David Alan Grier is Associate Professor in the Center for International Science and Technology Policy at George Washington University. His articles on the history of science have appeared in the "American Mathematical Monthly," "Chance," the "Christian Science Monitor," and the "Washington Post." He is Editor in Chief of the "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing." Long before he learned that his grandmother had been trained as a human computer, he absorbed the methods of programming the electronic computer from his father, who was a scientific computing specialist for the Burroughs Corporat...