Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Timeline of scientific computing

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

Contents

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.

    • 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. The engine was never completed, however, so her code was never tested.

    • 1900s

  • MW Kutta and CT Runge invent the Runge-Kutta method.

    • 1920s

  • Richardson introduces numerical weather forecasting by manual calculation.
  • 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.
  • George Dantzig introduces the simplex method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) in 1947.
  • Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.
  • Turing formulated the LU decomposition method.
  • Philips creates (invents?) the MONIAC hydraulic computer at LSE, better known as "Philip's Economic Computer".

    • 1950s

  • First successful weather predictions on a computer occurred.
  • 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. Voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century.
  • Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.
  • Molecular dynamics invented by Bernie Alder and Wainwright
  • Householder invents his eponymous matrices and transformation method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).
  • John G.F. Francis and Vera Kublanovskaya 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, 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.
  • Molecular dynamics invented independently by Aneesur Rahman.
  • Fast Fourier Transform (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Cooley and Tukey.

    • 1970s

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

    • 1980s

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

    • 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.

    • References

    Timeline of scientific computing Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA