[Numeric-interest] History of the NBS Handbook of Mathematical Functions

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

There is a new article about the history of the NBS Handbook of
Mathematical Functions that I found quite interesting:

>> ...
>> American Mathematical Monthly
>> August-September 2006
>> Irene Stegun, the Handbook of Mathematical Functions, and the
>> Lingering Influence of the New Deal
>> by David Alan Grier
>>
>> The Handbook of Mathematical Functions is one of the most widely
>> circulated mathematical references. It is also one of the few large,
>> collaborative mathematical projects and a rare example of a
>> twentieth-century mathematical activity led by a woman. The effort
>> that prepared the Handbook had its origins in the relief office of the
>> New Deal, the Mathematical Tables Project of the Work Projects
>> Administration. This office, which was organized to provide jobs for
>> the unemployed, offered an unusual opportunity for mathematically
>> inclined women and trained many of the contributors to the handbook.
>> ...

There is no URL to an online copy of the article, but I suspect your
nearest Mathematics Department will have multiple copies (mine
certainly does).

A point that the article brings out is that Irene Stegun was actually
the driving force behind this famous Handbook, which has sold more
than a million copies in the 40 years since its first publication in
1964, and it continues to be cited about 1500 times a year, according
to data from Science Citation Index.  Her co-author Milton Abramowitz
died in 1958 at the age of 45 while mowing his lawn, but his name
appears first on the book that was published six years later.

The genesis of the project goes back to Roosevelt's Work Projects
Administration (WPA) founded in 1938 to alleviate unemployment, and
the article's author traces the contributions of the Mathematical
Tables Project to Univac's commercial computers, and the founding of
the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

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