"Richard Herring" writes:
Osmium:
That's kind of what it does. The link I posted was the table of contents
for a chapter. You can navigate forward, to p.67 IIRC and find a series.
I think this is a Tschebychev (sp?) expansion. AMS 55 Was a monumental US
work of the 1930's to keep "computers" , back when computers were people,
employed during the depression. Urban Legend? You decide.
UL. Preliminary planning started in 1952, active work started 1956, first
published 1964.
I have the book
and it is physically very imposing.
I commend the Prefaces and Foreword to you. They contain dates ;-)
After being chastised I read the front matter and then realized that I had
already read it sometime in the past, but reading it again didn't change my
opinion. But I didn't make myself clear, I actually had in mind the actual
tabular data, not the physical book with its organization and extra matter
(this thread is actually about the extra matter). IOW, I visualized the
firing tables for the big guns in WW II - artillery and naval - were
computed by these WPA log tables. I still think so. A search for wpa and
ams55 hits a pay site at the one nice hit. A search for wpa and "ams 55"
hits a power point presentation which contains this:
Math tables project (NY 1938-46)
o Works Project Administration
o 37 volumes issued, trig, exp, log, etc.
here's a link to the presentation. I viewed it as HTML so I didn't get all
the "good" out of it.
http://www.google.com/search?num=20&...a+%22ams+55%22
I also found there is a recent book on this very subject. Unfortunately my
library doesn't have it. And by the time they got it on loan I would be off
on some other even more wonderful tangent.
I tried a Usenet search too, and it yielded surprisingly little, but there
is one interesting thread, which is a spin off form the book I mentioned.
It degenerated into a discussion of women being treated so shabbily.
