Monday 28 October 2024

Versine, Haversine... History and Etymology of Math Terms Versine

   Versine

The versine of an angle, A, is an almost extinct expression for the quantity 1-cos(A). Up to the 1600's this was probably the second most common trigonometric value used. The Latin word versed relates to turning, and the "versed sine" was, in essence, the sine turned 90 degrees.

In 1835, James Inman introduced the term haversine to describe a value of 1/2 of the versine, "half-versine". The haversine was an important formula in spherical geometry and navigation, since it gave a simple way to find the approximate distance between two points on the earth using the Latitudes and Longitudes. If we consider two points on the unit sphere, with positions given as (lat1, long1) and (lat2, long2) in radians, then the distance between them is given by  where dLat and dLong are the differences in the latitudes and longitudes. Tables for Navigation contained both Hav(x) and its inverse invHav(x) and the logs of these values to assist in prosthaphaeresis . To find the distances on the earth, the answer would be multiplied by the radius of the earth. According to Jeff Miller's web site, the word first appeared in the third edition of Navigation and Nautical Astronomy for the use of British Seamen.

The mathematical terms converse and inverse are both from the same root. Many other words come less directly from this root. A plow turns dirt up and over and creates a furrow, a straight line of dirt along the ground. Things laid out along a straight line were sometimes said to resemble the furrow and called verses, and thus words in a line of a poem became a verse. To reverse is to turn back, and the obverse side is the side you see when you turn something over, and your vertebra are the joints that allow you to turn.

On This Day in Math - October 28

  




"Big Fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em,

and little fleas have lesser fleas,

and so ad infinitum.

~Augustus De Morgan

The 301st day of the year; 301 is the sum of three consecutive primes starting at 97

\( 301 \equiv 1 Mod _b \) for every base,b, from 2 through 6   (Sixth grade version, if you divide 301 by any number 2 through 6, you get a remainder of 1)

301, like every odd number, is the difference of two consecutive squares, 151^2 - 150^2 .  It is also 25^2 - 18^2  (students should expand (x+7)^2 - x^2 to see why, and when this type of relation will next be useful.  




EVENTS

1386 Opening of the University of Heidelberg. It is the oldest university in Germany and was the third university established in the Holy Roman Empire. *Wik


1462 Archbishop Adolph of Nassau captured the city of Maintz and allowed his soldiers to plunder the city. This forced Gutenberg and his printers to flee, but rather than nipping printing in the bud, it forced its spread to Strasburg, Cologne, Basel, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg, Subiaco, and by 1470, Paris. [G. H. Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages (1896),
p. 372]. *VFR


1636 Harvard College founded. The only mathematical master’s thesis in the U.S. before 1700 was at Harvard. This was in 1693 when the candidate took the affirmative position on “Is the quadrature of a circle possible?”. *VFR  The University web site has, "On September 8, 1636, Harvard, the first college in the American colonies, was founded. Who founded Harvard? Despite popular opinion (and a certain statue) John Harvard did not found Harvard, but he was the first major benefactor and he donated half of his estate and his library of more than 400 books to the School.(Read again, but keep in mind they had Masters candidates affirming the impossible, so math was not their best subject.)




1752  Euler writes to (?Goldbach?)  to say that he only knows of seven perfect numbers, those of the form \( (2^p -1)(2^{p-1}) \) with p = 2, 3, 5, 7, 13, 17, and 19.  He also says he is uncertain whether \(2^{31} - 1\) is prime (it is), and adds that if it has a factor , it will be of the form 64n+1. Numbers of the form \( 2^p -1|\) are called Mersenne primes, and as of Jan 2020, there were only 51 known.  *L E Dickson, History of the Theory of Numbers  *GIMPS   (On Oct 21, 2024 the addition of a new largest known Mersenne prime brings the total known to 52.  The new (and surely only temporary) largest known Mersenne Prime is 

2136,279,841 − 1.





1752 Euler publishes a paper listing the 161 numbers less than 15,000 for which \( n^2+1 \) is a prime. He also listed eight numbers for which \( n^4 + 1 \) is a prime; {1, 2, 4, 6, 16, 20, 24, and 34}.
He had described to Goldbach as early as July 9, 1743 a manor by which numbers of this form might be divisible.   *L. E. Dickson, History of the Theory of Numbers




1886 The Statue of Liberty was dedicated on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor. The sculptur Bartholin was present. The statue had almost been moved to another city when there was not enough interest in New York to pay the cost of building the pedestal.  Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, a New York newspaper, announced a drive to raise $100,000 (the equivalent of $2.3 million today). Pulitzer pledged to print the name of every contributor, no matter how small the amount given.The drive captured the imagination of New Yorkers, especially when Pulitzer began publishing the notes he received from contributors. "A young girl alone in the world" donated "60 cents, the result of self denial."  As the donations flooded in, the committee resumed work on the pedestal. After five months of daily calls to donate to the statue fund, on August 11, 1885, the World announced that $102,000 had been raised from 120,000 donors, and that 80 percent of the total had been received in sums of less than one dollar.  *Wik

