Prof. Sam LawlerRE: https://telescoper.blog/2026/04/03/finding-easter/
I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself).
I had absolutely no idea how complicated the date of Easter is. Wow.
Jim Daly@sundogplanets In modern Irish the word for computer is 'ríomhaire', which derives from the Old Irish 'rímaire', which was someone (a monk) who computed things such as the position of celestial bodies and the timing of Easter. https://www.ria.ie/2020/03/05/inside-a-history-of-ireland-in-100-words-riomhaire/
Riley S. Faelan@psneeze The Latin word for the process of figuring out when holidays were was 'Computus'. In theory, the sub-process of figuring out when Easter is is supposed to be the more specific 'Computus Paschalis', but in practice, that was the most important of all the Catholic Computuses, so 'the Computus' tends to refer to just that one.
@riley Fascinating. If the etymology had taken a different twist I could well be typing this on an Eastering machine. @sundogplanets
@psneeze Yep. Or the Rising Machine.
@riley 😮 Yes! @sundogplanets
@psneeze Oh, and there's a famous book by Isaac Asimov in which 'Computer' is a job title for humans, and not even by clever pun: The End of Eternity. In it, The Eternity is an organisation for manipulating Teh One Timeline, and it employs people known as Computers to figure out which way the timeline should be manipulated. Computers as we know them are notoriously missing from throughout the book (except, possibly, a seldom-referenced hand-held device that might be interpreted more like a PDA or a calculator), which kind of makes sense, because the book came out in 1955, when the early ancestors of our kind of computers were exotic experimental mathematics things that militaries sometimes gave maths departments a lot of money for.
@riley Computers is what NASA called the mathematicians (mainly women) who did the calculations for space flight so I suppose Asimov was influenced by that. @sundogplanets
@psneeze There was no NASA in 1955. It was still two years until the Sputnik Moment that caused NASA to be established.
@riley Maybe I'm confusing it with the NACA. @sundogplanets
@psneeze Maybe. I don't know for sure, but NACA would probably have been into some fancy fluid dynamics calculations by its latter years, and a systolic array of human computers is a feasible way of doing it.
Incidentally, a major plot twist of the book is that future humans find it to be a problem that the early Eternity's meddlement didn't let Terrans develop space travel technologies.
@psneeze I don't know for sure, but Asimov's inspiration might have been the Manhattan Project's practice of arranging human 'computers' into systolic arrays to perform complex simulations before the time of automatic computers and spreadsheets. Reportedly, these computers could use mechanic calculators, though.
The Manhattan Project's practice might, in turn, be derived from the New Deal initiative of the "Mathematical Tables Project", which employed unemployed office clerks and tasked them to 'compute' look-up tables for a bunch of useful transcendental functions. Importantly, the Tables Project was relatively public from the beginning; the Manhattan Project, obviously, was very, very classified, in order to properly ensure that only Russian spies would know exactly what was going on in it. But ten years after the war, the organisational lessons of the project might possibly have started to seep out of the military.