In June 1957, a conference of "Data Processing and Automatic Computing Machines" was held at the Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury, South Australia. Many eminent numerical analysts and computer scientists, and others who would go on to become eminent, were invited from half-way around the world. The conference proceedings is hard to find these days, so here is a scan of Volume I, "Programming and mathematics". (I haven't seen Volume II, Engineering, or Volume II, Business Applications.)

Amongst the authors are James Wilkinson and Maurice Wilkes (both Turing Award winners), Sir Tom Cherry, and Sandy Douglas. John Butcher has a paper in here too; I think it is his second published paper. But the volume was of special interest to me for the paper by Robin Merson, An operational method for the study of integration processes. The story of this paper and its significance is told in R I McLachlan, K Modin, H Munthe-Kaas, and O Verdier, Butcher series: A story of rooted trees and numerical methods for evolution equations, Asia Pacific Mathematics Newsletter, vol. 7 no. 1, 2017.

At the end of each paper, the discussion that followed has been transcribed. This makes an interesting snapshot of people's views of computing and numerical analysis in 1957. I haven't looked at all the papers, so if you see anything interesting, let me know and I will flag it here.

Robert McLachlan

  1. Cover
  2. Preface
  3. Organising committee
  4. H J Brown, Introduction
  5. Table of contents
  6. Proceedings
  7. B G Gates, Opening address
  8. R W McG Boswell, Introductory remarks to the Conference on Data Processing and Automatic Computing Machines
  9. W C J White, Introduction to the WRE data processing system
  10. J A Ovenstone, The WREDAC system
  11. T M Cherry and F Hirst, The Machine CSIRAC
  12. J M Bennett and B E Swire, The SILLIAC
  13. R G Smart, The UTECOM digital computer
  14. T Pearcey, Data reduction in pure scientific research
  15. A D Booth, Machine translation of languaes
  16. F W Harwood, Linguistic applications of computing machinery
  17. M V Wilkes, Some remarks on the numerical solution of ordinary differential equations
  18. J W Carr III, Generalised functional round-off error analysis
  19. R H Merson, An operational method for the study of integration processes
  20. J M Bennett, Continuant matrices in numerical analysis
  21. J H Wilkinson, The calculation of the eigenvectors of codiagonal matrices produced by the Givens and Lanczos processes
  22. A Jones, Eigenvalues and vectors of a symmetric matrix using Jacobi's method
  23. A S Douglas, On the solution of parabolic partial differential equations by difference methods
  24. T M Cherry, Numerical solution of a problem in forced convection
  25. B A Chartres, Monte Carlo calculation of the multiple scattering of muons
  26. J C Butcher, On the numerical inversion of Laplace and Mellin transforms
  27. P J Claringbold, The automatic design and analysis of biological experiments
  28. A S Douglas, Computers and Crystallography
  29. H C Freeman, 'SILLIAC' computer programs for X-ray crystal structure analysis
  30. C L Hamblin, An addressless coding scheme based on mathematical notation
  31. G W Hill and J G Sanderson, Automatic computing
  32. R G Smart, The DEUCE matrix interpretive scheme
  33. I M Bassett, Interpretive programming
  34. J M Bennett, J C Butcher, M Chapple, A new diagnostic routine block
  35. Appendices
  36. Abstract cards
  37. Volume I complete