The Maxwell Equations

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It all began on a Saturday evening when tired from my mathematical pursuits I took up the local evening paper and came across this advertisement on the last page:

Kraftstudt & Company Ltd.

accept orders from organisations and individuals for all manner of calculating, analytical and computing work. High quality guaranteed. Apply:

12 Weltstrasse

That was just what I needed. For several weeks I had been sweating over Maxwell equations concerning the behaviour of electromagnetic waves in the heterogeneous medium of a special structure. In the end I had managed by a series of approximations and simplifications to reduce the equations to a form that could be handled by an electronic computer. I already pictured myself travelling up to the capital and begging the administration of the Computer Centre to do the job for me. For begging it would have to be, with the Centre working full capacity on military problems and nobody there giving a damn for a provincial physicist's dabblings in the theory of radio-wave propagation.

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