Algorithm's Cradle: Commemorating al-Khwarizmi in the Soviet History of Mathematics and Cold War Computer Science (original) (raw)
Related papers
Thinking Algorithmically: From Cold War Computer Science to the Socialist Information Culture
Cold War competition shaped the process of computerization in both East and West during the second half of the twentieth century. This article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies, which brought the analysis of Cold War techno-politics beyond the context of the nation-state, with approaches from Critical Algorithm Studies, to question the algorithm's role in the global "computer revolution." It traces the algorithm's trajectory across several geographical, political, and discursive spaces to argue that its mutable cultural valences made the algorithm a universalizing attribute for representing human-machine interactions across the ideological divide. It shows that discourses about the human capacity to devise algorithms, a practice central to computer programming, became a space for negotiating different versions of modern subjectivity. This article focuses on two related episodes to demonstrate how the notion of "algorithmic thinking" became explicitly associated with a range of politicized agendas, each claiming the algorithm's power. On one hand, the coupling of "algorithm" and "thinking" was used to describe a naturalized cognitive capacity shared among the members of the international scientific community and projected backward to the medieval scholar Al-Khwarizmi. On the other hand, the universal spread of "algorithmic thinking" became the educational goal of a late Soviet computer literacy campaign under the slogan of "Programming, the Second Literacy," a metaphor and a political vision conceived to bring about the Socialist "Information Age."
The article tells about the scientific work of the great Uzbek scientist Muhammad al-Khwarizmi and his historical merits in world science. Algorithms are one of the hundred names of al-Khwarizmi. The article details the evolution of this term. The article also shows the role of algorithmic ideas and the al-Khwarizmi scientific school in becoming of well-known European mathematicians such as Leonardo Pisansky, Paccioli and many other Renaissance scientists.
Social Studies of Science, 2001
ABSTRACT Soviet science in the post-WWII period was torn between two contradictory directives: to 'overtake and surpass' Western science, especially in defence-related fields; and to 'criticize and destroy' Western scholarship for its alleged ideological flaws. In response to this dilemma. Soviet scientists developed two opposite discursive strategies. While some scholars 'ideologized' science, translating scientific theories into a value-laden political language, others tried to 'de-ideologize' it by drawing a sharp line between ideology and the supposedly value-neutral, 'objective' content of science. This paper examines how early Soviet computing was shaped by the interplay of military and ideological forces, and affected by the attempts to 'de-ideologize' computers. The paper also suggests some important similarities in the impact of the Cold War on science and technology in the Soviet Union and the United States.
Algorithms, An Historical Perspective
The Power of Algorithms, 2013
The design of algorithms for land measurement, financial transactions and astronomic computations goes back to the third millennium BCE. First examples of algorithms can be found in Mesopotamian tablets and in Egyptians scrolls. An important role in the development of numerical algorithms was played in the ninth century by the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi, who introduced the Indian numeration systems to the Arab world and from whom we derived the name 'algorithm' to denote computing procedures. In the Middle Ages algorithms for commercial transactions were widely used, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the problem of characterizing the power of algorithms was addressed. The precise definition of 'algorithm' and of the notion of computability were established by A.M. Turing in the 1930s. His work is also considered the beginning of the history of Computer Science.
The Joint Project Arifmometr an Archaeology of Computing in the Ussr
The research project Arifmometr is among the first systematic scientific studies on the general history of development of both Russian computer engineering and Russian computer theory ever performed in an European context. The basic idea and main objective of the project is the creation of a systematized, complete and adequate scientific review of the development of Russian (USSR) computing for the European audience. Subject of the study will be Russian computing with its specific features in the context of European computer development and scientific and cultural progress from the first counting devices and theoretical works of the beginning period until the end of an independent development in the early 70s (when computer science and industry in the USSR adopted and became compatible with American IBM standards). The aim is to fill the gap in knowledge on the subject and to represent a more complete general picture of European computer science and computer culture. All essential a...
Russian Logics and the Culture of Impossible: Part II-Reinterpreting Algorithmic Rationality
This article reinterprets algorithmic rationality by looking at the interaction between mathematical logic, mechanized reasoning, and, later, computing in the Russian Imperial and Soviet contexts to offer a history of the algorithm as a mathematical object bridging the inner and outer worlds, a humanistic vision that we, following logician Vladimir Uspensky, call the "culture of the impossible." We unfold the deep roots of this vision as embodied in scientific intelligentsia. In Part I, we examine continuities between the turn-of-the-twentieth-century discussions of poznaniye-an epistemic orientation towards the process of knowledge acquisition-and the postwar rise of the Soviet school of mathematical logic. Establishing this connection allows us to explain, in Part II, the role of the algorithm in disciplinary dynamics between mathematical logic and cybernetics and a characteristic understanding of programming, not as a narrow skill, but as a matter of consciousness.