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Huh? Theres's a long history of doing this — 'computers' were people long before they are machines.
by perilunar 4y ago
Huh? Theres's a long history of doing this — 'computers' were people long before they are machines.
- adrian_b 4y agoYes, indeed. My father's first job was as a "computer" at an astronomical observatory (in the fifties of the 20th century, when vacuum tube computers had just started to appear, but they had astronomical prices, so they were out of reach for an astronomical observatory).
- hydrogen7800 4y agoI'm aware of human "computers" but my recollection was that in the case of Prandtl, it was an application FEM. I did not know FEM wasn't developed at that time, as this article shows, so it must have been something else.
- adrian_b 4y agoAs a poster above has already said, it might have been a finite difference method, because they solve the same problems. Unlike FEM, finite difference methods have been used right since the origins of differential and integral calculus, with Newton and Leibniz. There are also precursors of the modern FEM, like the Ritz or Galerkin methods, which could have been used by Prandtl.