Wednesday, 20 November 2024

On This Day in Math - November 20

 



The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

— Edwin Powell Hubble

The 324th day of the year; 324 is the largest possible product of positive integers with a sum of 16. (Students, Can you find the integers. Try to find the similar maximum product with a sum of 17)).
324 is also the sum of four consecutive primes, 324 = 73 + 79 + 83 + 89

If you have a square array of 324 dots (that's 18x18) you can carefully paint them each in one of four colors so that no four corners of a rectangle (with sides horizontal and vertical) are the same color. you can also do that for any smaller square, but not for any larger. Here is a 17x17 to ponder


EVENTS

1629 In a letter to Marin Mersenne, Descartes … went on to postulate another kind of language in which ideas would be represented so clearly that errors of judgment would be 'almost impossible'. To realize such a language, all of our thoughts would first have to be given a proper order 'like the natural order of the numbers'; and this presupposes the 'true philosophy', by which the analysis and ordering of thoughts would be carried out. Although Descartes pursues the plan no further, he is optimistic that 'such a language is possible and that the knowledge on which it depends can be discovered'. *Donald Rutherford,

1711 Robert Simson submitted to a simple test of his mathematical knowledge and was duly admitted as professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow. His most influential work was a definitive edition of Euclid’s Elements in 1749. *VFR  The pedal line of a triangle is sometimes called the "Simson line" after him, although it does not actually appear in any work of Simson.
In geometry, given a triangle ABC and a point P on its circumcircle, the three closest points to P on lines AB, AC, and BC are collinear. The line through these points is the Simson line of P, named for Robert Simson. The concept was first published, however, by William Wallace in 1799, and is sometimes called the Wallace line, and also the pedalline.




1843 Sylvester departs US for England and describes his life as "Pretty much a blank." After resigning from Un of Va. after only four months, J. J. Sylvester lived with a brother in New York City while trying to find work in the US. Finally giving up, he returned to England with no job or prospects for one. *James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters
edited by Karen Hunger Parshall



1980, Steve Ptacek in Solar Challenger piloted its first solar-powered flight. The aircraft was designed and built by AeroVironment, Inc. (founded in 1971 by ultra-light airplane innovator, Dr. Paul MacCready). An earlier, 71-ft wingspan, solar-powered design, the Gossamer Penguin, after test flights, flew about 1.95 miles at a public demonstration on 7 Aug 1980. Solar Challenger built upon this experience to be a piloted, solar-powered aircraft strong enough to handle both long and high flights when encountering normal turbulence. With only a 46.5-ft wingspan, it had a huge horizontal stabilizer and had enough wing area for 16,128 solar cells. After design modifications, Ptacek flew across the English Channel flight on 7 July 1981.*VFR




2008 Conficker, also known as Downup, Downadup and Kido, is a computer worm targeting the Microsoft Windows operating system that was first detected on this day in November 2008. It uses flaws in Windows software and dictionary attacks on administrator passwords to propagate while forming a botnet, and has been unusually difficult to counter because of its combined use of many advanced malware techniques. The Conficker infected millions of computers including government, business and home computers in over 200 countries, making it the largest known computer worm infection since the 2003 Welchia. *Wik

2016  This composite image of Earth and its moon, as seen from Mars, combines the best Earth image with the best moon image from four sets of images acquired on Nov. 20, 2016, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Each was separately processed prior to combining them so that the moon is bright enough to see. The moon is much darker than Earth and would barely be visible at the same brightness scale as Earth. The combined view retains the correct sizes and positions of the two bodies relative to each other.  *Seti Inst







BIRTHS

1602 Otto von Guericke (20 Nov 1602; 11 May 1686) German physicist who investigated the properties of a vacuum invented (1654) the first piston air pump to produce a vacuum. While mayor of Madgeburg, in 1663, he demonstrated that two 51 cm diameter copper hemispheres with air pumped out of their interior would be so strongly held together by the force of air pressure that teams of horses harnessed to each hemisphere were not able to pull the hemispheres apart. He studied the role of air in combustion and respiration. With his invention of the first electrostatic machine - a rotating ball of sulphur electrified by friction against his hand - he produced sizeable sparks and showed that like charges repel each other.*TIS



1792 Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky born. (November 20, 1792 – February 12, 1856 (O.S.)) was a Russian mathematician and geometer, renowned primarily for his pioneering works on hyperbolic geometry, otherwise known as Lobachevskian geometry. William Kingdon Clifford called Lobachevsky the "Copernicus of Geometry" due to the revolutionary character of his work. Russia did not convert to the Gregorian Calendar until after the communist revolution in 1918. The new style dates were (December 1, 1792 – February 24, 1856 *Wik
And if you've never heard Tom Lehrer's fantastic musical creation about Lobachevsky. He admits the topic has no relation to the man, but the name just fit so well.



