Calculating the log of a number

[osmium]

:

Osmium:

UL. Preliminary planning started in 1952, active work started 1956, first
published 1964.


I commend the Prefaces and Foreword to you. They contain dates ;-)

After being chastised I read the front matter and then realized that I had
already read it sometime in the past, but reading it again didn't change my
opinion. But I didn't make myself clear, I actually had in mind the actual
tabular data, not the physical book with its organization and extra matter
(this thread is actually about the extra matter). IOW, I visualized the
firing tables for the big guns in WW II - artillery and naval - were
computed by these WPA log tables. I still think so. A search for wpa and
ams55 hits a pay site at the one nice hit. A search for wpa and "ams 55"
hits a power point presentation which contains this:

Math tables project (NY 1938-46)
o Works Project Administration
o 37 volumes issued, trig, exp, log, etc.

here's a link to the presentation. I viewed it as HTML so I didn't get all
the "good" out of it.

http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hl=en&lr=lang_en&c2coff=1&q=wpa+"ams+55"

I also found there is a recent book on this very subject. Unfortunately my
library doesn't have it. And by the time they got it on loan I would be off
on some other even more wonderful tangent.

I tried a Usenet search too, and it yielded surprisingly little, but there
is one interesting thread, which is a spin off form the book I mentioned.
It degenerated into a discussion of women being treated so shabbily.

 

[osmium]

I believe that's actually a Laurent series, which is the complex
generalization of a Taylor series. Tschebychev, AFAIK, has some
polynomials and filter design techniques named after him, but not
series expansions. Perhaps a lurking mathematician can correct me.

I have no intention of starting an argument. But. I based my comment on
the footnote at the bottom of Eqn. 4.1.44, which says "approximations in
terms of Chebyshev polynomials" .