Mathematical Tables Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 Mathematical 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, many of which were collected in a book by Abramowitz and Stegun, still in worldwide use today.
- See also: Difference engine
[edit] References
- Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables, by Milton Abramowitz and Irene A. Stegun (Eds)
