Mathematical Laboratory

Aj simple examples of chaos. Maps are interesting to study in their own right, as mathematical laboratories for chaos. Indeed, maps are capable... 

The UNIVAC was not the only computer project the National Bureau of Standards was involved in, nor was it the only such project in which it was working with the military. The NBS established its National Applied Mathematics Laboratories in 1945 because the U.S. Navy wanted there to be a single national body to provide leadership in the development of new computational technology. Additionally, the National Bureau of Standards wanted to obtain a copy of the UNIVAC because the Office of the Air Comptroller of the U.S. Air Force was interested in using the machine in operations research techniques in military administration. ... 

The staff working in operations research, however, were impatient with the time it was taking to develop both the UNIVAC and the Institute for Advanced Study machine. They were able to convince the Air Force in 1948 to provide extra financing to the Applied Mathematics Laboratories in order to produce a very small computer to fill the need for computing power until either the Institute computer or the UNIVAC was ready. The complexity of the new design was kept to an absolute minimum so that it could be finished quickly. When it went into operation in May 1950, the SEAC (Standards Eastern Automatic Computer) was the first fully operational stored program electronic computer in the United States. ... 

In October 1946, Professor D. R. Hartree moved from his Chair of Mathematics at the University of Manchester to become Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge and to head up the Mathematical Laboratory there. He knew Lennard-Jones, for he had been a member of the Kapitza club in 1924-25, when Lennard-Jones was also a member. (He was then just plain Jones, the Lennard was added in 1925 upon his marriage to Kathleen Mary Lennard.) Among the other members of the club that year were P. A. M. Dirac, L. H. Thomas, and P. M. S. Blackett. 

Whereas the first decades of quantum chemistry induced many chemists to rethink the status of theory within chemistry, the establishment of mathematical laboratories and the wide use of computers compelled many to rethink the status of experiment. In fact, computers came to be seen as virtual laboratory sites in which new types of experiments, both virtual and actual, could be enacted to give answers to chemical questions. Virtual experiments and mathematical laboratories expanded the sites of quantum chemistry. 

Developments in computers forced quantum chemists to rethink the status of experimental practices and to reconceptualize the notion of experiment, not so much within the more traditional framework involving instrumentation and laboratories, but, in this case, almost exclusively within the framework of mathematics. Soon afterwards, the idea of a mathematical laboratory materialized and was explored successfully by quantum chemistry groups. 

Science research, study, progress, innovation, technology, discovery, development, nature, knowledge, savoir, improvement, future, mathematics, laboratory, life, physics, rationality, evolution, intelligence, medicine, experiment... 

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