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So 57 years ago, there weren’t any programming books. Well, there was one. McCracken and Dorn, Numerical Methods and Fortran Programming. A kindly childless
by aj7 5y ago
So 57 years ago, there weren’t any programming books. Well, there was one. McCracken and Dorn, Numerical Methods and Fortran Programming. A kindly childless couple, Ben and Bluma Goldin, who lived in the same apartment house in Brooklyn, bought me this book as a gift.
An axiomatic lesson from the book was distrust of Taylor expansions, and the necessity of moving the expansion point of any function to a favorable location.
Because harmonic functions are very well behaved, it should also be obvious that even a very coarse lookup table + interpolation should converge to high accuracy quickly. Finally, use of trigonometric identities to zero in on the desired angle is helpful. OK I’ll shut up now.
- chmaynard 5y agoWhy tell us the couple's names and tell us they were childless? Strange. I'm not inclined to trust anything you said after that.
- unethical_ban 5y agoIt's common in storytelling to add details. It's frustrating you call it bad faith because you don't get it.
- aj7 5y agoThey are long dead. It was sad. They doted on me and my sister because they had no kids. He was a salesman. He knew how to get books in Manhattan. He used to get my sister classics with the most beautiful color plate illustrations. In the sixties, these had little value. Today?
- eesmith 5y agoGoing on a tangent, as I understand it, the first programming book was "The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer: With special reference to the EDSAC and the Use of a Library of Subroutines", by Maurice Wilkes, David Wheller and Stanley Gill (1951). https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk https://archive.org/details/programsforelect00wilk