"Lawyers have successfully managed to argue that computer programs are not mathematics and thus should not be covered by the exclusion of mathematics from patentable material. This comes from a deep misunderstanding of how computers really work – particularly as implementations of a universal turing machine. Some great papers on this have been written – including this one at groklaw. That explains in detail how computers really work and why all computer programs are simply mathematical functions – and even why all mathematical functions are really just numbers..." -- NB: John von Neumann / Computer science --