In this period when we need to remember that all Americans are immigrants, perhaps the second half of the plaque from  Emma Lazarus's  "The New Colossus"

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"



(Hard to imagine some politicians today reading these words, sad. )




1899 Robert Goddard has a "Cherry Tree Dream" of space flight. He will forever remember this as his "anniversary day.:
He became interested in space when he read H. G. Wells' science fiction classic The War of the Worlds when he was 16 years old. His dedication to pursuing space flight became fixed on October 19, 1899. The 17-year-old Goddard climbed a cherry tree to cut off dead limbs. He was transfixed by the sky, and his imagination grew. He later wrote:

On this day I climbed a tall cherry tree at the back of the barn … and as I looked toward the fields at the east, I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet. I have several photographs of the tree, taken since, with the little ladder I made to climb it, leaning against it.

It seemed to me then that a weight whirling around a horizontal shaft, moving more rapidly above than below, could furnish lift by virtue of the greater centrifugal force at the top of the path.

I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended. Existence at last seemed very purposive.


For the rest of his life he observed October 19 as "Anniversary Day", a private commemoration of the day of his greatest inspiration. *Wik




1938 The Indianapolis Star newspaper carried a story of a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem by Ann Condit, a Junior at Central High School in South Bend, Ind.  Her proof is unique in that it used the midpoint of the hypotenuse is the origin of all auxiliary lines and triangles.  

In less than two years her proof would appear in Elisha Scott Loomis' 2nd edition of his  The Pythagorean Proposition, expanded to 344 proofs from the 230 proofs in his first edition. *David Acheson, The Wonder Book of Geometry
I believe this is her construction: 




On this day in 1952, Charles Coulson delivered his inaugural lecture as Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford on The spirit of applied mathematics.
The Rouse Ball Professorship of Mathematics is one of the senior chairs in the Mathematics Departments at the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. The two positions were founded in 1927 by a bequest from the mathematician W. W. Rouse Ball. At Cambridge, this bequest was made with the "hope (but not making it in any way a condition) that it might be found practicable for such Professor or Reader to include in his or her lectures and treatment historical and philosophical aspects of the subject.
The current holders of the position (2023) are  Wendelin Werner[ at Cambridge and  Luis Fernando Alday at Oxford


*Walter William Rouse Ball14 August 1850



-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1957 Only three weeks after Sputnik went into space, young Denis Cox in Victoria, Australia sent a design for a spaceship addressed, "TO A TOP SCIENTIST AT Woomera ROCKET RANGE South Australia."  His design included locations for Australian Insignia, four Rolls Royce Engines, guided missiles, etc, but advised the scientists, "YOU PUT IN OTHER DETAILS".  The letter can be seen here at the Letters of Note web site Edited by Shaun Usher.
On September 24, 2009, an article on ABC Australia's web page indicated that "The Defence Science Technology Organisation is now finally organising a letter from rocket scientists in response to the letter."

In 1965, the Gateway Arch (630' (190m) high) was completed in St. Louis, Missouri. This graceful sweeping tapered curve of stainless steel is the tallest memorial in the U.S. The architect of the catenary curve arch (correct children, it is NOT a parabola) was Eero Saarinen who won the design competition in 1947. It was constructed 1961-66 in the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park, established on the banks of the Mississippi River, on 21 Dec 1935, to commemorate the westward growth of the United States between 1803 and 1890. Cost for the $30 million national monument was shared by the federal government and the City of St. Louis. The memorial arch has an observation room at the top for visitors reached by trams running inside the legs of the arch.*TIS
The connection between Thomas Jefferson as the president who made the Louisiana Purchase and who created the English term Catenary should not go un-noted.  





BIRTHS
1703 Antoine Deparcieux (28 Oct 1703 in Clotet-de-Cessous, France - 2 Sept 1768 in Paris, France) was a French mathematician who is best known for an early work on annuities and mortality.*SAU

1804 Pierre François Verhulst (28 October 1804, Brussels, Belgium – 15 February 1849, Brussels, Belgium) was a mathematician and a doctor in number theory from the University of Ghent in 1825. Verhulst published in 1838 the equation:

\( \frac{dN}{dt} = r N (1-\frac{N}{k}) \)

when N(t) represents number of individuals at time t, r the intrinsic growth rate and k is the carrying capacity, or the maximum number of individuals that the environment can support. In a paper published in 1845 he called the solution to this the logistic function, and the equation is now called the logistic equation. This model was rediscovered in 1920 by Raymond Pearl and Lowell Reed, who promoted its wide and indiscriminate use.*Wik




