The Establishment of Scientific Computing as a New Discipline

At the end of the 1950s the use of computational mathematics was well established. New electronic computers had been constructed, then, with vacuum tubes replaced by semiconductors, which made them faster and much more reliable. Many problems in science and engineering were solved numerically, and played a role at universities and in certain advanced industries when designing new products. However, many really heavy and difficult problems could still not be solved with sufficiently accurate and reliable results. Weather prediction is a typical example. Even with the availability of sufficiently advanced mathematical models, and even if sufficiently accurate weather data at a given time would have been fed into the computer, the discretization would have had to be fine enough to give reasonable accuracy. At that time any prediction of weather over a 24-h period was quite uncertain.