1873 William W(eber) Coblentz (20 Nov 1873; 15 Sep 1962) an American physicist and astronomer whose work lay primarily in infrared spectroscopy. In 1905 he founded the radiometry section of the National Bureau of Standards, which he headed for 40 years. Coblentz measured the infrared radiation from stars, planets, and nebulae and was the first to determine accurately the constants of blackbody radiation, thus confirming Planck's law. *TIS



1889 Edwin Powell Hubble (20 Nov 1889; 28 Sep 1953) American astronomer, born in Marshfield, Mo., who is considered the founder of extragalactic astronomy and who provided the first evidence of the expansion of the universe. In 1923-5 he identified Cepheid variables in "spiral nebulae" M31 and M33 and proved conclusively that they are outside the Galaxy. His investigation of these objects, which he called extragalactic nebulae and which astronomers today call galaxies, led to his now-standard classification system of elliptical, spiral, and irregular galaxies, and to proof that they are distributed uniformly out to great distances. Hubble measured distances to galaxies and their redshifts, and in 1929 he published the velocity-distance relation which is the basis of modern cosmology. *TIS
The late Bill Buegsen was a resident who was proud of the achievements of Marshfield's native son, so he designed a one-fourth replica of the original Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Telescope replica was dedicated on July 4, 1994 and is located on Clay Street, on the west side of the Webster County Courthouse in Marshfield, Mo. It took approximately three months to build, is approximately twelve feet long, ten feet wide and weighs twelve hundred pounds. There is also an Elementary school named for Hubble. The city is on the famous Route 66 just 30 minutes east of Springfield, Mo. *Marshfield Tourist Office web site

1893 André Bloch (20 Nov 1893 in Besançon, France - 11 Oct 1948 in Paris, France) attended the École Polytechnique in 1913 then was drafted in 1914. An accident at the front made him unfit for military service. On 17 Nov 1917, at a family meal, he murdered one of his brothers, his uncle and his aunt. He was confined to a psychiatric hospital (Saint-Maurice Hospital) where he worked on a large range of topics, function theory, geometry, number theory, algebraic equations and kinematics.
Bloch wrote many important papers, corresponding with Hadamard, Mittag-Leffler, Pólya and Henri Cartan (Élie Cartan's son). He was a model patient who refused to go out saying Mathematics is enough for me. Bloch explained the murders to his doctor saying It's a matter of mathematical logic. There had been mental illness in my family. He saw it as his eugenic duty! The Académie awarded him the Becquerel Prize just before his death. *SAU




1917 Leonard Jimmie Savage (20 November 1917 – 1 November 1971) was an American mathematician and statistician. Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said Savage was "one of the few people I have met whom I would unhesitatingly call a genius." His most noted work was the 1954 book Foundations of Statistics, in which he put forward a theory of subjective and personal probability and statistics which forms one of the strands underlying Bayesian statistics and has applications to game theory.
During World War II, Savage served as chief "statistical" assistant to John von Neumann, the mathematician credited with building the first electronic computer.
One of Savage's indirect contributions was his discovery of the work of Louis Bachelier on stochastic models for asset prices and the mathematical theory of option pricing. Savage brought the work of Bachelier to the attention of Paul Samuelson. It was from Samuelson's subsequent writing that "random walk" (and subsequently Brownian motion) became fundamental to mathematical finance.
In 1951 he introduced the minimax regret criterion used in decision theory.
The Hewitt–Savage zero–one law and Friedman–Savage utility function are (in part) named after him, as is the Savage Award given annually by the International Society for Bayesian Analysis for the best dissertations in Bayesian analysis.
 *Wik




1985 Charles Leonard Hamblin (20 November 1922 – 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician, and computer pioneer, as well as a professor of philosophy at the New South Wales University of Technology (now the University of New South Wales) in Sydney.
Among his most well-known achievements in the area of computer science was the introduction of Reverse Polish Notation and the use in 1957 of a push-down pop-up stack. This preceded the work of Friedrich Ludwig Bauer and Klaus Samelson on use of a push-pop stack. The stack had been invented by Alan Turing in 1946 when he introduced such a stack in his design of the ACE computer. Hamblin's most well-known contribution to philosophy is his book Fallacies, a standard work in the area of the false conclusions in logic. *Wik






