University calculators

[pier4r]

(12-19-2018 09:38 AM)Maximilian Hohmann Wrote:  I always thought anyway that mathematicians do not need/use calculators. They provide the theory, but they don't do the calculations.

If they do symbolic manipulations yes (or theorems). But more often than not to get an idea of a pattern to prove there is a lot of number crunching involved.

I had your similar view in the past: "Mathematicians" (with the capital M) do not need numerical computations. Well after reading here and there different biographies, I realized that the idea is quite wrong across all centuries. For example Kepler formalized the laws of planetary motions after studying a ton on recorded data (so kudos to whom collects data, double checks it and store it properly) by Tycho Brahe and others.
Napier spent years, literally years, compiling mathematical tables and publishing them only later.

If you dig in biographies you see that for some (or most?) or theoretical formalization a lot of numerical attempts are done. And this is understandable, you need to plug the numbers (or at least the symbols) to recognize the pattern.

Impressive how the attitude changed over time thanks to social media. Nowadays it seems that people publish their findings asap (at least the ones that are not in the academia), in the past people did a lot of works that risked to be unpublished. For me it is difficult to accept that someone is going to compute mathematical tables for 10+ years in an era were the life expectancy is 40 or less. I wonder how much hard work was lost due to work that lasted too long compared to the life of the person that was doing it.