Charles Babbage (1791–1871) was Lucasian Professor of mathematics in Cambridge from 1828–1839. He displayed a fertile curiosity that led him to study many contemporary processes and problems in a way which emphasised an analytic, data driven view of life.

In popular culture Babbage has been celebrated as an anachronistic Victorian engineer. In reality, Babbage is best understood as a figure rooted in the enlightenment, who had substantially completed his core investigations into 'mechanisation of thought' by the mid 1830s: he is thus an anachronistic Georgian: the construction of his first difference engine design is contemporary with the earliest public railways in Britain.

A fundamental question that must strike anybody who examines Babbage's precocious designs is: how could one individual working alone have synthesised a workable computer design, designing an object whose complexity of behaviour so far exceeded that of contemporary machines that it would not be matched for over a hundred years?

We shall explore the extent to which the answer lies in the techniques Babbage developed to reason about complex systems. His Notation which shows the geometry, timing, causal chains and the abstract components of his machines, has a direct parallel in the Hardware Description Languages developed since 1975 to aid the design of large scale electronics. In this presentation, we shall provide a basic tutorial on Babbage's notation showing how his concepts of 'pieces' and 'working points' effectively build a graph in which both parts and their interactions are represented by nodes, with edges between part-nodes and interaction-nodes denoting ownership, and edges between interaction-nodes denoting the transmission of forces between individual assemblies within a machine. We shall give examples from Babbage's Difference Engine 2 for which a complete set of notations was drawn in 1849, and compare them to a design of similar complexity specified in 1987 using the Inmos HDL.

Here is the scientific program.

Keynote speakers:

Roger Kamm, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Alicia El Haj,  Interdisciplinary Chair of Cell Engineering, Healthcare Technology Institute, University of Birmingham

Invited speakers (confirmed to date):

Davide Ambrosi, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Anthony Callanan, University of Edinburgh, UK

Ruth Cameron, University of Cambridge, UK

Sonia Contera, University of Oxford, UK

Linda Cummings, New Jersey Institute of Technology, USA

Mohit Dalwadi, University of Oxford, UK

John Dunlop, University of Salzburg, Austria

John King, Nottingham, UK

Nati Korin, Technion, Israel

Catriona Lally, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Sandra Loerakker, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands

Ivan Martin, University of Basel, Switzerland

Scott McCue, Queensland University of Technology, Australia

Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy, University of Oxford, UK

Tom Mullin,  University of Oxford, UK

Ramin Nasehi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Reuben O'Dea, University of Nottingham, UK

James Oliver, University of Oxford, UK

Ioannis Papantoniou, KU Leuven, Belgium

Ansgar Petersen, Julius Wolf Institute Berlin, Germany

Luigi Preziosi, Politecnico di Torino, Italy

Rebecca Shipley, University College London, UK

Barbara Wagner, Weierstrass Institute for Applied Analysis and Stochastics, Berlin

Cathy Ye, Oxford University, UK

Feihu Zhao, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands

The idea of isotropic localization is to substitute an algebro-geometric object (motive)
by its “local” versions, parametrized by finitely generated extensions of the ground field k. In the case of the so-called “flexible” ground field, the complexity of the respective “isotropic motivic categories” is similar to that of their topological counterpart. At the same time, new features appear: the isotropic motivic cohomology of a point encode Milnor’s cohomological operations, while isotropic Chow motives (hypothetically) coincide with Chow motives modulo numerical equivalence (with finite coefficients). Extended versions of the isotropic category permit to access numerical Chow motives with rational coefficients providing a new approach to the old questions related to them. The same localization can be applied to the stable homotopic category of Morel- Voevodsky producing “isotropic” versions of the topological world. The respective isotropic stable homotopy groups of spheres exhibit interesting features.