An Index of Mathematical Tables

IT is common knowledge now that the tabulation of mathematical functions, and the whole approach to numerical mathematics, have been revolutionized with the present century by the increased use and improvement of calculating machines. In Britain we have seen the effects of this in the productions of Dr. L. J. Comrie and of the British Association Tables Committee; in Germany in the work of Dr. J. Peters; in the United States in the tables produced by Prof. H. T. Davis and his collaborators and, most recently and strikingly, by the New York Work Projects Administration. The old classical tables, beginning in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries with Rheticus, Pitiscus and Briggs, revised, corrected, re-edited from time to time, already formed a literature in themselves; the modern and contemporary tables form an enormous and ever-increasing supplement. Descriptions of extant tables had been given in the past, for example, by De Morgan in his articles written for various encyclopaedias and by the numerous reports of the British Association Tables Committee, begin ning with Glaisher's extensive report of 1873, of 175 pages; but latterly the need of a comprehensive index of tables had begun to be felt. The authors of the present book set to work in 1939 to supply this need. In the United States the same need was independently experienced, the result being the publication in 1943, by a Committee of Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation, of the quarterly journal, Mathematical Tables and Aids to Computation, which has very quickly justified its existence.An Index of Mathematical TablesBy Dr. A. Fletcher Dr. J. C. P. Miller Prof. L. Rosenhead. Pp. viii + 451. (London: Scientific Computing Service, Ltd., 1946.) 75s.