I’m not sure about this, but I have the general sense that in the history of science it’s not unusual for someone to have a premonition of a sort. A vision of some aspect of science that at the time seems like pure fiction, but sometime later — and that span is sometimes centuries long — their early vision comes to be a central theory, or a basic tenet, or even a tangible reality.

Computer science is an unusual branch of the sciences, because it’s partly real science (that is, a struggle to understand what the universe is and how it works) and partly a branch of engineering. I mean, we can actually build computers that work. Physicists can’t build protons (well, not yet). Biologists can’t build giraffes (again, not yet). But computers? No problem. They’re really good at some things, like calculating the odds of a very strange coincidence. What kind of coincidence, you ask? A coincidence like the one I’m about to tell you about, of course.

A man named Vannevar Bush was born on March 11, 1890, earned a BS and an MS degree at the same time (in four years), and went on to enroll in the MIT electrical engineering program. He received his PhD and patented a string of inventions that made him financially independent. He became the dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 1932, a job that apparently came with a fair amount of spare time. At least the way Bush managed to do it. He used the rest of his time to try to “make the world better.”

He moved up to the Carnegie Institution for Science in 1938, where he was in charge of allocating over a million dollars in grants annually for scientific research. Bush had found his calling: funding promising research programs. Over the next years he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (that eventually became NASA), the National Defense Research Committee, and ran the Office of Scientific Research and Development when it was created in 1941. He was largely responsible for convincing the US government to fund the Manhattan Project to create nuclear weapons. He had also arranged for the development of the “proximity fuse,” a way to detonate bombs at the right moment based on a radar device. It reportedly had a huge effect on the success of the Allies during WWII.

In 1945, Bush wrote about his experiences during WWII: “This has not been a scientist's war; it has been a war in which all have had a part. The scientists, burying their old professional competition in the demand of a common cause, have shared greatly and learned much. It has been exhilarating to work in effective partnership.” He wrote those words in an essay he published in Atlantic Monthly; it was titled As We May Think, and discussed a concept Bush had conceived of a decade earlier. It was called the “memex.”

The memex was a description of a system that would augment human memory by using a web of links connecting ideas and articles together. A diagram of the memex looks familiar nowadays: it’s the World Wide Web. Bush got a few of the details wrong — he thought the documents would be stored on microfilm instead of digitally — but it was his essay that inspired everything from the development of the computer mouse and graphical user interface to the actual terms “hypertext” and “hyperlink.” Bush had one of those prescient visions of the future of a science — computer science.

The list of people born on March 11 includes J.C.R. Licklider, too. His life story has quite a few parallels to Bush’s. Licklider was born a few years later than Bush, in 1915, and also worked at MIT. His first name was Joseph, but he generally went by his nickname, “Lick.” He moved to the private sector in 1957 when he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman. That was where he designed the BBN Time-Sharing System, which was the first public computer system where you could use a percentage of the capability of a big computer to solve your particular problem. He eventually returned to MIT and in 1960 wrote the paper Man-Computer Symbiosis. It talked about “interactive computing,” a thing that wouldn’t exist in reality for years to come. His paper was a big reason why it came into existence, in fact. He also foresaw the creation of easy-to-use computer interfaces.

His series of memos about something called the “Intergalactic Computer Network” described today’s internet in great detail, including cloud computing. He wrote those memos, though, in 1962. In 1968 he wrote The Computer as a Communication Device, where he described networking and social media. The director of the Xerox PARC computer science lab said that “most of the significant advances in computer technology—including the work that my group did at Xerox PARC—were simply extrapolations of Lick's vision. They were not really new visions of their own. So he was really the father of it all.” Licklider’s vision was about networks built to connect computers around the world.

Another March 11 birthday was in 1952, when Douglas Adams was born in Cambridge, England. Adams wasn’t a computer scientist at all; he was a writer. He started out writing for British radio and TV, and wrote some skits included in Monty Python shows. He even appeared on the show at least a couple of times. He’s easy to recognize; he was 6’ 5” tall.

Adams went on to write for the Doctor Who series, and came up with the radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which was produced for BBC Radio in the late 1970s. When the series was a hit, he started writing the stories as novels, and eventually finished five in the series. Although there are five, Adams referred to the series as a trilogy.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is comic fiction, not a set of computer-science essays. So what is Adams doing being mentioned here? Well, don’t overlook the fact that he was born on the same day of the year as Vannevar Bush and J.C.R. Licklider. But it’s more than that. One of the many subplots of Hitchhiker’s Guide has to do with the ultimate purpose of humanity (and the earth). Adams’ answer is that both the planet and humanity itself are components of a vast computer designed by a super-intelligent alien species to answer the question “what is the meaning of life?” The computer answers the question, too.

For the whole context, you’ll just have to read the books for yourself (which I recommend you do; they’re hilarious). But for now, let’s just go back to the beginning, when I pointed out that computers are really good at things like calculating the odds of a very strange coincidence. Now that you know what the coincidence is, it’s time to reveal the answer, which is .42 percent.  It should be obvious how the computer arrived there. If not, well, maybe you don’t fully understand the question.