Timeline of modern scientific computing

1930s

• John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry create the first electronic non-programmable, digital computing device, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, from 1937-42.

1940s

• Monte Carlo simulation (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented at Los Alamos by von Neumann, Ulam and Metropolis.^[1][2][3]
• First hydro simulations occurred at Los Alamos.^[4][5]
• George Dantzig introduces the simplex method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) in 1947.^[6]
• Ulam and von Neumann introduce the notion of cellular automata.^[7]
• Turing formulated the LU decomposition method.^[8]

1950s

• First successful weather predictions on a computer occurred.^[9][10]
• Hestenes, Stiefel, and Lanczos, all from the Institute for Numerical Analysis at the National Bureau of Standards, initiate the development of Krylov subspace iteration methods.^{[11][12][13][14]} Voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century.
• A team led by Backus develops the FORTRAN compiler and programming language at IBM's research centre in San Jose, California. This sped the adoption of scientific programming,^[15][16][17] and is one of the oldest extant programming languages, as well as one of the most popular in science and engineering.
• "Equations of State Calculations by Fast Computing Machines" introduces the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm.^[18]
• Fermi, Ulam and Pasta with help from Mary Tsingou, discover the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam problem.^[19]
• Molecular dynamics invented by Bernie Alder and Wainwright ^[20][21]
• Householder invents his eponymous matrices and transformation method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).^[22]
• John G.F. Francis ^[23][24] and Vera Kublanovskaya^[25] invent QR factorization (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century).

1960s

• First recorded use of the term "finite element method" by Ray Clough,^[26] to describe the methods of Courant, Hrenikoff and Zienkiewicz, among others. See also here.
• Using computational investigations of the 3 body problem, Minovitch formulates the gravity assist method.^[27][28]
• Edward Lorenz discovers the butterfly effect on a computer, attracting interest in chaos theory.^[29]
• Molecular dynamics invented independently by Aneesur Rahman.^[30]
• Fast Fourier Transform (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Cooley and Tukey.^[31]
• W Kohn instigates the development of density functional theory (with LJ Sham and P Hohenberg),^[32][33] for which he shares the Nobel Chemistry Prize (1998).^[34] This contribution is arguably the first Nobel given for a computer programme or computational technique.

1970s

• Mandelbrot, from studies of the Fatou, Julia and Mandelbrot sets, coined and popularized the term 'fractal' to describe these structures' self-similarity.^[35][36]
• Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken prove the four colour theorem, the first theorem to be proved by computer.^[37][38][39]

1980s

• Fast multipole method (voted one of the top 10 algorithms of the 20th century) invented by Rokhlin and Leslie Greengard.^[40][41][42]

1990s

• In computational genomics and sequence analysis, the Human Genome Project, an endeavour to sequence the entire human genome, begins in 1990.
• The appearance of the first research grids using volunteer computing - GIMPS (1996), distributed.net (1997) and Seti@Home (1999).
• Kepler conjecture is almost all but certainly proved algorithmically by Thomas Hales in 1998.

2000s

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

Miscellaneous

• Technology and Society
  • Tim Berners-Lee created Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the World Wide Web in 1989 and 1990 respectively, while working at CERN.
  • The world's first graphical internet browser, Mosaic released at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in 1993.^[43]

Key organisations

By (research/non-review) publications:

• Los Alamos (7): Ulam et al. 1947; Metropolis & Ulam 1949; Richtmyer 1948; v. Neumann & Richtmyer 1950; Metropolis et al. 1953, Fermi et al. 1955; v. Neumann 1966.
• NIST (4): Hestenes & Stiefel 1952, Stiefel 1952, and Lanczos 1950, 1952.

By (unique) authors/innovators:

• IBM (2): Backus et al., Mandelbrot.
• Los Alamos (11): Fermi; Metropolis (2 pub.s); Pasta; Richtmeyer (3 pub.s); Rosenbluth, A.W.; Rosenbluth, M.N.; Teller, A.H.; Teller, E.; Tsingou; Ulam (3 pub.s); v. Neumann (4 pub.s);
• NIST(3): Hestenes, Lanczos(2 pub.s), Stiefel(2 pub.s).

See also

• Scientific computing
• Timeline of scientific computing
• Timeline of computing
• History of computing
• Timeline of algorithms
• Timeline of computational mathematics
• Timeline of computational physics

References

External links

• SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics) News. Top 10 Algorithms of the 20th Century.
• The History of Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing @ SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics)
• Ruttimann, Jacqueline (2006). "2020 computing: Milestones in scientific computing". Nature. 440: 399–405. doi:10.1038/440399a. 
• Anderson, H. L. "Scientific Uses of the MANIAC". Journal of Statistical Physics. 43 (5-6): 731–748. Bibcode:1986JSP....43..731A. doi:10.1007/BF02628301.