Timeline of scientific computing

The following is a timeline of scientific computing, also known as computational science.

Before modern computers

18th century

• The French naturalist Comte de Buffon poses his needle problem in 1733; generalized to the Buffon-Laplace problem, and then further into Clean Tile Problem.^[1][2]

19th century

• Babbage in 1822, began work on a machine made to compute/calculate values of polynomial functions automatically by using the method of finite differences. This was eventually called the Difference engine.
• Lovelace's note G on the Analytical Engine (1842) describes an algorithm for generating Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and thus the first-ever computer programme.^[3][4] The engine was never completed, however, so her code was never tested.^[5]

1900s

• MW Kutta and CT Runge invent the Runge-Kutta method.^[6][7]

1920s

• Richardson introduces numerical weather forecasting by manual calculation.^[8]
• Douglas Hartree creates the first ab-initio method.

1930s

This decade marks the first major strides to a modern computer, and hence the start of the modern era.

• Fermi's Rome physics research group (informal name I ragazzi di Via Panisperna) develop statistical algorithms based on Comte de Buffon's work, that would later become the foundation of the Monte Carlo method. See also FERMIAC.
• John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry create the first electronic non-programmable, digital computing device, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, from 1937-42.
• Complex number calculator created by Stibitz.

1940s

• Monte Carlo simulation (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented at Los Alamos by von Neumann, Ulam and Metropolis.^[9][10][11]
• George Dantzig introduces the simplex method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) in 1947.^[12]
• Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.^[13]
• Turing formulated the LU decomposition method.^[14]
• Philips creates (invents?) the MONIAC hydraulic computer at LSE, better known as "Philip's Economic Computer".^[15][16]

1950s

• First successful weather predictions on a computer occurred.^[17][18]
• Hestenes, Stiefel, and Lanczos, all from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods.^{[19][20][21][22]} Voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century.
• Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.^[23]
• Molecular dynamics invented by Bernie Alder and Wainwright ^[24][25]
• Householder invents his eponymous matrices and transformation method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).^[26]
• John G.F. Francis^[27][28] and Vera Kublanovskaya^[29] invent QR factorization (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).

1960s

• First recorded use of the term "finite element method" by Ray Clough,^[30] to describe the methods of Courant, Hrenikoff and Zienkiewicz, among others. See also here.
• Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory.^[31]
• Molecular dynamics invented independently by Aneesur Rahman.^[32]
• Fast Fourier Transform (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Cooley and Tukey.^[33]

1970s

• Mandelbrot, from studies of the Fatou, Julia and Mandelbrot sets, coined and popularized the term 'fractal' to describe these structures' self-similarity.^[34][35]
• Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken prove the four colour theorem, the first theorem to be proved by computer.^[36][37][38]

1980s

• Fast multipole method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Vladimir Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard.^[39][40][41]

1990s

• In computational genomics and sequence analysis, the Human Genome Project, an endeavour to sequence the entire human genome, begins in 1990.
• Kepler conjecture is almost all but certainly proved algorithmically by Thomas Hales in 1998.

2000s

• The Human Genome Project completes a rough draft of human genome in 2000.
• The Human Genome Project completed in 2003.

2010s

• Foldit players solve virus structure, one of the first cases of a game solving a scientific question.

Miscellaneous

• Technology and Society
  • Tim Berners-Lee created Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web in 1989 and 1990 respectively, while working at CERN.
  • The world's first graphical internet browser, Mosaic released at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in 1993.^[42]

See also

• Scientific computing
• History of computing
• Timeline of computing
• History of mathematics
• Timeline of mathematics
• Timeline of algorithms
• History of computing hardware
• Timeline of modern scientific computing

