Table making for the relief of labour
David Alan Grier · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2003
This chapter discusses the Mathematical Tables Project, which was created by the Work Projects Administration (WPA), a government agency that attempted to create jobs for ‘employable workers’. Over its ten year existence, the Mathematical Tables Project was constantly forced to argue for the value of its work. Each new calculation required the project leaders to claim that they knew what they were doing, that their computers were adequately trained, and that the final values could be trusted. For the most part, they suffered the damning criticism of faint praise from scientists.