Vampire Arthur [Cayley](https://thoughtstreams.io/Dave/til/8049/), or even vampire Ada Lovelace, are both too young, with only a couple of centuries of experience. Unfortunately, vampire Gottfried Leibniz would be too old. I've heard that Newton used to publish work which he'd done with the calculus, but presented it geometrically, so it would make sense to his peers. Now I'm imagining our vampire at a whiteboard, making geometric constructions with compass and straight-edge, then [translating](https://thoughtstreams.io/Dave/quotes/7213/) the solution back into algol-y brace-and-semicolon pseudocode for the benefit of the befuddled interviewee... ---- Either vampire Jacques [Vaucanson](https://thoughtstreams.io/Dave/quotes/7534/) or vampire Pierre Jaquet-Droz, however, would be the [perfect age](https://mobile.twitter.com/kathmachine/status/727590460009521152), and both of them already demonstrated * an unhealthy fascination with animating the the non-quick * the ability to drum up public and private funding to support complex projects https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr0e_WsjkvY Jaquet-Droz's choice of writing, art, and music were not haphazard; these were the ways in which aristocrats of the XVIII distinguished themselves from the public.