1924 Benoit Mandelbrot (20 Nov 1924 in Warsaw, Poland - 14 Oct 2010 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) was largely responsible for the present interest in Fractal Geometry. He showed how Fractals can occur in many different places in both Mathematics and elsewhere in Nature.*SAU
As a visiting professor at Harvard University, Mandelbrot began to study mathematical objects called Julia sets that were invariant under certain transformations of the complex plane. Building on previous work by Gaston Julia and Pierre Fatou, Mandelbrot used a computer to plot images of the Julia sets. While investigating the topology of these Julia sets, he studied the Mandelbrot set which was introduced by him in 1979.

In 1975, Mandelbrot coined the term fractal to describe these structures and first published his ideas in the French book Les Objets Fractals: Forme, Hasard et Dimension, later translated in 1977 as Fractals: Form, Chance and Dimension.  According to computer scientist and physicist Stephen Wolfram, the book was a "breakthrough" for Mandelbrot, who until then would typically "apply fairly straightforward mathematics ... to areas that had barely seen the light of serious mathematics before".  Wolfram adds that as a result of this new research, he was no longer a "wandering scientist", and later called him "the father of fractals":




1955 Ray Ozzie, who designed the Lotus Notes office management software for Lotus Development Corporation, is born in Chicago, IL. Ozzie graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1979. During this time Ray worked at the Computer-based Education Research Lab (CERL) on the PLATO operating system. He was impressed with PLATO’s real-time communications and has often publicly credited his CERL experience as the inspiration for Lotus Notes. In 1984 Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation, supported the idea to develop a PLATO-like product for PC by funding Iris Associates, Inc. In August 1986 Lotus Notes was complete becoming the first example of groupware and a commercial success. In 1997 Ozzie left Iris Associates to start a new venture, Rythmix Corp.*CHM

1963 Sir William Timothy Gowers, FRS (20 November 1963, ) is a British mathematician. He is a Royal Society Research Professor at the Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics at the University of Cambridge, where he also holds the Rouse Ball chair, and is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1998 he received the Fields Medal for research connecting the fields of functional analysis and combinatorics.*Wik





DEATHS

1713 Thomas Tompion (baptised 25 Jul 1639, 20 Nov 1713) Most famous English clockmaker of his time, especially known for watchmaking improvements. He worked closely with experimental physicist Robert Hooke, and in 1675, following Hooke's design, Tompion made one of the first English watches regulated by a balance spring. In 1695, with Edward Barlow and William Houghton, he patented the cylinder escapement (a controlling device) that allowed use of a horizontal wheel, enabling Tompion to make the first of the flat and more compact watches.*TIS
Traveling watch with alarm by Thomas Tompion, 1680 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)



1764 Christian Goldbach (18 Mar 1690, 20 Nov 1764)Russian mathematician whose contributions to number theory include Goldbach's conjecture, formulated in a letter to Leonhard Euler dated 7 Jul 1742. Stated in modern terms it proposes that: "Every even natural number greater than 2 is equal to the sum of two prime numbers." It has been checked by computer for vast numbers - up to at least 4 x 1014 - but still remains unproved. Goldbach made another conjecture that every odd number is the sum of three primes, on which Vinogradov made progress in 1937. (It has been checked by computer for vast numbers, but remains unproved.) Goldbach also studied infinite sums, the theory of curves and the theory of equations. *TIS
It is Goldbach and Euler's correspondence that contains some of Goldbach's most important contributions to mathematics, specifically number theory. Goldbach and Euler's friendship survived Goldbach's move to Moscow in 1728 and communication ensued. Their correspondence spanned 196 letters over 35 years written in Latin, German, and French. These letters spanned a wide range of topics, including various mathematics topics. Goldbach was the leading influence on Euler's interest and work in number theory. Most of the letters discuss Euler's research in number theory as well as differential calculus. Until the late 1750s, Euler's correspondence on his number theory research was almost exclusively with Goldbach.