1845 Ulisse Dini (14 Nov 1845 in Pisa, Italy - 28 Oct 1918 in Pisa, Italy) Dini looked at infinite series and generalised results such as a theorem of Kummer and one of Riemann, the ideas for which had first emerged in work of Dirichlet. He discovered a condition, now known as the Dini condition, ensuring the convergence of a Fourier series in terms of the convergence of a definite integral. As well as trigonometric series, Dini studied results on potential theory. *SAU

1880 Michele Cipolla (born 28 October 1880 in Palermo; died 7 September 1947 in Palermo) was an Italian mathematician, mainly specializing in number theory.
He was a professor of Algebraic Analysis at the University of Catania and, later, the University of Palermo. He developed (among other things) a theory for sequences of sets and Cipolla's algorithm for finding square roots modulo a prime number. He also solved the problem of binomial congruence.*Wik



1937 Dr. Marcian Edward (Ted) Hoff, Jr. was born October 28, 1937 at Rochester, New York. He received a BEE (1958) from Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. During the summers away from college he worked for General Railway Signal Company in Rochester where he made developments that produced his first two patents. He attended Stanford as a National Science Foundation Fellow and received a MS (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) in electrical engineering. He joined Intel in 1962. In 1980, he was named the first Intel Fellow, the highest technical position in the company. He spent a brief time as VP for Technology with Atari in the early 1980s and is currently VP and Chief Technical Officer with Teklicon, Inc. Other honors include the Stuart Ballantine Medal from the Franklin Institute.*CHM



1955 Bill Gates, cofounder and CEO of Microsoft Corporation, was born. Gates developed a version of BASIC for the Altair 8800 while being a student at Harvard. With the success of BASIC, he and co-developer Paul Allen​ founded Microsoft, which delivered an operating system for the IBM PC​, the Microsoft Word​ word processing program, the Window system software, and other programs. *CHM


DEATHS
1703 John Wallis (23 Nov 1616, 28 Oct 1703) British mathematician who introduced the infinity math symbol. Wallis was skilled in cryptography and decoded Royalist messages for the Parliamentarians during the Civil War. Subsequently, he was appointed to the Savilian Chair of geometry at Oxford in 1649, a position he held until his death more than 50 years later. Wallis was part of a group interested in natural and experimental science which became the Royal Society, so Wallis is a founder member of the Royal Society and one of its first Fellows. Wallis contributed substantially to the origins of calculus and was the most influential English mathematician before Newton. *TIS
Between 1643 and 1689 he served as chief cryptographer for Parliament and, later, the royal court. He is credited with introducing the symbol ∞ to represent the concept of infinity. 




1916 Cleveland Abbe (3 Dec 1838, 28 Oct 1916) U.S. astronomer and first meteorologist, born in New York City, the "father of the U.S. Weather Bureau," which was later renamed the National Weather Service. Abbe inaugurated a private weather reporting and warning service at Cincinnati. His weather reports or bulletins began to be issued on Sept. 1, 1869. The Weather Service of the United States was authorized by Congress on 9 Feb 1870, and placed under the direction of the Signal Service. Abbe was the only person in the country who was already experienced in drawing weather maps from telegraphic reports and forecasting from them. Naturally, he was offered an important position in this new service which he accepted, beginning 3 Jan 1871, and was often the official forecaster of the weather.*TIS



1918 Edward Bouchet (15 Sept 1852, New Haven, Conn – 28 Oct 1918, New Haven, Conn) was the first African-American to earn a Ph.D. in Physics from an American university and the first African-American to graduate from Yale University in 1874. He completed his dissertation in Yale's Ph.D. program in 1876 becoming the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. (in any subject). His area of study was Physics. Bouchet was also the first African-American to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa.
Bouchet was also among 20 Americans (of any race) to receive a Ph.D. in physics and was the sixth to earn a Ph. D. in physics from Yale.
When Bouchet was born there were only three schools in New Haven open to black children. Bouchet was enrolled in the Artisan Street Colored School with only one teacher, who nurtured Bouchet's academic abilities. He attended the New Haven High School from 1866–1868 and then Hopkins School from 1868-1870 where he was named valedictorian (after graduating first in his class).
Bouchet was unable to find a university teaching position after college, most likely due racial discrimination. Bouchet moved to Philadelphia in 1876 and took a position at the Institute for Colored Youth (ICY). He taught physics and chemistry at the ICY for 26 years. The ICY was later renamed Cheyney University. He resigned in 1902 at the height of the W. E. B. Du Bois-Booker T. Washington controversy over the need for an industrial vs. collegiate education for blacks.
Bouchet spent the next 14 years holding a variety of jobs around the country. Between 1905 and 1908, Bouchet was director of academics at St. Paul's Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia (presently, St. Paul's College). He was then principal and teacher at Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio from 1908 to 1913. He joined the faculty of Bishop College in Marshall, Texas in 1913. Illness finally forced him to retire in 1916 and he moved back to New Haven. He died there, in his childhood home, in 1918, at age of 66. He had never married and had no children.*Wik




