This metal badge reads "Cruft Laboratory, Staff No. 62, Harvard University", and was donated to the Smithsonian by Grace Murray Hopper (1906–1992). Hopper had joined the United States Naval Reserves in December 1943 and attended the Naval Reserve Midshipman’s School for Women through June 1944. She was then posted to the U.S. Navy’s Computation project that was housed at the Cruft Laboratory.
Hopper had a PhD in mathematics (Yale 1934) and her assignment was to write computer code for the Mark I computer, formally known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hopper continued working at the Harvard Computational Laboratory until 1949 although she, along with other women in the Naval Reserve, had been released from active duty in 1946.
This machine-embroidered cloth arm patch was worn around 1944 by a US Navy Specialist I, Third Class. Navy Specialist is a rating that refers to an enlisted sailor's job specialty and the letter I inside the diamond indicates that the sailor who wore this patch had been trained to be a machine operator for a punch-card accounting machine, an electric accounting machine, or a tabulating machine. The single red chevron below the diamond indicates that the specialist's rate, or pay grade, was equivalent to that of a Petty Officer Third Class.
Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), a mathematician who became a naval officer and computer scientist during World War II, donated this patch to the Smithsonian. Hopper joined the U.S. Naval Reserves in December 1943. From July 1944 she worked with the Navy’s Computation Project at Harvard University’s Cruft Laboratory writing computer code for the Mark I computer, formally known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.
Similar patches (with white background) are shown on World War II images of specialists working on the Computation Project. Hopper herself had been commissioned a lieutenant (junior grade) before she was assigned to the project, so she would not have worn this patch.
This paperbound book contains eighty crossword puzzles. The puzzles are almost all worked in ink, with a variety of annotations. The editor of the book was Margaret Petherbridge, and the publisher Pocket Books, Inc. A mark on the cover reads: pb (/) The POCKET BOOK of (/) CROSSWORD (/) PUZZLES (/) 100 HOURS of PUZZLE PLEASURE. A mark inked on the title page reads: #210 (/) O.C. Hazlett.
The mathematician Olive C. Hazlett once owned tne book.
For related transactions see 2015.0027 and 1998.0314.
The dimensions are for the relatively large set of sheets from 1980 which contains historical information about the Kansas Section of the MAA. this was prepared by Elaine L. Tatham of Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas.
The small gold leaflet is entitled "Thirty-Third Annual Meeting of the Kansas Section of the Mathematical Association of America and Forty-Third Annual Meeting of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics." It gives the program for a meeting of mathematicians held at St. Scholastica College on April 10, 1948.