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From: bjornl@tds.kth.se (Bj|rn Lisper)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,sci.math
Subject: Re: Questions about the history of computing...
Message-ID: <BJORNL.89Aug9170721@tarpon.tds.kth.se>
Date: 9 Aug 89 15:07:22 GMT
References: <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu>
Organization: The Royal Inst. of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden.
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In-reply-to: bts@evergreen.cs.unc.edu's message of 6 Aug 89 19:33:15 GMT

In article <9086@thorin.cs.unc.edu> bts@evergreen.cs.unc.edu (Bruce Smith)
writes:
%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?

I've heard that Napier spent 40 years of his life calculating logarithm
tables. (I think he was a 17th century Scotch matematician.)

Bjorn Lisper