1856 Farkas Bolyai (9 Feb 1775, 20 Nov 1856) Hungarian mathematician, poet, and dramatist who spent a lifetime trying to prove Euclid's (fifth) postulate that parallel lines do not meet. While studying at the University of Göttingen, he met as a fellow student, the noted German mathematician Carl F. Gauss, with whom he corresponded as a life-long friend. Bolyai taught mathematics, physics and chemistry at Marosvásárhely all his life. He discouraged his son, János Bolyai, from studying the parallel axiom as he had, writing in a letter to him: "For God's sake, please give it up. Fear it no less than the sensual passion, because it, too, may take up all your time and deprive you of your health, peace of mind and happiness in life." *TIS



1882 Henry Draper (7 Mar 1837, 20 Nov 1882) American physician and amateur astronomer who made the first photograph of the spectrum of a star (Vega), in 1872. He was also the first to photograph a nebula, the Orion Nebula, in 1880. For his photography of the transit of Venus in 1874, Congress ordered a gold medal struck in his honour. His father, John William Draper, in 1840 had made the first photograph of the Moon.*TIS




1934 Willem de Sitter (6 May 1872, 20 Nov 1934) Dutch mathematician, astronomer, and cosmologist who developed theoretical models of the universe based on Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. He worked extensively on the motions of the satellites of Jupiter, determining their masses and orbits from decades of observations. He redetermined the fundamental constants of astronomy and determined the variation of the rotation of the earth. He also performed statistical studies of the distribution and motions of stars, but today he is best known for his contributions to cosmology. His 1917 solution to Albert Einstein's field equations showed that a near-empty universe would expand. Later, he and Einstein found an expanding universe solution without space curvature.*TIS



1960 Hidehiko Yamabe (山辺 英彦 Yamabe Hidehiko?, August 22, 1923 in Ashiya, Hyōgo, Japan – November 20, 1960 in Evanston, Illinois) was a Japanese mathematician. His most notable work includes the final solution of Hilbert's fifth problem.
After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1947, Yamabe became an assistant at Osaka University. From 1952 until 1954 he was an assistant at Princeton University, receiving his Ph.D. from Osaka University while at Princeton. He left Princeton in 1954 to become assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. Except for one year as a professor at Osaka University, he stayed in Minnesota until 1960. Yamabe died suddenly of a stroke in November 1960, just months after accepting a full professorship at Northwestern University. *Wik



1986 Arne Carl-August Beurling (February 3, 1905 – November 20, 1986) was a Swedish mathematician and professor of mathematics at Uppsala University (1937–1954) and later at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Beurling worked extensively in harmonic analysis, complex analysis and potential theory. The "Beurling factorization" helped mathematical scientists to understand the Wold decomposition, and inspired further work on the invariant subspaces of linear operators and operator algebras.
In the summer of 1940 he single-handedly deciphered and reverse-engineered an early version of the Siemens and Halske T52 also known as the Geheimfernschreiber (secret teletypewriter) used by Nazi Germany in World War II for sending ciphered messages.[1] The T52 was one of the so-called "Fish cyphers", that using, transposition, created nearly one quintillion (893 622 318 929 520 960) different variations. It took Beurling two weeks to solve the problem using pen and paper. Using Beurling's work, a device was created that enabled Sweden to decipher German teleprinter traffic passing through Sweden from Norway on a cable. In this way, Swedish authorities knew about Operation Barbarossa before it occurred. Not wanting to reveal how this knowledge was attained the Swedish warning was not treated as credible by Soviets. *Wik




1989  Wade Ellis (June 9, 1909 – November 20, 1989) was an American mathematician and educator. He taught at Fort Valley State University in Georgia and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee and earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1944. He carried out classified research on radar antennas at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and taught at Boston University and Oberlin College, where he became Full Professor in 1953. The same year, he was elected to the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America.

Ellis promoted mathematical education and was decorated for his efforts in 1966 by the government of Peru. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1967 as Associate Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Mathematics until his retirement in 1977, when he was named professor emeritus. Afterwards, he served in various administrative positions including vice chancellor of academic affairs at University of Maryland Eastern Shore and interim president of Marygrove College in Detroit. *Wik




2015 Miroslav Fiedler (7 April 1926 – 20 November 2015) was a Czech mathematician known for his contributions to linear algebra, graph theory and algebraic graph theory.

