Computers are everywhere today—at work, in the bank, in artist's studios, in our pockets—yet they remain to many of us objects of irreducible mystery. How can today's computers perform such a bewildering variety of tasks if computing is just glorified arithmetic? The answer, as Martin Davis lucidly illustrates, lies in the fact that computers are engines of logic. Their hardware and software embody concepts developed over centuries by logicians such as Leibniz, Boole, and Gödel, culminating in the amazing insights of Alan Turing. Readers will come away from this book with a revelatory understanding of how and why computers work. 8 b/w photographs. Published in hardcover as The Universal Computer.

Author Biography: Martin Davis's other books include Computability and Unsolvability. A professor emeritus at New York University, he is currently a visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley.