Mathematical Drudgery

Rating: 1/10 (1 February 2020)

This pretends to champion both black and female causes by implying that the protagonists were previously overlooked mathematical geniuses. They were not: they were arithmeticians at best. It is indeed hard to believe nowadays that, before the digital computer, there really was no way of, say, multiplying two numbers having many significant digits apart from using 'long multiplication' or tables of logarithms. The latter rarely went beyond 7 significant figures, leaving only long multiplication. It was not unusual to employ people simply to perform that relatively mundane task. The most famous person to do the job was Nevil Shute Norway, now known as Nevil Shute, who worked at Farnborough (a leading UK aviation research establishment). The point is that, far from being a tale of empowerment, this 'space-age' opening was simply a new form of slavery or of typist-pool routine.