engine in 1844 and wrote the first algorithm processed by a machine. Between 1842-43 she translated an article by mathematician Luigi Menabrea on the engine, and added her own notes to it.
Though the Analytical Engine was never actually built, Lovelace’s notes are important in early computing as she realised computers could do more than maths, unlike Babbage who thought only calculations could be done.
Logical Thought
Logical Thinking is the process of analysing a situation and finding a sensible solution.
This is key for problem solving as it helps you to make the correct and sensible decision in order to solve the problem.
It’s important as you can then understand the issue well. Also, if you’re not clear, then one small misunderstanding could lead to trying to solve the problem becoming really complicated.