References

1. Buffon, G. Editor's note concerning a lecture given 1733 by Mr. Le Clerc de Buffon to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris. Histoire de l'Acad. Roy. des Sci., pp. 43-45, 1733; according to Weisstein, Eric W. "Buffon's Needle Problem." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. 20 Dec 2012 20 Dec 2012.
2. Buffon, G. "Essai d'arithmétique morale." Histoire naturelle, générale er particulière, Supplément 4, 46-123, 1777; according to Weisstein, Eric W. "Buffon's Needle Problem." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource. 20 Dec 2012
3. Simonite, Tom (24 March 2009). "Short Sharp Science: Celebrating Ada Lovelace: the 'world's first programmer'". New Scientist. Retrieved 14 April 2012.
4. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/tom-stoppards-arcadia-at-twenty.html
5. Kim, Eugene Eric; Toole, Betty Alexandra (May 1999). "Ada and the first computer". Scientific American. 280 (5): 70–71. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0599-76.
6. MW Kutta (1900). "Beiträge zur näherungsweisen Integration totaler Differentialgleichungen" [Contributions to the approximate integration of total differential equations] (in German). Thesis, University of Munich.
   • "Reprinted", Z. Math. Phys., 46: 435–453, 1901 and in B.G Teubner, 1901.
7. Runge, C., "Über die numerische Auflösung von Differentialgleichungen" [About the numerical solution of differential equations](in German), Math. Ann. 46 (1895) 167-178.
8. L F Richardson, Weather Prediction by Numerical Process. Cambridge University Press (1922).
9. Metropolis, N. (1987). "The Beginning of the Monte Carlo method" (PDF). Los Alamos Science. No. 15, Page 125.. Accessed 5 may 2012.
10. S. Ulam, R. D. Richtmyer, and J. von Neumann(1947). Statistical methods in neutron diffusion. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory report LAMS–551.
11. Metropolis, N.; Ulam, S. (1949). "The Monte Carlo method". Journal of the American Statistical Association. 44: 335–341. doi:10.1080/01621459.1949.10483310.
12. "SIAM News, November 1994.". Retrieved 6 June 2012. Systems Optimization Laboratory, Stanford University Huang Engineering Center (site host/mirror).
13. Von Neumann, J., Theory of Self-Reproduiing Automata, Univ. of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1966.
14. A. M. Turing, Rounding-off errors in matrix processes. Quart. J Mech. Appl. Math. 1 (1948), 287–308 (according to Poole, David (2006), Linear Algebra: A Modern Introduction (2nd ed.), Canada: Thomson Brooks/Cole, ISBN 0-534-99845-3.) .
15. The computer model that once explained the British economy. Larry Elliott, The Guardian, Thursday 8 May 2008.
16. Phillip's Economic Computer, 1949. Exhibit at London Science Museum.
17. Charney, J.; Fjørtoft, R.; von Neumann, J. (1950). "Numerical Integration of the Barotropic Vorticity Equation". Tellus. 2 (4).
18. See the review article:- Smagorinsky, J (1983). "The Beginnings of Numerical Weather Prediction and General Circulation Modelling: Early Recollections" (PDF). Advances in Geophysics. 25. Retrieved 6 June 2012.
19. Magnus R. Hestenes and Eduard Stiefel, Methods of Conjugate Gradients for Solving Linear Systems, J. Res. Natl. Bur. Stand. 49, 409-436 (1952).
20. Eduard Stiefel,U¨ ber einige Methoden der Relaxationsrechnung (in German), Z. Angew. Math. Phys. 3, 1-33 (1952).
21. Cornelius Lanczos, Solution of Systems of Linear Equations by Minimized Iterations, J. Res. Natl. Bur. Stand. 49, 33-53 (1952).
22. Cornelius Lanczos, An Iteration Method for the Solution of the Eigenvalue Problem of Linear Differential and Integral Operators, J. Res. Natl. Bur. Stand. 45, 255-282 (1950).
23. Metropolis, N.; Rosenbluth, A.W.; Rosenbluth, M.N.; Teller, A.H.; Teller, E. (1953). "Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines" (PDF). Journal of Chemical Physics. 21 (6): 1087–1092. doi:10.1063/1.1699114.
