Abstract
THE many users and admirers of the New York Work Projects Administration Mathematical Tables always studied the impressive list at the end ofeach volume of further tables to be published, and looked forward to the time when much-needed values would be available. It was a great shock to them when President Roosevelt announced, towards the end of 1942, that all W.P.A. activities were to cease; it was hard to realize that such a great international asset as the wonderful New York team of computers—the greatest the world has ever known—was to be destroyed at a time whenits proved usefulness might have been diverted to the war effort. Actually, although the greater part has been disbanded, a nucleus has remained in being to help the Service departments, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Naturally there were, early in 1943, a great number of tables ready for piress, but not printed. It is with feelings of relief that we learn that the publication of these has now been provided for, and that four volumes have been announced already. The first gives reciprocals of the integers from 100,000 to 200,000, and thus extends the tables of Oakes (now unobtainable) and Cotsworth, which stop at 100,000. The second is a 10-place table of the Bessel functions J0(z)and J1(z) for complex arguments, giving real and imaginary parts for ϕ = 0(5°)90° and a range 0(0·01)10 of the modulus. The third table gives circular and hyperbolic tangents and cotangents to eight significant figuresfor x = 0(0·0001)2; it is thus a companion to the similar values of sines and cosines that appeared in 1939. The American practice of computing by calculating machines led to a revival some fifteen years ago of the Lagrangian interpolation formula. The new tables now provided give the coefficients for interpolating with any number of points (that is, tabular values) from 3 to 11. Incidentally, they include all the coefficients of Everett's central difference formula. The tables are to be issued by the Columbia Press, Ithaca, N.Y. (in Great Britain by Scientific Computing Service, Ltd., 23 Bedford Square, London, W.C.1).
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
New Mathematical Tables. Nature 153, 311 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/153311b0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/153311b0