I'm spending my math hours plucking logarithms and anti-logarithms from the columns in the tables in the back of the 1958 book. Soon I will be not only plucking them and adjusting them, but using them in computation to multiply and divide long inconvenient numbers. The 1958 book covers this material, while more recent books written since the mid-'80s or '90s don't. The newer textbook authors assume that the student will use a calculator to figure out the logarithms and all other computations, and that's that.

But for some peculiar reason I like the feeling of computing them the old-fashioned way, before I relinquish it all to use the calculator like a modern twenty-first century person. It's sort of like ice skaters doing those geometric figure-eights and circles, even though they're no longer required to do them in competitions. Every discipline has some devotees who deliberately learn how to do things the old way, as I mentioned a couple of entries ago about my crafter friends.

Not only do I frequent the log tables, I now have a slide rule as well. This beautiful relic was lent to me by a friend who has kept slide rules as cherished family heirlooms. The slide rule belonged to her grandmother, who was a math teacher. She is not alone in her collecting. Check out this slide rule site to see the work of someone who has a special fondness for the things. The heirloom now on my math desk is made in Japan and has a bamboo back and a plastic (or perhaps even ivory) front. The etching of the numbers is very precise and delicate, and so small that it's hard to make out the parallel number lines, let alone the proportions of space in between them. To find a logarithm, you slide the bar to choose the number on the front and then look around to the back, where the indicator will tell you what your logarithm is. But boy is that indicator tiny. How did the slide rule users ever get an accurate-to-four-significant-digits reading? Maybe they went for the log tables in addition to their slide rule.

Another helpful friend has found a website which sells vintage slide rules, in mint condition still wrapped in their boxes. (I don't want to mention the site, because then there will be a big rush to buy this limited stock and I won't get one.) My friend has already ordered me one as well as one for herself. They were surprisingly cheap for the treasures that they are. Now all I need is a short-sleeved shirt with a plastic pocket protector, and big black-rimmed glasses, to complete that 1958 look. Well, it would involve a bit of cross-dressing, since I am not about to wear the '50s female attire of poufy conical skirt, along with girdle, fitted blouse, stockings, and high heels….

Doing this retro math reminds me that the first "computers" were not machines, but people. The word "computer," before about 1960, still could refer to a person doing computing work. Earlier in the twentieth century, before our cybernetic age, astronomers and physicists used roomfuls of people to do the number-crunching work. Often they were young women, sitting at their desks computing away like living parallel processors. The scientists chose women, as I have read, because they claimed (as do some modern evolutionary psychologists) that women are better suited to tedious, repetitive, painstaking, precise, detail-oriented work. Rarely, one of the more talented ones was able to rise out of the pool and actually become a scientist herself, like the admirable astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941). If I had chosen to study mathematics in the early twentieth century, and wanted to work in physics or astronomy, I probably would have ended up in one of these rooms, with little hope of ever going any further. So I am thankful to what we now truly call the Computer for liberating me from this non-existent prospect.

Posted at 2:59 am | link