1924 John Backus (3 Dec 1924, 28 Oct 1988) American computer scientist who invented the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) programming language in the mid 1950s. He had previously developed an assembly language for IBM's 701 computer when he suggested the development of a compiler and higher level language for the IBM 704. As the first high-level computer programming language, FORTRAN was able to convert standard mathematical formulas and expressions into the binary code used by computers. Thus a non-specialist could write a program in familiar words and symbols, and different computers could use programs generated in the same language. This paved the way for other computer languages such as COBOL, ALGOL and BASIC. *TIS



1965 Luther Pfahler Eisenhart (13 January 1876 – 28 October 1965) was an American mathematician, best known today for his contributions to semi-Riemannian geometry.*Wik



1983 Pol(idore) Swings, (24 Sep 1906; 28 Oct, 1983) Belgian astrophysicist, made spectroscopic studies to identify elements and structure of stars and comets. He discovered the first interstellar molecule, the CH radical (1937). In comet atmospheres he studied the "Swings bands" - certain carbon emission lines. In 1941, with a slit spectrograph he identified a "Swings effect" in the violet CN bands (3875 A) - a fluorescence partly due to solar radiation that shows emmission line excitation differences dependant on the Doppler shift caused by a comet's motion relative to the Sun. He co-authored an Atlas of Cometary Spectra with Leo Haser in 1956. *TIS



1986 Irving Reiner (February 8, 1924, Brooklyn, New York – October 28, 1986) mathematician at the University of Illinois who worked on representation theory. He solved the problem of finding which abelian groups have a finite number of indecomposable modules. His book with Charles W. Curtis, (Curtis & Reiner 1962), was for many years the standard text on representation theory.*Wik



1935 Louise Schmir Hay (June 14, 1935 – October 28, 1989) was a French-born American mathematician. Her work focused on recursively enumerable sets and computational complexity theory, which was influential with both Soviet and US mathematicians in the 1970s. When she was appointed head of the mathematics department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, she was the only woman to head a math department at a major research university in her era.

Her work was influential with both Soviet and US mathematicians of the period. She co-founded the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) in an effort to provide support to other working mothers. In 1978, she won a Fulbright Scholarship, as did her husband, and they spent the year studying in the Philippines. In 1979, Hay was named the acting head of the University of Illinois' mathematics department. n 1980, she was appointed to the executive board of the AWM and remained in that post until 1987. She was also named as secretary of the Association for Symbolic Logic in 1982.



2003  Marie Maynard Daly (April 16, 1921 – October 28, 2003) American biochemist who was the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in Chemistry (1947). Her postdoctoral research at the Rockefeller Institute included studying the composition and metabolism of components of cell nuclei, determining the base composition of deoxypentose nucleic acids, and calculating the rate of uptake of labeled glycine by components of cell nuclei. Seven years later, she took a university position. She taught biochemistry and researched the metabolism of the arterial wall and its relationship to aging, hypertension, and atherosclerosis. Later, she studied the uptake, synthesis, and distribution of creatine in cell cultures and tissues. She retired in 1986. *TIS 
 In 1953, Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA. Accepting the Nobel Prize for this work in 1962, Watson cited one of Daly's papers on "The role of ribonucleoprotein in protein synthesis" as contributing to his work. *Wik 





Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell

Sunday 27 October 2024

Problems from the Land down Under

  

Looking through the Gazette of the Australian Mathematical Society, and found their puzzle corner (July 2009 , so the exponents in the first problem are explained) ... really nice problems. I think I have this one, but I didn't prove it.... 


  Digital deduction The numbers 2^2009 and 5^2009 are written on a piece of paper in decimal notation. How many digits are on this piece of paper? And this one has me puzzled (which is why they call them puzzles, I guess).. 

  Piles of stones There are 25 stones sitting in a pile next to a blackboard. You are allowed to take a pile and divide it into two smaller piles of size a and b, but then you must write the number a×b on the blackboard. You continue to do this until you are left with 25 piles, each with one stone. What is the maximum possible sum of the numbers written on the blackboard? Anyone know how to a) prove the first, or b) solve the second... 

Do let me know....mostly down to chewing my pencil tips now.... 


 Spoiler (I think) x x x x x x x 
OK, for number one I went back to that old Polya-ism, "If there is a problem you can't solve, find a smaller problem you can solve."  Instead of 2010 I put in 1.  Well 2^1 has one digit and 5^1 has 1 digit so the answer is 2.  Repeating this with more numbers it seemed the solution was always n+1 digits for any exponent n.  
Sue VanHattum gave a nice approach using base ten logarithms, 
digits in 2^n = ceiling(log(2^n))
digits in 5^n = ceiling(log(5^n))
adding gives n+1, so we have n+1 digits.

