Natural Tangents

The history of women as “computers” — those who do the hard mathematical work of science — goes farther back than the “Hidden Figures” of NASA. Emma Gifford, M.B.E. was one, working around the Great War (WWI) on books like Natural Tangents, determining the complex calculation of trigonometric functions, nominally to aid her husband’s work in optics. But her results, which “should have a place in every college library and in every physical laboratory” according to one review, were unmatched in her time, an era when the results of functions were best found on the mind-boggling tables created by the hundreds in this book: 1,296,000 total calculations. Mrs. Gifford was created Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 1920 (when Natural Tangents was published), though not for her mathematical achievement, but because she was Commandant of the only Red Cross VAD hospital that specialized in the treatment of amputees.