Transducers allow for composable algorithmic transformations on collections in a way that is reusable and type-independent. In Clojure, transducers were introduced by Rich Hickey as a way to implement operations like map, filter, and reduce on collections. The transducers library for Ruby implements transducers, allowing Ruby developers to compose transducers like map, filter, and take to process collections in a more performant way, such as for text processing.