OK, I think the total for the 25 stones will always be 300... I tried it about three different ways and they all came out the same... hmmmm... In fact, if we look at some smaller numbers for a guide, it seems that for any n, the sum of the products by this process will lead to \( \binom{n}{2}\)... now why is that? Anyone, Anyone??? Bueller?
Well I was right on that one, it seems, but the real understanding came when master problem solver, Joshua Zucker, explained, "The second problem I have seen many times in books as a strong induction exercise, but ... WHY does it come out the triangular numbers?

Well, the triangular numbers are the solution to the handshake problem.
When all the pebbles are in one pile, let them all shake hands.
At each splitting step, the number of points you score is equal to the number of handshakes you destroy.
At the end, you have all the pebbles in their own individual pile, so there are no more handshakes possible - they have all been destroyed.
Hence the score is equal to the initial number of handshakes.


For example, if you start with five stones/handshakes, there are 10 handshakes(edges) connecting the five points.



 If you break away a group of two, (say V1 and V2) you break the connection between each of these two in one group and the three in the second group, or six handshakes, leaving four edges (handshakes) One between the set of two, and three in the triangle of V3, V4, V5.  
------------------------

Just for a kick, I picked out a couple of newer ones for you to try.  Enjoy and share your solutions:

For the geometry lovers, try this one.

In a regular nonagon, prove that the length difference between the longest diagonal and the shortest diagonal is equal to the side length. In other words, prove c−b = a in the diagram below.
*Australian Mathematical Soc. Gazette
And here is one for that I think is an excellent problem for younger students to intuit a wonderful mix of problems solving ideas.  "Let S be a set of 10 distinct positive integers no more than 100. Prove that S contains two disjoint non-empty subsets which have the same sum."

I will come back in awhile and address possible approaches to each, (If I can solve them).

On This Day in Math - October 27

  



It is the duty of every true Muslim, man and woman, to strive after knowledge.
Ulugh Beg [quoting the Hadith. Inscribed on his gate in Bukhara] (see Deaths 1449)


The 300th day of the year; 300 is a triangular number, the sum of the integers from 1 to 24.

300 is also the sum of a pair of twin primes (149 + 151). 

And the sum of ten consecutive primes, 300 = 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47.
The Fibonacci sequence Modulo 50, has a period length of 300. As an example for a smaller number, mod 2, the numbers 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 Mod 2 have residues 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 0, 1, for a repeating pattern of 3.


EVENTS

1725 Nicolaus II and Daniel Bernoulli arrived in St. Petersburg on October 27, 1725 (OS)

In 1780, the first U.S. astronomical expedition to record an eclipse of the sun observed the event which lasted from 11:11 am to 1:50 pm. The observers left about three weeks earlier, on 9 Oct from Harvard College, Cambridge, Mass., for Penobscot Bay, led by Samuel Williams. A boat was supplied by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the four professors and six students. Although the U.S. was at war with Britain, the British officer in charge of Penobscot Bay permitted the expedition to land and set up equipment to observe the predicted total eclipse of the sun. The expedition was shocked to find itself outside the path of totality. They saw a thin arc of the sun instead of its complete obscuration by the moon. *TIS

1859 The spectroscope was invented on this day. A spectroscope is a prism-based device which separates light into its different wavelengths. Gustav Kirchhoff initially used it to study the spectral “signature” of various chemical elements, allowing the identification of a new element if a new spectrum was observed. *rsc.org




1980 The first major network crash, the four-hour collapse of the ARPANET, occurred
The ARPANET, predecessor of the modern Internet, was set up by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Initially it had linked four sites in California and Utah, and later was expanded to cover research centers across the country.
The network failure resulted from a redundant single-error detecting code that was used for transmission but not storage, and a garbage-collection algorithm for removing old messages that was not resistant to the simultaneous existence of one message with several different time stamps. The combination of the events took the network down for four hours. *CHM 



2011 EPL (Europhysics Letters) went beyond Earthly limits by publishing its first ever paper submitted from space: a landmark for both European and physics-based research. Concerned with the properties of complex plasma in almost zero gravity conditions, the paper represents collaborative research of 29 individual missions performed over the last 10 years by German and Russian researchers aboard the International Space Station (ISS).
The experiments detailed in the paper were performed on the ISS in July 2010 by Alexander Alexandrovich Skvortsov and were submitted on 27 October 2011 by Skvortsov’s colleague, Sergey Alexandrovich Volkov, who remains on the ISS. IOP  Blog





BIRTHS

1678 Pierre Rémond de Montmort (27 Oct 1678 in Paris, France, 7 Oct 1719 in Paris, France) was a French mathematician who wrote an important work on probability. Montmort's reputation was made by his book on probability Essay d'analyse sur les jeux de hazard which appeared in 1708. The book, which is a collection of combinatorial problems, is a systematic study of games of chance and shows that there is important mathematics in this area.
Montmort collaborated with Nicolaus(I) Bernoulli and he was also a friend of Taylor. At a time of high feelings in the Newton-Leibniz controversy it says a lot for Montmort that he could be friends with followers of both camps.
In addition to those mentioned above, Montmort corresponded with Craig, Halley, Hermann and Poleni.
Montmort was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1715, when he was on a trip to England. The following year he was elected to the Académie Royal des Sciences. *SAU  
The work greatly influenced the thinking of Montmort's contemporary, Abraham De Moivre.



