Mechanized Mathematics

I t is indeed an honor to be invited to this platform. One has only to read the names of my distinguished predecessors to realize that, as the saying goes, I have thirty-seven acts that are hard to follow. As a mostly pure mathematician my concern is increased when I note that thirty-two of the lectures have dealt with applications of mathematics to other sciences. The true desperation of my predicament becomes apparent when I tell you that I plan to discuss the application of science to mathematics. I am convinced, however, that if Professor Gibbs were with us today he would be among the first to endorse the application of mechanical devices to the better understanding of pure, as well as applied, mathematics. To support this conviction I should like to call your attention to a bit of mathematical history of the turn of the century, having to do with Gibb's discovery of the phenomenon that now bears his name. In 1898 Michelson and Stratton, at the University of Chicago, completed the construction of their big 80 term harmonic analyzer and published drawings of some of its output in Philos. Mag. One of these is a graph of the function