COUFFIGNAL, Louis.

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Sur l'analyse mécanique. Application aux machines à calculer et aux calculs de la mécanique céleste. First editions, the Erwin Tomash Library copies, inscribed by the author on the front free endpapers to the pharmacologist Gabriel Bertrand and the mathematician Émile Borel respectively, "A Monsieur... Membre de l'Institut, hommage respectueux, Louis Couffignal". The copy inscribed to Borel has Tomash's ownership label on the front wrapper verso. In this paper, Couffignal (1902-1966) anticipated the cybernetic conception of machines as information-processing systems and began to build a conceptual bridge between the computation and mechanization of reasoning. "This was the first time that the topic of calculating machines had been accepted for a thesis at the University of Paris... The bulk of the work consists of a description of mechanical calculating machines and a discussion of the binary number system. Couffignal proposes both mechanical and relay implementations of the binary functions" (Tomash & Williams).

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