A very creative story about a mathematician which History has entirely forgotten - one "Thaddeus Q. Quenderghast III, of Nettlebend, Wyoming". Born around 1821, a contemporary of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (with whom he is implied to have had a relationship "that raises more questions than answers"). He was a child prodigy, showing "an early and precocious aptitude for the more abstruse areas of higher mathematics, solving the four color problem one afternoon during a finger-painting exercise" (nice touch!). By chance, he inherits about seventy square miles of farmland replete with cattle and one day, while musing over Boolean algebra, realizes that the gates on the cattle pens can represent binary switches and the presence or absence of an animal in the pen as a 0/1. From there, it is a very short conceptual leap into the creation of the world's first true computer...driven by a system of fences, gates, mirrors, sentry-posts and a special mathematical code devised by Thaddeus to speed up communication; at one point, the cattle-computer is able to calculate pi to 4 decimal places!

Beyond the great title and a very lovely idea, it should make interesting comparison to Sean McMullen's "Souls in the Great Machine" and AC Clarke's "Into The Comet", where human calculators work in parallel to form a large-scale computer.