Difference engine
Automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Difference engine?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
SHOW ALL QUESTIONS
For the novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, see The Difference Engine.
A difference engine is an automatic mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions. It was designed in the 1820s, and was first created by Charles Babbage. The name difference engine is derived from the method of divided differences, a way to interpolate or tabulate functions by using a small set of polynomial co-efficients. Some of the most common mathematical functions used in engineering, science and navigation are built from logarithmic and trigonometric functions, which can be approximated by polynomials, so a difference engine can compute many useful tables.