Name Percy Ludgate | ||
Died October 16, 1922, Dublin, Republic of Ireland | ||
Percy Edwin Ludgate (August 2, 1883 – October 16, 1922) was an Irish accountant and designer of an Analytical Engine.
Born in Skibbereen County, Cork, he studied at Rathmines College of Commerce, before joining a Dublin-based accountancy firm.
From 1903 he spent his spare time designing an Analytical Engine. Working alone, Ludgate designed his machine while unaware of Charles Babbage's designs, although he later went on to write about Babbage's machine. Ludgate's engine used multiplication as its base mechanism unlike Babbage's which used addition, Ludgate's engine used rods similar to slide rules. Its precise mechanism is unknown as the only written accounts of the engine which survive do not detail its workings.
Ludgate also helped advance calculators by expanding Charles Babbage's design for the first programmable computer. He was one of a few independent workers in the field of science and mathematics. His inventions were worked on outside a lab and on a part-time basis.
His design featured several novelties, including a method of implementing multiplication referred to at the time as "Irish logarithms". (Boys, 1904)
He presented the details of his designs to the Royal Dublin Society in 1909, and in 1914 was invited by the Royal Society to lecture in Edinburgh at a special conference on mathematics and computing.
Little is known about Ludgate's life, as his only records are his scientific writings. The best source of information about Ludgate and his work lie in the work of Professor Brian Randell.
He died of pneumonia in 1922.
In 1991, a prize for the best final year project in the Moderatorship in computer science course at Trinity College Dublin – the Ludgate Prize – was instituted in his honor.