Proceedings of a second symposium on large-scale digital calculating machinery

Description:

Proceedings of a very important conference during the early stages of the development of computing. This Second Harvard Symposium following the First in 1947, was held at the dedication of the Mark III Calculator , installed at the Navy Proving Ground in Dahlgren. There is, in this volume, a reasonably comprehensive survey of the field of numerical methods and computational problems in various sciences as it was in 1949 in the USA and Europe. There is a contribution from the eminent theorist Cornelius Lanczos, who gives a method of minimized iterations for the solution of characteristic value problems. There is a unified theory of computing machines by G. W. Patterson. There are papers by H. Feshbach, by R. D. O'Neal, E. T. Welmers, and H. W. Emmons, and others on economics etc by W. W. Leontief, and many others on eg computing in Chemistry. It is interesting to see what high speed computing was in 1949! Daniel V. McCaughan

subjects: History of computing,  numerical analysis,  Mark III Calculator,  Harvard

People: C. Lanczos,  G.W.Patterson,  W.W. Leontief,  H Fesbach

Times: 1949