Modern computing

OCT 01, 1949

The intricacies of automatic computing methods have been popularized by pictures, visual and verbal, of complicated wiring diagrams, great banks of electron tubes, and dramatic control boards, as well as by certain romantic analogies between the machines and the human brain. There remains, however, a need for defining the limits of computing machine operation, as well as its promise.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3066292

R. D. Richtmyer

N. C. Metropolis

The physical sciences, notably physics and astronomy, have come in the past few decades to depend heavily upon the various devices intended to make the solving of mathematical problems less arduous and more rapid than in the days, and with the paper and pencil methods, of the ancients. The methods, of course, have themselves seen little change; yet machines capable of more and more speed in numerical computing make it possible to calculate problems that before would have been solved only approximately if at all.

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More about the authors

R. D. Richtmyer, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.

N. C. Metropolis, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.