1728 James Cook (27 Oct 1728; 14 Feb 1779) English seaman who was the first of the really scientific navigators. Captain Cook spent several years surveying the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. He observed a solar eclipse on 5 Aug 1766 near Cape Ray, Newfoundland. On the first of three expeditions into the Pacific (1768) he took Joseph Banks as the ship's botanist to study the flora and fauna discovered. (This practice of carrying a naturalist took place some 75 years before Charles Darwin's famous voyage.) Cook observed the transit of Venus on this voyage from the island of Tahiti on 3 Jun 1769. This would help scientists plot the distance between the sun to the earth. His geographical discoveries made him the most famous navigator since Magellan. He was killed by cannibal natives in Hawaii.*TIS
Cook Tahiti



1798 Heinrich Ferdinand Scherk (27 Oct 1798 in Poznań, Poland - 4 Oct 1885 in Bremen, Germany) was a mathematician born in what is now Poland who discovered an important example of a minimal surface. Scherk discovered the third non-trivial examples of a minimal surface which appeared in his paper Bemerkungen über die kleinste Fläche innerhalb gegebener Grenzen published in Crelle's Journal. The first two examples, the catenoid and the helicoid (also called the screw surface), had been found by the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Marie Meusnier in 1776. The catenoid arises from rotating the catenary curve about a horizontal line. Scherk's result was certainly seen as a major breakthough and brought him considerable fame; two surfaces, Scherk's First Surface and Scherk's Second Surface, as they are named today, are studied in the paper. Scherk's doubly periodic surface is the first example of a complete, embedded, doubly periodic minimal surface. His minimal surfaces have recently been the basis of sculptures by the American artist Brent Collins who has based many of his works on Scherk's second minimal surface.
Another contribution by Scherk is still important today, namely his work on the distribution of the prime numbers. *SAU
Animation of Scherk's first and second surface transforming into each other: they are members of the same associate family of minimal surfaces.*Wik




1827 Pierre-Eugène-Marcellin Berthelot (27 Oct 1827, 18 Mar 1907 at age 79) was a French chemist and science historian and government official whose creative thought and work significantly influenced the development of chemistry in the late 19th century. He helped to found the study of thermochemistry, introduced a standard method for determining the latent heat of steam, measured hundreds of heats of reactions and coined the words exothermic and endothermic. Berthelot systematically synthesized organic compounds, including some not found in nature. His syntheses of many fundamental organic compounds helped to destroy the classical division between organic and inorganic compounds. *TIS



1856 Ernest William Hobson (27 Oct 1856 in Derby, England, -19 April 1933 in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England) wrote the first English book on the measure theory and integration of Baire, Borel and Lebesgue. *SAU

1890 Olive Clio Hazlett (October 27, 1890 - March 8, 1974) was an American mathematician who spent most of her career working for the University of Illinois. She mainly researched algebra, and wrote seventeen research papers on subjects such as nilpotent algebras, division algebras, modular invariants, and the arithmetic of algebras.*Wik She was the most prolific of the US-born women of her time who worked in pure mathematics and was recognized for her research accomplishments when, in 1927, she became the second US-born woman to be ranked as one of American’s leading mathematicians by her peers, a distinction marked by a “star” in American Men of Science. *Natl Museum of American History




1915 Robert Alexander Rankin (27 Oct 1915 in Garlieston, Wigtownshire, Scotland, - 27 Jan 2001 in Glasgow, Scotland) studied at Cambridge University. His fellowship there was interrupted by his wartime work on rockets. He became Professor of Mathematics at Birmingham before moving to the professorship at Glasgow, a post he held for 27 years. His most important work was on Number Theory. He became President of the EMS in 1957 and 1978 and an honorary member in 1990. *SAU


DEATHS

1449 Ulugh Beg (22 Mar 1394- 27 Oct 1449) The only important Mongol scientist, mathematician, and the greatest astronomer of his time. His greatest interest was astronomy, and he built an observatory (begun in 1428) at Samarkand. In his observations he discovered a number of errors in the computations of the 2nd-century Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy, whose figures were still being used. His star map of 994 stars was the first new one since Hipparchus. After Ulugh Beg was assassinated by his son, the observatory fell to ruins by 1500, rediscovered only in 1908. Written in Arabic, his work went unread by the world's next generation of astronomers. When his tables were translated into Latin in 1665, telescopic observations had surpassed them. *TIS

