Film review: Top secret rosies
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Abstract:
Top Secret Rosies: The Female Computers of World War II is a documentary that focuses on four women who worked as “human computers”, computing individual ballistic trajectories for the Army at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. These trajectories were then compiled into tables at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground (APG). Three men are also featured: two who were members of the Army Air Corps and one, Joseph Chapline, who worked with John Mauchly at the university. Several historians also appear giving commentary. The film gives a flavor of the wartime experiences of the seven principal interviewees and explores how they felt about their work. We learn from the women something of what it was like to work on the tables, and we learn from the men in the planes something of what it was like to use the tables for dropping bombs. We also learn that some of the calculations were done by hand, some were done using calculating machines, and some were done using the university’s differential analyzer, an analog electromechanical computing machine used to solve differential equations. Unfortunately, but understandably, we do not learn precisely what went into creating the tables or what sort of calculations the women were doing. Other technical details that would interest mathematicians are also not included. Nonetheless, the film is interesting and informative. It is particularly suitable for an audience that might not be aware of the pervasiveness of mathematics, in military applications and elsewhere. However, by mislabeling the women in the film as mathematicians, it does somewhat distort the role of women in the mathematical sciences in the midtwentieth century. Furthermore, while Top Secret Rosies shows a piece of history not usually seen, it does not show anything of the history of mathematics or the history of women in mathematics, as is claimed in some reviews of the film. The title of the film is clearly meant to evoke a comparison with “Rosie the Riveter”, a World War II symbol of women who worked in shipyards and aircraft factories and did other jobs previously done mainly by men. This comparison is not really appropriate since it was not unusual for women to do computations before the war. Furthermore, in the 1930s about 15 percent of all the American Ph.D.’s in mathematics were granted to women, and there were at least two hundred American women with Ph.D.’s in mathematics at the start of World War II.1 Many of these women, most notably Reviewed by Judy GreenCite