Mathematician Irene Stegun was born #OTD in 1919. A major contributor to the Works Progress Administration’s Mathematical Tables Project, she’s probably best known as co-author of the classic “A Handbook of Mathematical Functions” — usually referred to as “Abramowitz and Stegun.”

Almost everyone in physics, astro, and applied math has a copy of this book — physical or digital — somewhere on their shelf.

Something I did not know is that Milton Abramowitz, who was Stegun’s co-editor on the project, died of a heart attack in 1958. That was after the book was underway but well before it was finished. Stegun took over and saw the project through to its publication in 1964.

(ANOTHER thing I did not know is that this grew out of a WPA project employing clerks, physicists, and mathematicians who couldn’t find work after the Great Depression! Where is my prestige TV drama about the Mathematical Tables Project!?)

Anyway, because Abramowitz & Stegun was produced by government employees as part of a publicly funded project, anyone can make a copy of it. Dover famously reprinted it — that’s the copy most of us own.

In 2010 the digital successor to Abramowitz & Stegun went online, when @NIST published the “Digital Library of Mathematical Functions.”

https://dlmf.nist.gov 

Because the book is the result of a “work for hire by the US government,” it is not eligible for copyright and can be distributed. There are many sites that host pdf scans of the book if you’d like a copy of your own to keep on hand.
https://www.math.ubc.ca/~cbm/aands/ 

Did you know that the Works Progress Administration had a Mathematical Tables Project? If you’re a scientist, engineer, or applied mathematician then you’ve likely used an important reference work that grew out of it: Abramowitz & Stegun’s “Handbook of Mathematical Functions.”