1553 Michael Servetus (/sərˈviːtəs/; Spanish: Miguel Serveto as real name, French: Michel Servet), also known as Miguel Servet, Miguel de Villanueva, Michel Servet, Revés, or Michel de Villeneuve (Tudela, Navarre, 29 September 1511 – 27 October 1553), was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer, and Renaissance humanist. He was the first European to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation, as discussed in Christianismi Restitutio (1553). He was a polymath versed in many sciences: mathematics, astronomy and meteorology, geography, human anatomy, medicine and pharmacology, as well as jurisprudence, translation, poetry and the scholarly study of the Bible in its original languages.
He is renowned in the history of several of these fields, particularly medicine. He participated in the Protestant Reformation, and later rejected the Trinity doctrine and mainstream Catholic Christology. After being condemned by Catholic authorities in France, he fled to Calvinist Geneva where he was burnt at the stake for heresy by order of the city's governing council.



1616 Johann Richter or Johannes Praetorius (1537 Jáchymov, Bohemia – 27 October 1616, Altdorf bei Nürnberg) was a Bohemian German mathematician and astronomer. From 1557 he studied at the University of Wittenberg, and from 1562 to 1569 he lived in Nuremberg. His astronomical and mathematical instruments are kept at Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg.
In 1571 be became Professor of mathematics (astronomy) at Wittenberg where he met Valentinus Otho(Otto) and Joachim Rheticus. When Otho came to Wittenberg in 1573, he suggested to him the fraction |( \frac{355}{113}\) as an approximation to pi. Although known much earlier in the Orient, this is the first known time it was introduced in Europe.
He taught Copernicus' theory of astronomy initially as a means of eliminating the equant from Ptolemy's account, and later moving to a proto-Tychonic system.
He died in Altdorf bei Nürnberg, aged about 79. *Wik



1845 Jean-Charles-Athanase Peltier (22 Feb 1785, 27 Oct 1845) French physicist who discovered the Peltier effect (1834), that at the junction of two dissimilar metals an electric current will produce heat or cold, depending on the direction of current flow. In 1812, Peltier received an inheritance sufficient to retire from clockmaking and pursue a diverse interest in phrenology, anatomy, microscopy and meteorology. Peltier made a thermoelectric thermoscope to measure temperature distribution along a series of thermocouple circuits, from which he discovered the Peltier effect. Lenz succeeded in freezing water by this method. Its importance was not fully recognized until the later thermodynamic work of Kelvin. The effect is now used in devices for measuring temperature and non-compressor cooling units. *TIS



1675 Gilles Personne de Roberval (8 Aug 1602- 27 Oct 1675) French mathematician who developed powerful methods in the early study of integration, writing Traité des indivisibles. He computed the definite integral of sin x, worked on the cycloid and computed the arc length of a spiral. Roberval is important for his discoveries on plane curves and for his method for drawing the tangent to a curve, already suggested by Torricelli. This method of drawing tangents makes Roberval the founder of kinematic geometry. [
The fundamental idea in Roberval's method of tangents is to consider a curve as described by two motions of the same point. Roberval used the same idea about 1643 to compare the arclength of a parabola with that of an Archimedean spirall7, and to solve some extremal problems]
In 1669 he invented the Roberval balance with an articulated parallelogram is now almost universally used for weighing scales of the balance type. He studied the vacuum and designed apparatus which was used by Pascal in his experiments and also worked in cartography. *TIS

*Wik




1878 Lise Meitner (7 Nov 1878; 27 Oct 1968)  Austrian physicist who shared the Enrico Fermi Award (1966) with the chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research beginning in 1934 that led to the discovery of uranium fission. She refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1917, with Hahn, she had discovered the new radioactive element protactinium. She was the first to describe the emission of Auger electrons. In 1935, she found evidence of four other radioactive elements corresponding to atomic numbers 93-96. In 1938, she was forced to leave Nazi Germany, and went to a post in Sweden. Her other work in the field of nuclear physics includes study of beta rays, and study of the three main disintegration series. Later, she used the cyclotron as a tool. *TIS

In Lise Meitner,  Ruth Lewin Sime tells a story that may shed some light on Meitner's early interest in experimentation:"When Lise was still very young, her grandmother warned her never to sow on the Sabbath, or the heavens would come tumbling downLise was doing some embroidery at the time and decided to make a test. Placing her needle on the embroidery, she stuck just the tip of it in and glanced nervously at the sky, took a stitch, waited again, and then, satisfied that there would be no objections from above, contentedly went on with her work."

