During the Great Depression, America’s Works Progress Administration, looking to employ jobless office workers, set up the Mathematical Tables Project. Several hundred human “computers” sat at rows of desks in a Manhattan office building and tabulated logarithms and exponential functions. The project published twenty-eight volumes of the results of complex functions, with titles such as Tables of Reciprocals of the Integers from 100,000 Through 200,009, presenting 201 pages covered in tables of numbers. Organized groups of human calculators showed the promise of computation, but also the
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