English mathematician.

Babbage graduated in mathematics from Cambridge in 1814. Whilst there he came up with idea of producing a machine to calculate logarithm tables. He set about designing and attempting to build a reliable mechanical computer capable of producing and printing accurate tables. By 1822 he had built a small calculating machine able to work out squares and quadratic equations.

Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1816, with the society's backing, Babbage was able to get government funding to build a larger machine and in 1823 work began on his 'difference engine'. Unfortunately ten years later the project was abandoned due to problems caused by friction.

By this time Babbage was working on his 'analytical engine', designed to perform multiple functions, store numbers and work to a program using punched cards. Building began in 1833, but due to the lack of engineering expertise available at that time, the machine was still unfinished when Babbage died in 1871. It was not until 1991 that the Science Museum completed a Babbage 'engine' to original designs, demonstrating for the first time the viability of Babbage's schemes.

With a desire to improve the usefulness of science in society, Babbage helped set up the Astronomical Society (1820), the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1831) and the Statistical Society of London (1834). Between 1827 and 1835 he was Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge.