SPEED AND ACCURACY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 59, 11 March 1937, Page 17

SPEED AND ACCURACY

MACHINE CALCULATIONS

USE BY SCIENTISTS

(From "The Post's" Representative.)

LONDON, February 10.

Just as banks, insurance offices, and other big commercial ■ concerns usa mechanical' calculators to reduce the' time formerly employed by clerks to do sums in arithmetic, so complicated mathematical problems usual in research work are also being solved by machinery to an increasing extent. Scientists are depending a great deal more on machines to do this laborious work. ■ •- Cambridge University is to spend at least £10,000 within .the next few years in building and setting up a computing laboratory.- Many of.the instruments.to be installed are so ingenious that they seem to the initiated to be actually, thinking. . • ~'.■' One of the first of these mathematical instruments to be invented was made in 1814.t0 measure directly the area bounded by an irregular curve. This was subsequently developed as the "planimeter." and is now made in forms which solve directly and quickly many problems connected with irregular plane figures, which would take hours to work out by algebra and arithmetic. The most complicated mathematical instrument in the world is the "product integraph" at the Institute of Technology, Massachusetts. This instrument, which is some eighteen feet long, is driven by electricity and answers some mathematical problems which are far too complex for the human brain to tackle. Most mathema'r tical equations can be represented;"aa a curve drawn on squared paper." In the "product integraph" the equations concerned in the different : parts of the problem to be solved are fed into appropriate places in the machine and the answer is read as another curve at the end. Computations which would take weeks to complete-. by the old methods'can be finished in a few hours by this instrument. Problems that would take an/hour or so can be done in a few miri,tites.