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From: aed@j.cc.purdue.edu (Dan Hartley)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,sci.math
Subject: Re: Questions about the history of computing...
Summary: Trigonometric hairdressers
Keywords: Were there (non-trivial) programs before computers?
Message-ID: <9821@j.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 8 Aug 89 03:37:52 GMT
References: <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Followup-To: poster
Organization: Purdue University
Lines: 33


In article <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu> bts@evergreen.cs.unc.edu (Bruce Smith) writes:
> When people talk about the history of computing or the history
> of computer science, the discussion is usually about hardware....
>
> For instance, how did people produce tables of functions?  I'm
> not asking whether they used Taylor series, but rather how did
> they manage the computations.  Did someone shut a mathematician
> in a closet and not let him out 'til it was finished?  Or, did
> they hire an army of clerks and give each instructions on what
> numbers to add, what numbers to multiply and to whom to pass on
> their portion of the answer? ...

Following the adoption of the metric system in France (late 1700s), a fellow
by the name of de Prony tackled the immense job of recalculating the trig
tables to reflect the 100-degree quadrant.  Prevailing on the mathematicians
of the time, he came up with a (labor-intensive) procedure for constructing
the new tables.  How did he do it?  Well, it seems that the powdered wig had
fallen into disfavor, leaving legions of unemployed Paris hairdressers...

Anyway, his method relied partly on some number of independent computations
to assure accuracy.  He managed this by having the calculations repeated
by isolated teams around the country, since the art of copying from your
neighbor's paper was already well developed by that time :-).

In keeping with the tradition of fickle government funding that continues to
this day, no monies were appropriated for the publishing of whatever tables
were produced.
-- 
 Daniel E. Hartley                    Manager of Operations and Facilities
 ARPANET: aed@j.cc.purdue.edu         Purdue University Computing Center
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