ABSTRACT
The Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables was the culmination of a quarter century of National Bureau of Standards (NBS) work on core mathematical tools. Evaluating commonly occurring mathematical functions has been a fundamental need as long as mathematics has been applied to the solution of practical problems. In 1938, NBS initiated its Mathematical Tables Project to satisfy the increasing demand for extensive and accurate tables of functions. The Handbook project occurred during the period when general-purpose electronic computing machinery was first coming into use in government research laboratories. A number of difficult mathematical problems that emerged in the course of developing the Handbook engaged researchers in the NBS Applied Mathematics Division for a number of years after its publication. Two of these are especially noteworthy, the first having to do with stability of computations and the second with precision.