It happened that Meitner’s nephew, Otto Frisch, also a physicist, was visiting Meitner in Sweden for the holidays, and as the two strolled in the snow in those days after Christmas, they came to understand that, in Hahn's bombardment experiment, uranium atoms must have split into two lighter by-products, one of which was barium.  Hahn had split the atom, only he didn't know it.  Meitner and Frisch figured out how and why a nucleus could divide, and they also understood that such a reaction would produce a prodigious amount of energy, and they immediately sent off a paper to Nature, a paper that was published on Feb. 11, 1939, with the title "Disintegration of uranium by neutrons: a new type of nuclear reaction."  They called the new reaction: "fission."  The Pandora's Box of atomic energy had suddenly been opened.

In 1945, Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (for 1944) for his discovery of fission.  Meitner and Frisch were not so honored, or even mentioned in the citation. Now that the records of the prize committee’s deliberations have been unsealed, it appears that the committee was not prepared to consider the possibility that a pair of physicists might have made an important contribution to a discovery that was essentially chemical.  Meitner was very gracious about the omission in her later years, but there are many people who feel that a share of that Nobel Prize should have been hers. *Linda Hal Org

in 1939 during the Fifth Washington Conference on Theoretical Physics at the George Washington University, Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr publicly announced the splitting of the uranium atom. The resulting “fission,” with its release of two hundred million electron volts of energy, heralded the beginning of the atomic age.

The announcement came just weeks after Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, two of Bohr’s colleagues at Copenhagen, reported that they had discovered the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons. After receiving the news in a letter, physicist Lise Meitner and her cousin, Otto Frisch, correctly interpreted the results as evidence of nuclear fission. Frisch confirmed this experimentally on January 13, 1939. *atomicheritage.org



With Hahn in Laboratory


*Wik




1930 Ellen Amanda Hayes (September 23, 1851 – October 27, 1930) was an American mathematician and astronomer. Born in Granville, Ohio (pop 1,127 in the 1880 census) she graduated from Oberlin College in 1878 and began teaching at Adrian College. From 1879 to her 1916 retirement, she taught at Wellesley College, where she became head of the mathematics department in 1888 and head of the new department in applied mathematics in 1897.Hayes was also active in astronomy, determining the orbit of newly discovered 267 Tirza while studying at the Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia.
She wrote a number of mathematics textbooks. She also wrote Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles (1920), an account of life in Granville, and The Sycamore Trail (1929), a historical novel.
Hayes was a controversial figure not just for being a rare female mathematics professor in 19th century America, but for her embrace of radical causes like questioning the Bible and gender clothing conventions, suffrage, temperance, socialism, the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, and Sacco and Vanzetti. She was the Socialist Party candidate for Massachusetts Secretary of State in 1912, the first woman in state history to run for statewide office. She did not win the race, but did receive more votes than any Socialist candidate on the ballot, including 2500 more than their gubernatorial candidate.
Hayes was concerned about under-representation of women in mathematics and science and argued that this was due to social pressure and the emphasis on female appearance, the lack of employment opportunities in those fields for women, and schools which allowed female students to opt out of math and science courses.
Her will left her brain to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University. Her ashes were buried in Granville, Ohio. *Wik



1980 John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (13 Mar 1899, 27 Oct 1980) was an American physicist and mathematician who shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1977 with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill F. Mott. The prize honoured Van Vleck's contributions to the understanding of the behaviour of electrons in magnetic, noncrystalline solid materials. *TIS




1998 Dan Pedoe (29 October 1910, London – 27 October 1998, St Paul, Minnesota, USA[1]) was an English-born mathematician and geometer with a career spanning more than sixty years. In the course of his life he wrote approximately fifty research and expository papers in geometry. He is also the author of various core books on mathematics and geometry some of which have remained in print for decades and been translated into several languages. These books include the three-volume Methods of Algebraic Geometry (which he wrote in collaboration with W. V. D. Hodge), The Gentle Art of Mathematics, Circles: A Mathematical View, Geometry and the Visual Arts and most recently Japanese Temple Geometry Problems: San Gaku (with Hidetoshi Fukagawa). *Wik   [His book on San Gaku is one of the most beautiful math books I have ever owned.  Many of the temple plaques are the work of working peasants who learned and created beautiful geometric works as offerings to the gods. Soddy's hexlet, thought previously to have been discovered in the west in 1937, had been discovered on a sangaku dating from 1822.]

Replica of Sangaku at Hōtoku museum in Samukawa Shrine.





1999 Robert L. Mills (15 Apr 1927 - 27 Oct 1999)American physicist who shared the 1980 Rumford Premium Prize with his colleague Chen Ning Yang for their "development of a generalized gauge invariant field theory" in 1954. They proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang-Mills fields. Their mathematical work was aimed at understanding the strong interaction holding together nucleons in atomic nuclei. They constructed a more generalized view of electromagnetism, thus Maxwell's Equations can be derived as a special case from their tensor equation. Quantum Yang-Mills theory is now the foundation of most of elementary particle theory, and its predictions have been tested at many experimental laboratories. *TIS




Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell