Harry Polachek interview: March 24, 1970
Richard R. Mertz · 1999
Encouraged by his father and a high school teacher, Polachek studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Yeshiva University and while working on his master's degree at Columbia. He was teaching high school and working on his Ph.D. when called to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1941. After 1 1/2 years using the electromechanical calculators and the Bush differential analyzer there, he continued to direct hand calculations of firing tables for a year in Philadelphia. Polachek then joined the Explosives Research Group at the Bureau of Ordnance. He worked with John von Neumann, using IBM accounting equipment to solve a cylindrical explosion problem. He also spent a week at Harvard solving on the Mark I, a problem relating to shock waves. After the war, Polachek completed his Ph.D. at Columbia and then went to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) in 1947. He continued work on hydroballistics, using IBM machines to solve problems related to wind tunnels and shock waves. The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator/Computer (NORC) was built for NOL but went to the Navy Proving Ground at Dahlgren. In 1952, Polachek went to the David Taylor Model Basin, where his group put a Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) to work solving actuarial problems, doing shelf inventories, and otherwise serving the Navy. John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener are mentioned several times in this oral history.