That Dr. Paul Herget, the director of the University of Cincinnati Observatory, is one of the nation’s few experts capable of operating every type of computing machine?
Dr. Herget, who is teaching a new UC course in principles and uses of electronic computing machines, is director of all computations of orbits for this country’s artificial satellite program. Last spring, using the world’s largest and most powerful computing machine, Dr. Herget completed more computations that ever before in the history of astronomy.
Working for nine hours on trajectory computations for minor planets, he estimated that he made the equivalent of 5000 years of computations, corresponding to approximately half a billion arithmetic operations, most of the consisting of 13 digits.