Forwarding on behalf of a colleague (see contact details below): not a history job in the usual sense, but looks fascinating! Best James http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AIA801/postdoctoral-research-assistant/ Postdoctoral Research Assistant Leverhulme Project Grant 'Notions and Notations' Royal Holloway, University of London -Computer Science 36 months duration full time Starting salary is £32,862 per annum inclusive of London Allowance Applicants are invited for a position as fixed term Research Assistant in the Computer Science department at Royal Holloway, University of London. The post will support the Leverhulme Trust project Notions and Notations, Babbage's Language of Thought, grant reference RPG-2013-396. The team is led by Professor Adrian Johnstone and Professor Elizabeth Scott, and includes Dr Doron Swade who oversaw the construction of Babbage's Difference Engine 2 for the Science Museum. Babbage scholarship is an expanding field, yet one fundamental question has been largely ignored: how is it that one individual working alone could have synthesised a workable computer design over a short period, designing an object whose complexity of behaviour so far exceeded that of contemporary machines that it would not be matched for over one hundred years? We believe that the answer lies in the techniques Babbage developed to reason about complex systems. His Notation, or rather his notations showing the geometry, the timing, the causal chains and the abstract components of his machines, have a direct parallel in the Hardware Description Languages (HDLs) developed since 1970 to aid the design of large scale electronics. Our research project will attempt to establish whether Babbage created the forerunner to HDLs, achieving intellectual leverage by abstracting away from machine schematics to hardware notations that directly described function, rather than implementation. The key research questions to be addressed are (a) whether Babbage's notations capture the full specification of his engines and (b) the degree to which the notation is a successful HDL that underpins and enables the intellectual development of Babbage's mechanisms, both at the micro level of individual functional units and at the systems level. We propose to test this by developing a specification language and accompanying simulator which capture Babbage's notation, and using them to exercise Babbage's notations for Difference Engine 2. The successful candidate will have a PhD in relevant area, have good programming skills in Java, be familiar with current software engineering practices, be able to implement Web based applications, be familiar (to undergraduate level) with the construction of programming language parsers and translators, and have a good working knowledge of computer architecture. Detailed knowledge of Babbage and his designs is not required since that will be acquired within the project, but candidates must have an interest in the origins of computing. This is a full time post available from 1 April, 2014 for a fixed term period of 36 months. This post is based in Egham, Surrey, London where the College is situated in a beautiful, leafy campus near to Windsor Great Park and within commuting distance from London. For an informal discussion about the post, please contact Prof Adrian Johnstone, a.johnstone@rhul.ac.uk or +44 (0)1784 443425.