All that stands between ten-year-old Beatrice and an amazing life are five wishes…and she’s got a plan to make them all come true! A magical and heartfelt adventure about grief, hope, and the power of human connection. Beatrice Corwell has a crooked haircut, eight well-trained cats, and a plan: she’s turning herself into a Tin Man. Once her heart is made of metal, she’ll no longer miss her beloved dead grandma, her absent dad, or her recently moved-away best friend. While Beatrice awaits her transformation, she keeps vigil with a special doll and a handful of wishes she’s determined to make come true. With her encyclopedic knowledge, there must be a way to grant her heart’s deepest desires. When an unusual boy named Caleb moves to town and mentions his granny’s interest in magic, Beatrice decides to enlist their help. She quickly learns, however, that spells don’t always go as planned, and witches can’t be trusted. With the arrival of an unexpected visitor and a series of otherworldly messages, Beatrice’s plans begin to falter. Will her heart turn into metal? Will any of her wishes come true? The Wonderful Wishes of B. is the story of a smart, quirky girl learning what she wants and what she needs—and how, sometimes, the wishes we hold dearest are granted in the most unexpected ways.

The information age owes its existence to a little-known but crucial development, the theoretical study of logic and the foundations of mathematics. The Great Formal Machinery Works draws on original sources and rare archival materials to trace the history of the theories of deduction and computation that laid the logical foundations for the digital revolution. Jan von Plato examines the contributions of figures such as Aristotle; the nineteenth-century German polymath Hermann Grassmann; George Boole, whose Boolean logic would prove essential to programming languages and computing; Ernst Schröder, best known for his work on algebraic logic; and Giuseppe Peano, cofounder of mathematical logic. Von Plato shows how the idea of a formal proof in mathematics emerged gradually in the second half of the nineteenth century, hand in hand with the notion of a formal process of computation. A turning point was reached by 1930, when Kurt Gödel conceived his celebrated incompleteness theorems. They were an enormous boost to the study of formal languages and computability, which were brought to perfection by the end of the 1930s with precise theories of formal languages and formal deduction and parallel theories of algorithmic computability. Von Plato describes how the first theoretical ideas of a computer soon emerged in the work of Alan Turing in 1936 and John von Neumann some years later. Shedding new light on this crucial chapter in the history of science, The Great Formal Machinery Works is essential reading for students and researchers in logic, mathematics, and computer science.

Reproduction of the original: The Great Pestilence by Francis Aidan Gasquet