Talk:History of numerical solution of differential equations using computers

The present article was created as a section of Differential equation. The following discussion has been moved from Talk:Differential equation.

Rise in importance during 20th century

This section contains interesting material, but in my opinion, it does not belong to this article. First, it deals exclusively with the war effort (World War II, that is) in one country, USA, not with the general development of differential equations. So the title is rather misleading. Moreover, it describes some numerical approaches to differential equations, but nothing else. Differential equations had been important at least since the time of Newton, and indeed in earlier times people like Euler worked on problems of ballistics, among other things. Can anyone think of a suitable article to which this section can be moved? Something having to do with applied mathematics, war effort, or numerical methods, perhaps? Arcfrk 02:51, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Actually, there is a point here; solutions to differential equations became evaluable whether or not they could be solved in closed form, and that change propagated world-wide shortly after the war. A {{main}} to History_of_computing_hardware#Pre-1940_analog_computers or somewhere like that; cutting it down to a summary; and, yes, changing the title would make this quite bearable. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 05:08, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

This section seems to be about the rise of certain mathematical tools into areas of engineering like automatic control, and related advances in computing. It's odd, to say the least, to put it into this article. The same points can be made for other parts of mathematics not used so often in engineering in early 20th century. One problem with this section is that it wasn't written by a historian, but rather by someone, with his/her fascination with certain aspects of the history. So one ends up with a mainly mathematical article with a historical section with certain rather obvious biases and inaccuracies. Not a satisfactory state of matters, in my opinion. --C S (Talk) 09:43, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

It appears that the section has now been deleted, and since it is not reproduced on this talk page, its hard to tell what the fuss was about. linas 15:44, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

No, it was simply renamed 20th century applications, and is still very much out of place. Arcfrk 02:13, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

There seems to be some argument over the name of the cannon discussed in the article. It is either Big Bertha or the Paris Gun. I believe that both guns had the capacity to achieve high enough altitudes. Possibly both should be mentioned? Bygeorge2512 17:58, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

The article quotes it as however, such as Germany's giant cannon with singular usage. The Paris gun reached up to 100km distance, with the Big Berthas reached only 12km distance. The Berthas were used mainly to reduce the forts around Liege and Namur during 1914, the Paris Gun, and other railroad guns were mainly used to shell Paris from a distance. I think that the cannons should be made plural, and include both the Berthas and the Paris Gun. Spirits in the Material 18:04, 21 May 2007 (UTC)

But both Big Bertha and the Paris Gun were WWI weapons and their firing tables would have been calculated by hand, as the first analog differential analyser was only built in 1927 - so I don't see how either of these weapons is relevant to this article, which is about solving differential equations using computers. Gandalf61 12:00, 3 June 2007 (UTC)

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