BRL and The Moore School
As a result of the United States' entering World War II, Goldstine left the University of Michigan where he was a professor in July, 1942 to enlist in the Army. He was commissioned a lieutenant and worked as an ordnance mathematician calculating firing tables at the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. The firing tables were used in battle to find the appropriate elevation and azimuth for aiming artillery, which had a range of several miles.
The firing table calculations were accomplished by about one hundred women operating mechanical desk calculators. Each combination of gun, round and geographical region required a unique set of firing tables. It took about 750 calculations to compute a single trajectory and each table had about 3,000 trajectories. It took one of these people—known, ironically, as computers—about 12 days to compute one trajectory, and more than four years to compute a table. To increase production, BRL enlisted the computing facilities of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and Goldstine was the liaison between BRL and the university.
Read more about this topic: Herman Goldstine
Famous quotes containing the words moore and/or school:
“With its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral,
with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—The
criterion of suitability and convenience.”
—Marianne Moore (1887–1972)
“True it is that she who escapeth safe and unpolluted from out the school of freedom, giveth more confidence of herself than she who cometh sound out of the school of severity and restraint.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)