The Harvard Computers standing in front of Building C at the Harvard College Observatory, 13 May 1913
The Harvard Computers were a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. The team was directed by Edward Charles Pickering (1877 to 1919) and, following his death in 1919, by Annie Jump Cannon.[1]
The women were challenged to make sense of these patterns by devising a scheme for sorting the stars into categories. Annie Jump Cannon's success at this activity made her famous in her own lifetime, and she produced a stellar classification system that is still in use today. Antonia Maury discerned in the spectra a way to assess the relative sizes of stars, and Henrietta Leavitt showed how the cyclic changes of certain variable stars could serve as distance markers in space.[2]
Other computers in the team included Williamina Fleming and Florence Cushman. Although these women started primarily as calculators, they made significant contributions to astronomy, much of which they published in research articles.
^"The Female Astronomers Who Captured the Stars".
^Woodman, Jenny (2016-12-02). "The Women 'Computers' Who Revolutionized Astronomy". The Atlantic. Retrieved 2019-03-16.
The HarvardComputers were a team of women working as skilled workers to process astronomical data at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
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findings. This consequently also strengthened and contributed to HarvardComputers. In 1882 he started his appeals for international variable star observations...
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American astronomer and human computer, one of the first members of female computer group known as "the HarvardComputers." She made the most complete...
observed at atomic scales, and digital computers emerged in the following decades to replace human computers for tedious calculations. Both disciplines...