How did past mathematicians feel about giant computations? Did those who saw the advent of computers get jealous?

A bit of a soft question.

Did past mathematicians ever reveal what feelings they felt as they did a massive computation by hand? Did they hate it? Did they wish that they didn't have to? Might they have even loved it?

Did any of them see computers rise and rise, and regret spending time on tedious computations in their early years?

Before computers, mathematicians were still sometimes able to use computers, but human ones. A notable example is the article by Cayley "On Tschirnhausen's transformation" about the Bring-Jerrard reduction of the quintic, where one can read:



In many other articles in classical invariant theory by Cayley, one can find some rather scary computations which he must have done himself. But for this particular paper, even for Cayley, it must have been too hard. To get an idea of the kind of computations by hand that classical invariant theorists were able to pull off, see the book on Modern Algebra by George Salmon, as well as the book on binary forms by Faa Di Bruno which contains the full explicit expansion of the degree 18 invariant of binary quintics. For comparison, see

Explicit formulas for invariants of binary quintic forms

Gauss once wrote in a letter that using a certain table of primes to count their frequencies during brief periods of free time gave him “much pleasure”. See the first page of

https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2006-43-01/S0273-0979-05-01096-7/S0273-0979-05-01096-7.pdf

and note his comment that he did “not have the patience for a continuous count”.

There is the famous quote by Babbage in the 1800s:

I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.

See https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage.

Emmy Noether’s 1907 Ph.D. thesis was full of hundreds of calculations and she later called her thesis “crap”. I think that refers more to her unhappiness with the lack of conceptual clarity coming from all those calculations, but I presume she also despised spending all that time on the many calculations, which would be far shorter now with computer algebra systems.

In the context of mathematical physics, the use of computers has long been frowned upon. While not a mathematician himself, P.W. Anderson in his Nobel lecture referred to the "indignity of numerical simulations":

Localization was a different matter: very few believed it at the time, and even fewer saw its importance; among those who failed to fully understand it at first was certainly its author. It has yet to receive adequate mathematical treatment, and one has to resort to the indignity of numerical simulations to settle even the simplest questions about it.

The book When Computers Were Human by David Alan Grier contains much information that is relevant to the historical question.

The birth of the electronic computer was intertwined with the military needs of World War II. To understand how people felt about computing, one should first recognize that many of the people who were employed as (human) computers had lower social status. Grier writes:

It was really the job of the dispossessed, the opportunity granted to those who lacked the financial or societal standing to pursue a scientific career. Women probably constituted the largest number of computers, but they were joined by African Americans, Jews, the Irish, the handicapped, and the merely poor. The Mathematical Tables Project employed several polio victims as computers, while the Langley research center kept an office of twelve African American computers carefully segregated from the rest of the staff.

Such people may have welcomed a computing job as a good source of income in a world of limited options, and those with a patriotic spirit may have been happy to be able to contribute concretely to the war effort.

As for the threat of unemployment, that was probably occasioned more by the end of the war (and the resulting drop in demand for massive computation) than by the replacement of humans by machines, which were still expensive and limited at the time.

Anyway, I think it's important to recognize that when it comes to the history of "giant computations," the image of an ivory-tower mathematician doing calculations in pursuit of rarefied truth is a narrow one. Numerically at least, there were far more people for whom computation was simply paid work. If computation is just your day job, that will color the way you think about it, as well as the way you think about automation of your job.