Mary Croarken

The beginnings of the Manchester computer phenomenon: people and influences

The development of computers at the University of Manchester in the late 1940s is discussed. Scientific computation in Britain during and immediately after World War II is briefly described. Computers at the University were initially influenced by M.H.A. Newman and F.C. Williams. Biographies of these two men are given, and their wartime work is examined in the light of computer development at Manchester. The development at Manchester of the first prototype stored-program computer, the Manchester baby, is also discussed.<<ETX>>

Beautiful numbers: the rise and decline of the British Association Mathematical Tables Committee, 1871-1965

The Mathematical Tables Committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and latterly of the Royal Society, led British table making activity for nearly a century. During this period, table making evolved from the private passion of solitary table makers to organized groups of human computers augmented by calculating machines. The most tangible output of the committee was the Mathematical Tables Series: volumes that became a byword for perfection in accuracy and typography. After World War II, the scientific community expected that the electronic computer would take over the role of the table maker. It did, but not in the way table makers had supposed.

The emergence of computing science research and teaching at Cambridge, 1936-49

The motivation behind the creation of the Cambridge University Mathematical Laboratory and its original terms of reference are described. The changes to the laboratory caused by World War II are discussed. The Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory was reestablished in 1945 under the directorship of M.V. Wilkes. The ways in which Wilkes developed the work of the laboratory and built up a research team to work on the EDSAC project, which established Cambridge as a major center of computer research, are considered.<<ETX>>

Providing longitude for all

The Nautical Almanac is an annually published ephemeris giving the positions of heavenly bodies for stated points in time.1 For the past 235 years it has provided essential data to both navigators and astronomers and continues to be familiarly known as the Nautical Almanac. Today’s satellite technology makes books of astronomical tables for the navigator almost obsolete but in the latter part of the eighteenth century they were the only way in which sailors could navigate the globe with accuracy. Today the Nautical Almanac is generated by electronic computers and, as part of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, is run as a commercial enterprise. In the eighteenth century, when the Nautical Almanac was first published, all the work was done by hand using seven-figure logarithm tables and was funded by the Admiralty. While the work was supervised from the Royal Observatory Greenwich, the actual computations were carried out in towns and villages all over England. The first editor of the Nautical Almanac was Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal 1765-1811. This paper will describe how he created the Nautical Almanac, how the calculations were done during the eighteenth century and who were the people who carried them out.

The history and heritage of scientific information systems [Reviews]

Alvarez) says that the “story is as exciting as a spy novel.” The book does contain a considerable amount of technical information on codebreaking, which some readers may wish to reread after having finished the book. Further technical details are given in several appendices. There are 40 pages of notes, a two-page glossary, a 10-page bibliography, and a very useful index. Battle of Wits gives a brief introduction to the nature of cryptography and cryptanalysis, followed by a discussion of the work of British and American codebreakers between the two World Wars, and also of the Polish Cipher Bureau and its work in breaking the Enigma code in the 1930s. The book then gives an account of the development of codebreaking activities by the Allies and the vital role codebreaking played during World War II (including the Battle of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean theatre, the Allied invasion of Europe, and the war in the Pacific). The origins, development, and use of the Enigma machines by the Germans for cryptography are described in detail, as are the mathematical methods and the mechanical, electromechanical, and electronic machines used by the British and the Americans in breaking the Enigma code. Budiansky’s portrayal of some of the persons involved in codebreaking contributes considerably to the historical and technical accounts. Of particular interest are Marian Rejewski (who was one of the central figures in the Polish codebreaking activities in the 1930s), Joseph Rochefort (who was in charge of breaking the Japanese AN-25 naval code used at Midway), William Friedman (who broke the Japanese diplomatic Purple code), Herbert Yardley (whose inglorious career spanned the United States, Chiang Kai-shek’s China, and even Canada), and Dillwyn Knox and Alan Turing in Great Britain. Ian Fleming even makes an appearance in a role suggestive of the exploits of his later fictional hero James Bond. Readers with a computing background will be fascinated by the author’s accounts of the manual and mechanical means used in cryptanalysis, including conventional IBM punchedcard equipment. Some will keep thinking how the analyses could be so much more simply and expeditiously done with the hardware and software available today, and may even speculate on the computational methods used by present-day cryptographers and cryptanalysts. The following example (from p. 33) of the randomization method used in compiling a new code book for the US War Department in the 1930s may both amuse the reader and indicate how far computational tools have evolved since then: ...they entered sixty thousand words in alphabetical order on three-by-five index cards, also by hand. The cards then had to be placed in a random order so they could each be assigned a fiveletter code group; the solution was to push the furniture aside to clear a space in the secure vault where they worked, then throw the cards into a stream of air from a fan. When the cards landed on the floor they were given a final stirring, then picked up.