Prof. Sam LawlerI'm sorry to see obituaries for Dr. Gladys West this morning: https://thezebra.org/2026/01/18/dr-gladys-west-mathematician-whose-work-made-gps-possible-dies-at-95/
She was brilliant and did a lot of incredibly important scientific work, a lot of which was hidden/uncredited early on, because she was a mathematician in a time when "computer" was a job description.
Prof. Sam LawlerA paper from a few years ago by Dung et al. looked at how often programmers were not credited as authors in genetics research papers from the 1970s and 1980s, but were acknowledged as programmers who ran the code for the analysis, and how often those uncredited scientists were women https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/211/2/363/5931132?login=false
It used to be very common practice to have a programmer do your analysis for you, and they weren't considered a co-author (probably because many were women)
Prof. Sam LawlerIn 1964, the first simulation showing that Pluto is in a mean-motion resonance with Neptune was published: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1965Obs....85...43C
They ran a 120,000 year simulation that showed libration of the resonant angle for the first time. This must have been terrifyingly hard to do. Punch cards, vacuum tubes, FORTRAN? I don't even know how they did this, but it was run on the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator
This was the first time Pluto's orbital stability was explained.
rag. Gustavino Bevilacqua@sundogplanets@mastodon.social
If Galileo had proposed such an abstruse orbit they would have put him to boil with carrots and onions 