ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief and informal introduction to some of the early work that occurred in symbolic computation. The early terms that were generally used were “formula manipulation” or “formal algebraic manipulation.” At later periods equivalent terms were “nonnumerical mathematics,” “formal mathematical computation,” “symbolic mathematics,” and even “symbol manipulation.” The 1986 term in vogue seems to be “symbolic computation.” The most commonly used broad term during the first half of the 1960s was “nonnumerical mathematics.” There were normally three topics included under that scope: formula manipulation, “pure” mathematics, and theorem proving. FORMAC was a language extension to FORTRAN on the IBM 7090. Technically, FORMAC added to the normal facilities of FORTRAN what was called a “formal algebraic variable” and defined some operations on that. The SIGSAM conference was the first one that involved algebraic manipulation in any significant way.