24. Alder, B. J.; Wainwright, T. E. (1957). "Phase Transition for a Hard Sphere System". J. Chem. Phys. 27 (5): 1208. doi:10.1063/1.1743957.
25. Alder, B. J.; Wainwright, T. E. (1962). "Phase Transition in Elastic Disks". Phys. Rev. 127 (2): 359–361. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.127.359.
26. Householder, A. S. (1958). "Unitary Triangularization of a Nonsymmetric Matrix". Journal of the ACM. 5 (4): 339–342. doi:10.1145/320941.320947. MR 0111128.
27. Francis, J.G.F. (1961). "The QR Transformation, I". The Computer Journal. 4 (3): 265–271. doi:10.1093/comjnl/4.3.265.
28. Francis, J.G.F. (1962). "The QR Transformation, II". The Computer Journal. 4 (4): 332–345. doi:10.1093/comjnl/4.4.332.
29. Vera N. Kublanovskaya (1961), "On some algorithms for the solution of the complete eigenvalue problem," USSR Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, 1(3), pages 637–657 (1963, received Feb 1961). Also published in: Zhurnal Vychislitel'noi Matematiki i Matematicheskoi Fiziki [Journal of Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics], 1(4), pages 555–570 (1961).
30. RW Clough, "The Finite Element Method in Plane Stress Analysis," Proceedings of 2nd ASCE Conference on Electronic Computation, Pittsburgh, PA, Sept. 8, 9, 1960.
31. Lorenz, Edward N. (1963). "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow" (PDF). Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. 20 (2): 130–141. doi:10.1175/1520-0469(1963)020<0130:dnf>2.0.co;2.
32. Rahman, A (1964). "Correlations in the Motion of Atoms in Liquid Argon". Phys Rev. 136 (2A): A405–A41. Bibcode:1964PhRv..136..405R. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.136.A405.
33. Cooley, James W., and John W. Tukey, "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series," Math. Comput. 19, 297–301 (1965).
34. B. Mandelbrot; Les objets fractals, forme, hasard et dimension (in French). Publisher: Flammarion (1975), ISBN ISBN 9782082106474 ; English translation Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension. Publisher: Freeman, W. H & Company. (1977). ISBN 9780716704737.
35. Mandelbrot, Benoît B.; (1983). The Fractal Geometry of Nature. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. ISBN 0-7167-1186-9.
36. Appel, Kenneth; Haken, Wolfgang (1977). "Every planar map is four colorable, Part I: Discharging". Illinois Journal of Mathematics. 21: 429–490.
37. Appel, K.; Haken, W. (1977). "Every Planar Map is Four-Colorable, II: Reducibility". Illinois J. Math. 21: 491–567.
38. Appel, K.; Haken, W. (1977). "The Solution of the Four-Color Map Problem". Sci. Amer. 237: 108–121. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican1077-108.
39. L. Greengard, The Rapid Evaluation of Potential Fields in Particle Systems, MIT, Cambridge, (1987).
40. Rokhlin, Vladimir (1985). "Rapid Solution of Integral Equations of Classic Potential Theory." J. Computational Physics Vol. 60, pp. 187-207.
41. L. Greengard and V. Rokhlin, "A fast algorithm for particle simulations," J. Comput. Phys., 73 (1987), no. 2, pp. 325–348.
42. NCSA Mosaic. National Center for Supercomputing Applications homepage. Retrieved 11 Nov 2012.

External links

• SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) News. Top 10 Algorithms of the 20th Century.
• The History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing @ SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)
• Ruttimann, Jacqueline (2006). "2020 computing: Milestones in scientific computing". Nature. 440: 399–405. doi:10.1038/440399a.
• Anderson, H. L. "Scientific Uses of the MANIAC". Journal of Statistical Physics. 43 (5-6): 731–748. Bibcode:1986JSP....43..731A. doi:10.1007/BF02628301.