there's no way the manhattan project didn't, but did the university of chicago department of physics?
So many of the calculations just flat out don't matter to actually have the answers to, that I wonder.
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in reply to @NireBryce's post:
They were definitely in academia generally, but I've not seen a systematic accounting of how pervasive this sort of "uncredited, invisible labor" was. In the linked case, the existence of a data pipeline backed by a wealthy organization seems to make the formal system possible, so while not on the same scale as Bell Labs or Los Alamos, it's not actually qualitatively different.
At a minimum, as far as I can tell, a lot of the workaday arithmetic of experimental statistics (number-crunching for ANOVAs, etc.) was fobbed off on assistants through mid-20th century academia; it definitely wasn't limited to grad students. But it's not clear to me whether this was conceived of as "doing the science" at the time any more than balancing a department's budget was.
yeah, I guess I'm counting statistics and economics as the business end of things but that's unfair to the fields and unfair to the computers.
(And didn't think about astronomy, but: yep. and also 'well suited' to the task of computing, since that would be star counts / etc. I wonder of optical comparitor scut work only became a grad student thing because they got rid of the computers...)