Milton Abramowitz

Milton Abramowitz (19 February 1915 – 5 July 1958)^[1] was an American mathematician at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) who, with Irene Stegun, edited a classic book of mathematical tables called Handbook of Mathematical Functions, widely known as "Abramowitz and Stegun".

Abramowitz was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1915. He received a B. A. and M. A. from Brooklyn College (1937, 1940) and in 1948 received a Ph.D. in Mathematics from New York University. ^[2] He joined the NBS Math Tables Project in 1938, and was later Chief of the Computation Laboratory of the NBS Applied Mathematics Division. In 1958, he died while mowing the lawn of his home in suburban Washington, when the heat caused a heart attack.^[3][1] In his memory, the Abramowitz Award is granted by the University of Maryland, College Park to students "for superior competence and promise in the field of mathematics and its applications." Winners of this award include Charles Fefferman and Sergey Brin.^[4]

At the time of Abramowitz' death, the book was not yet completed but was well underway. Stegun took over management of the project and was able to finish the work by 1964, working under the direction of the NBS Chief of Numerical Analysis Philip J. Davis, who was also a contributor to the book. The major work of producing reliable mathematical tables, was part of the WPA project of Franklin Roosevelt.

External links

• Milton Abramowitz at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
• The Math Tables Project of the Work Projects Administration: The Reluctant Start of the Computing Era