The Dining Philosophers

Edsger Dijkstra develops an intuitive way to juggle multiple processes at the same time

When reading the history of their subject, it might seem that computer scientists develop a solution to a problem…

Euclid’s Ancient Recipe

The oldest algorithm still in use which dates back over two thousand years

Algorithms are one of the most important concepts in all of computer science. What they are and how they work are essential to any…

The Bridges of Königsberg

How Euler developed Graph Theory and gave programmers a whole new way to approach problems

“By and large it is uniformly true in mathematics that there is a time lapse between a mathematical…

Positively Lazy

How laziness drove John Backus to develop programming languages

“Much of my work has come from being lazy. I didn’t like writing programs, and so…I started work on a programming system to make it easier to write programs.”

Inputs, Processes and Outputs

An introduction to this series

You can learn a lot about a field by taking a tour of the key moments in its history. All those momentous occasions—like when the field was first born, or how the earliest protagonists blazed a trail…

Brown Dogs and Barbers

How a crisis in mathematics led to set theory and type theory

Mathematicians have many different ways at their disposal to express their ideas, most of which are inter-related and build on one another. One might assume…

Bob & Alice & Carol & … Julius Caesar

How our modern online communications are secured

When computer networking first came along in the 1960s and 1970s it opened up wondrous new avenues and opportunities but it also created new headaches that…

The Information War

How electronic computers emerged from the chaos of the Second World War

Konrad Zuse stands out as a remarkable individual in the history of computer science. He was the first to develop a true binary computer as well as…

The Limits of Computation

Turing finally settles whether a computer can solve any problem put to it

In the 1920s, a community of mathematicians believed that they were on the road to making the ultimate discovery that would far outdo…