Object Details
- Description
- This set of tables was published by the Project for the Computation of Mathematical Tables (later the Mathematical Tables Project) in New York City. During the 1930s. an agency of the United States government known as the Works Project Administration sought to create jobs for employable workers, Malcolm Morrow, a statistician at the W.P.A.’s Washington, D.C., office, proposed a project that would hire people to compute useful mathematical tables. The program came to be under the sponsorship of Lyman Briggs, the director of the National Bureau of Standards, and operated from 1938 until 1942 in New York City, under the direction of physicist Arnold Lowan, with immediate supervision of the (human) computers by the mathematician Gertrude Blanch.
- Not long after the outbreak of World War II in 1941, President Roosevelt ended the W.P.A. The computing work continued in New York, partly as an office of the U.S. Navy and also as part of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development. After the war ended, the two projects were reunited under the National Bureau of Standards. In 1959, the project moved to Washington, D.C. as the Computation Laboratory of the National Bureau of Standards. Some of the staff would work on the SEAC computer built there.
- According to the preface to this document, it was one of the first publications of the Project for the Computation of Mathematical Tables. It was proposed at a January, 1938, conference held in Washington, D.C., that was attended by members of the Committee on Bibliography of the Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation of the National Research Council as well as representatives of the W.P.A. and N.B.S. At the Same time, a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science undertook a more extensive project of computing powers of integers. Hence only a small number of mimeographed copies of this W.P.A. table were prepared.
- Reference:
- David Alan Grier, “Table making for the relief of labour,” in The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 265-292.
- According to the preface to this document, it was one of the first publications of the Project for the Computation of Mathematical Tables. It was proposed at a January, 1938, conference held in Washington, D.C., that was attended by members of the Committee on Bibliography of the Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation of the National Research Council as well as representatives of the W.P.A. and N.B.S. At the Same time, a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science undertook a more extensive project of computing powers of integers. Hence only a small number of mimeographed copies of this W.P.A. table were prepared.
- This example of the publication was owned by the German- American statistician, mathematician and computer pioneer Carl Hammer (1914-2004).
- Reference:
- David Alan Grier, “Table making for the relief of labour,” in The History of Mathematical Tables: From Sumer to Spreadsheets, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 265-292.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History
- maker
- Lowan, Arnold N.
- Date made
- 1939
- Credit Line
- Gift of Carl Hammer
- Physical Description
- paper (overall material)
- Measurements
- overall: .6 cm x 21.6 cm x 35 cm; 1/4 in x 8 1/2 in x 13 25/32 in
- Object Name
- Book
