Mathematics Education, Teaching Mathematics Quotes
Napoleon recognized that technology and science were major factors in innovation and economic development and that mathematics was necessary for that and for economics, and therefore placed a great deal of emphasis on mathematics education. He was a fairly competent mathematically himself having been an artillery officer early in his career.
Many of the male mathematicians were already working for the military or defense industries or still in military service. The University Of Pennsylvania Moore School of Engineering was working on trying to design and build a programmable computer that was to be the ENIAC computer. This was one of the very early computer development projects and mathematicians were desired to write the programs to control the computers and make them do something. But at the time, ironically, male mathematicians and engineers, wanted to design and build the computers—all of the early computers were built in a laboratory by scientists and engineers not by workers in a factory. Those were the prestigious and “interesting” jobs. Doing the programming most men assumed would be uninteresting, scut work, and so this project, out of desperation, came up with the radical idea of using women. And so the first computer programmers were mostly women. The irony was that once it became clear how creative and exciting computer programming could be, and its critical importance, the men flooded into the field and a decade later almost everyone thought that computer programming was a man’s profession, and there was a very common bias that women would not make good programmers. However, the people (men) who thought that did not know that the first computer programmer was a woman—Ada Lovelace {641640} and the earliest programming pioneers in America were mostly women.
Dr. Snyder was the youngest physicist at Los Alamos working on the Atom Bomb Manhattan Project. His rocketry skill was used to fire probes into the highly radioactive area to obtain samples and measurements immediately after the test bomb was exploded.
