I try to focus on high school math applications in this blog. Therefore, this picture probably doesn't quite fit. However, it is such a cool picture that I wanted to put it in. I saw it, or at least a portion of it in the September, 2016 issue of Reader's Digest. I went looking for the picture and found an expanded view of it on-line at http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-scientists-board-calculations-1961/. The Reader's Digest piece said that it was taken on October 10, 1957. These are equations related to satellite orbits. The picture was taken six days after the launch of Sputnik, putting the USSR up 1-0 in the space race. That seemed to get things going in the United States. NASA was created the next month and two months later, the U.S. had launched its own satellite.Initially, I thought the photographer did some kind of time-lapse photography and these were all the same guy. Although, one person did the writing - astronomer Samuel Herrick - these are all different scientists. Its been my observation that everyone from the 1950s looked more or less the same. I think that is the reason for my confusion.
At the above website, I got some more information about the photo. The point was made that there are no calculations here - just equations that they might use. That makes sense being at the start of the space race and smack dab in the middle of the cold war. So no top level information was being given away in this photo.
Usually I think its a poor idea to present applications that are over the heads of students, but I think an exception could be made here. There is virtually no calculus here and concepts in trigonometry, "e", etc would be recognizable to many high school students.
The article ended with this: For a complex equation that deals with time-steps and feeds back on itself, the prominent scientists of NASA would have “math parties”!!! [exclamation points, mine]. Everyone would master one part of the equation. Then the first guy would do his part and hand it off to the next guy and so on. Eventually the final guy would go back to the first person and give him the new inputs for 1ms [microsecond?] further in time. After a few hours you could have a nice neat graph of everything over a 1-2 second period. That is how the first nuclear reactors, nuclear bombs and a lot of aerospace calculations were done.