The other related thing that I bumped into about the same time: I was reading a book by George Dyson, called Darwin Among the Machines .He talked a little bit about the work of Leibniz with computers. Leibniz arguably was the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines. I found it striking at a time when I was already working on a book about money and a book about computers that there were these two people 300 years ago who were quite interested in the same topics. And not only that, but they had this big, famous rivalry that supposedly was about which of them had invented the calculus first, although it was really about a lot more than that.