Abstract
The flight of man in space is the most astonishing achievement of engineering. Many factors were necessary to it. Everybody konws that one was numerical calculation on large machines. Another was the basic equations that the machines were told to solve, thousands and perhaps millions of times. The equations that govern the motion of a space capsule were discovered by mathematicians more than 200 years ago. Machines and methods of using them change often. The basic equations do not. They are permanent.
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Works Referred To
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Truesdell, C. (1984). The Role of Mathematics in Science as Exemplified by the Work of the Bernoullis and Euler (1979, 1981). In: An Idiot’s Fugitive Essays on Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-8185-3_10
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