Mathematical Tables Project
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The Mathematical Tables Project brought together hundreds of unskilled people to compile a large number of tables of all sorts of mathematical information. It began in New York City in 1938 as part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Its technical director for its ten-year existence was the mathematician Gertrude Blanch. It was eventually merged into the Computation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards.
The Math Tables Project was the largest and most sophisticated—and one of the last—of the human computing groups. The project created ballistics calculations for the Army and navigation tables for the Navy, as well as providing the fundamental calculations for the Manhattan Project. The tables ultimately filled 28 published volumes, and were "possibly the most accurate ever produced." Many of them were collected in a book by Abramowitz and Stegun, which is still in worldwide use today.
References
- Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, by Milton Abramowitz and Irene A. Stegun (Eds)
External links
- The Math Tables Project of the Work Projects Administration: The Reluctant Start of the Computing Era (http://csdl.computer.org/comp/mags/an/1998/03/a3033abs.htm)
- Gertrude Blanch Papers (http://www.cbi.umn.edu/collections/inv/cbi00162.html#Biography)
- The Human Computer and the Birth of the Information Age (http://www.philsoc.org/2001Spring/2132transcript.html)
- Abramowitz and Stegun's Handbook (http://jove.prohosting.com/~skripty/)