Timeline of scientific computing

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The following is a timeline of scientific computing, also known as computational science.

Before modern computers

18th century

• Simpson rediscovers Simpson's rule, a century after Johannes Kepler (who derived it in 1615 after seeing it used for wine barrels).
• 1733 – The French naturalist Comte de Buffon poses his needle problem.^[1][2]
• Euler comes up with
  a simple numerical method for integrands.^[3][4][5]

• First formulation of Gram-Schmidt orthogonalisation by Laplace,^[6] to be further improved decades later.^{[7][8][9][10]}
• Babbage in 1822, began work on a machine made to compute/calculate values of polynomial functions automatically by using the method of finite differences. This was eventually called the Difference engine.
• Lovelace's note G on the
  Bernoulli numbers. It is considered the first algorithm ever specifically tailored for implementation on a computer, and thus the first-ever computer programme.^[11][12] The engine was never completed, however, so her code was never tested.^[13]
• Adams-Bashforth method published.^[14]
• In applied mathematics, Jacobi develops technique for solving numerical equations.^[15][16][17]
• Gauss Seidel first published.
• To help with computing tides, Harmonic Analyser is built in 1886.

1900s (decade)

• 1900 – Runge’s work followed by Martin Kutta to invent the Runge-Kutta method for approximating integration for differential equations.^[18][19]

1910s (decade)

• 1910 – A-M Cholesky creates a
  matrix decomposition scheme.^[20][21]
• Richardson extrapolation introduced.

1920s

• 1922 –
  numerical weather forecasting by manual calculation, using methods originally developed by Vilhelm Bjerknes as early as 1895.^[22][23]
• 1926 –
  algorithms (including complexity bounds) for many of the basic problems of abstract algebra, such as ideal membership for polynomial rings.^[24]
• 1926 Adams-Moulton method.
• 1927 – Douglas Hartree creates what is later known as the Hartree–Fock method, the first ab initio quantum chemistry methods. However, manual solutions of the Hartree–Fock equations for a medium-sized atom were laborious and small molecules required computational resources far beyond what was available before 1950.

1930s

This decade marks the first major strides to a modern computer, and hence the start of the modern era.

• Fermi's Rome physics research group (informal name I ragazzi di Via Panisperna) develop statistical algorithms based on Comte de Buffon's work, that would later become the foundation of the Monte Carlo method. See also FERMIAC.
• Shannon explains how to use electric circuits to do Boolean algebra in "A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits"
• Atanasoff–Berry Computer
  , from 1937-42.
• Complex number calculator
  created by Stibitz.

1940s

• 1947 – Metropolis algorithm for Monte Carlo simulation (named one of the top-10 algorithms of the 20th century)^[25] invented at Los Alamos by von Neumann, Ulam and Metropolis.^[26][27][28]
• George Dantzig introduces the simplex method (named one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century)^[25] in 1947.^[29]
• Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.^[30]
• Turing formulated the LU decomposition method.^[31]
• MONIAC hydraulic computer at LSE, better known as "Phillips Hydraulic Computer".^[32][33]
• First hydro simulations occurred at Los Alamos.[34]^[35]

1950s

• First successful weather predictions on a computer occurred.^[36][37]
• National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods.^{[38][39][40][41]} Named one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century.^[25]
• Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.^[42]
• Molecular dynamics invented by Bernie Alder and Wainwright ^[43][44]
• eponymous matrices and transformation method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).^[45]
• 1953 –
  Stanislaw Ulam, and Mary Tsingou discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou problem through computer simulations of a vibrating string.^[46]
• A team led by John Backus develops the FORTRAN compiler and programming language at IBM's research centre in San Jose, California. This sped the adoption of scientific programming,^[47][48][49] and is one of the oldest extant programming languages, as well as one of the most popular in science and engineering.

1960s

• 1960 – First recorded use of the term "
  Ray Clough to describe the earlier methods of Richard Courant, Alexander Hrennikoff and Olgierd Zienkiewicz in structural analysis.^[50]
• 1961 –
  QR factorization
  (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).
• 1963 –
  Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory.^[54]
• 1961 – Using computational investigations of the
  3-body problem, Michael Minovitch formulates the gravity assist method.^[55][56]
• 1964 – Molecular dynamics invented independently by Aneesur Rahman.^[57]
• 1965 –
  John W. Tukey.^[58]
• 1964 – Walter Kohn, with Lu Jeu Sham and Pierre Hohenberg, instigates the development of density functional theory,^[59][60] for which he shares the 1998 Nobel Chemistry Prize with John Pople.^[61] This contribution is arguably the earliest work to which Nobels were given for a computer program or computational technique.
• First regression calculations in economics.

1970s

• 1975 –
  Fatou, Julia and Mandelbrot sets. Fractals become the first mathematical visualization tool extensively explored with computing.^[62]
• 1977 –
  four colour theorem, the first theorem to be proved by computer.^[63][64][65]

• Vladimir Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard.^[66][67][68]
• Car–Parrinello molecular dynamics developed by Roberto Car and Michele Parrinello

1990s

• 1990 – In computational genomics and sequence analysis, the Human Genome Project, an endeavour to sequence the entire human genome, begins.
• 1998 – Kepler conjecture is almost all but certainly proved algorithmically by Thomas Hales.
• The appearance of the first research grids using
  Seti@Home
  (1999).

2000s

• 2000 – The Human Genome Project completes a rough draft of human genome.
• 2003 – The Human Genome Project completed.
• 2002 – The
  BOINC
  architecture is launched in 2002.

2010s

• Foldit players solve virus structure, one of the first cases of a game solving a scientific question.

• Computational science
• History of computing
• History of mathematics
• Timeline of mathematics
• Timeline of algorithms
• Timeline of computational physics
• Timeline of computational mathematics
• Timeline of numerical analysis after 1945
• History of computing hardware

References