Science History Writer to Discuss Digital/Analog Connection Wednesday

April 7, 2014

Text reads: George Dyson. Author of the National bestseller "Turing's Cathedral" Alan Turing's one-dimensional model of universal computation of 1936 led directly to John von Neumann's two-dimensional implementation of 1946. The resulting address matrix, entrenched for 60 years, is how the machines are able to find codes, and how codes are able to find the machines. Where to go from here? Some 3.5 billion years ago, analog organisms adopted digital coding to facilitate replication, error corrections, and

George Dyson talk

Best-selling author George Dyson will give a talk, “From Analog to Digital and Back: The View From 1946,” at the University of Virginia on Wednesday at 5 p.m. in Nau Hall, room 101.

The main difference between analog and digital signals is that an analog signal is continuous and a digital signal is discrete. Analog technologies record waveforms as they are, while digital technologies convert analog signals into numbers.

Son of the renowned physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, George Dyson is a writer of science history. His 2012 best-seller, “Turing’s Cathedral,” describes the personalities, engineering and social forces behind the rapid development of computers in the mid-20th century.

The event is sponsored by U.Va.’s mathematics, computer science and history departments.