Hello Matt, all, What an exciting email thread! For those many of you who don't know me, my name is Sam Kellogg—I'd a PhD student in Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and a long-time lurker on this list. My current dissertation research actually revolves around this very question of computational error, in a historical, philosophical, and linguistic sense—Matt, I think that you're absolutely right in your characterization of 'literal' mathematical error being a rather rare occurrence, though what precisely we mean by error is perhaps what most needs unpacking. After all, many of the 'error' messages we encounter seem to signify that things are still working as intended, at least on some level—the machine is still humming along! Anyways, I thoroughly agree this question needs a good deal more attention. I presented a paper on a specific class of error at SIGCIS in Milan last year. This was based on a series of contemporary empirical cases of errors I encountered that were functioning in overtly political ways in the context of the U.S. embargo on Cuba, but which were still appearing *as though* they had purely technical origins. Sanctions and political disjunctures, I argued, were being internalized within software systems as 'errors' (sometimes with accompanying bug reports and maintenance tickets!) with all kinds of bizarre outcomes. The fieldwork, undertaken a few years ago when travel between New York and Havana was a bit simpler, led me down a rabbit hole of questioning the role of error in the history of computation more broadly, and as well as in mathematics and philosophy, and I've been trying to think through these questions in view of some of the political consequences that we see downstream. I'd be happy to send you, and anyone else on this list, my slides and notes, with the proviso that the project has progressed quite a bit since then. Laurent, Chuck, Annette, Paul, Tom, and everyone else who has already responded (I receive the digest of this list so apologies if I've missed someone), all of these recommendations are exceedingly valuable. I am in the midst of moving house right now, but if there is interest I could put together a selection from my bibliography along with the materials already shared to distribute over the coming week. I myself have become particularly fascinated by Turing Award winner Richard Hamming's work on error (his early paper and accompanying patent for Error detecting and error correcting codes <https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6772729> is a key touchpoint), who I don't think has been mentioned yet. The backstory of how he ended up working on error in the first place is a good one, and I'm working on writing up this history, likely as a dissertation chapter, right now. Hamming's notion of what we now refer to as Hamming Distance <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamming_distance> is well worth reading up on—according to this schema, greater deviation from an intended message is rendered as greater 'distance' within a multidimensional space, a powerful transformation of the problem into spatialized terms. There's a great deal more to say here about how error is conceived of metaphorically and visually in order to transform it into something a little more workable or interpretable in different contexts, though for the moment I'll spare this list any further rambling. Matt, and anyone else actively pursuing this topic, please do reach out—I'd love to discuss further, hear more about parallel research, and in general welcome fellow travellers in the theory and history of error! Warm regards, Sam -- Sam P. Kellogg MCC, NYU <http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/mcc/> // PUBLIC CULTURE <https://read.dukeupress.edu/public-culture> // samkellogg.com