His article, "Algebraic Connectivity of Graphs", published in the Czechoslovak Math Journal in 1973, established the use of the eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of a graph to create tools for measuring algebraic connectivity in algebraic graph theory. Fiedler is honored by the Fiedler eigenvalue (the second smallest eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian), with its associated Fiedler eigenvector, as the names for the quantities that characterize algebraic connectivity. Since Fiedler's original contribution, this structure has become essential to large areas of research in network theory, flocking, distributed control, clustering, multi-robot applications and image segmentation. *Wik





Credits
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*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

Another Early Mathematician in America You Probably Never Heard Of

Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler (October 6, 1770 – November 20, 1843) was a Swiss-American surveyor who is considered the forefather of both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for his achievements as the first Superintendent of the U.S. Survey of the Coast and the first U.S. Superintendent of Weights and Measures.



Hassler was born on October 6, 1770 in Aarau, Switzerland. He was the son of Magdalena Ernst and Hans Jakob Hassler, a prosperous watchmaker and local official. He attended the Latin school and an advanced private school, then in 1786 the institute that later became the University of Bern. At first he studied law, but became a student of Johann Georg Tralles and changed his academic focus to astronomy, mathematics and physics. From 1791 to 1797 he continued his studies in France and Germany. In the summer of 1793, he studied under scientists Jean-Charles de Borda, Jean Baptiste Joseph Delambre, Jérôme Lalande and Antoine Lavoisier in Paris. He was employed on the trigonometrical survey of Switzerland before he emigrated to the United States in 1805.

He was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society on 17 April 1807. Through the influence of Albert Gallatin, he was appointed by President Thomas Jefferson as professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy from 1807 to 1810. Hassler was unpopular as a teacher and was dismissed on 31 December 1809, when John Calhoun, then Secretary of War, realized that Congress had not authorized the hiring of civilians to staff the academy. Hassler obtained another mathematics professorship at Union College at Schenectady from 1810 to 1811.

In 1811, he was employed by the federal government of the United States to begin a hydrographic survey of the U.S. coast. An Act of Congress on February 10, 1807, appropriated $50,000 for the beginning of the work. In 1812, Hassler was appointed the superintendent of the Survey of the Coast by the United States Congress. He was sent to France and England to collect supplies for the project. Hassler bought instruments of the most reputed French and British makers. After the War of 1812 broke out between the United States and the United Kingdom in 1812, his instruments were confiscated as spoils of war and Hassler was detained in England until 1815 as the British thought him an enemy spy.

After Hassler's return to the United States, President James Madison appointed him the first superintendent of the Survey of the Coast in 1816. The creative side of Hassler was seen in the design of new surveying instruments. Most original was Hassler's baseline apparatus which involved an idea worked out by him in Switzerland and perfected in America. Instead of bringing different bars in actual contact during the process of baseline measurements, he used four two-metre (6 ft 7 in) iron bars fastened together totaling eight metres (26 ft) in length and optical contact. As early as February–March 1817, Hassler standardized the bars of his device which were actually calibrated on the Committee Metre (an authentic copy of the Mètre des Archives) which was the property of the American Philosophical Society, to whom it had been presented by Hassler himself, who had received it from Tralles, a foreign member of the French Committee charged with the construction of the standard metre by comparison with the Toise of Peru, which had served as unit of length in the measurement of the meridional arcs in France and Peru. The Committee Metre possessed all the authenticity of any original metre extant, bearing not only the stamp of the committee, but also the original mark by which it was distinguished from the other bars during the operation of standardizing. Thus the metre became the unit of length for geodesy in the United States. Indeed, the Committee Metre served as the standard of length for Coast and Geodetic Survey until 1890, when the National Prototype Metre Bar No. 27 allotted to the United States in 1889 at the first General Conference on Weights and Measures arrived in Washington, D.C.  However, Hassler had exceeded the spending limitations that had been set for his trip to Europe, and the resulting controversy foreshadowed the frictions between Hassler and the American Government that would plague his career. In 1818, the United States Congress removed Hassler from his role as superintendent of the Survey of the Coast and gave control to the United States Army, which remained in control until 1832.

On July 10, 1832, Congress reestablished the Survey of the Coast on the basis of the original act of 1807. Upon President Jackson's recommendation, Hassler again became its Superintendent. The Survey was renamed the United States Coast Survey in 1836, and in 1878 it became the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey.

Hassler also was able to continue his superintendence over the work in Weights and Measures.[4] He became the head of the Office of Standard Weights and Measures (this office was a progenitor of the United States Bureau of Standards created by an Act of Congress on March 3, 1901) in the Treasury Department as an office within the Survey of the Coast which was reorganized in 1832, where he carried out the early work of establishing the standards of weights and measures in the United States, with the involvement of fellow Swiss immigrant Albert Gallatin, then ambassador of the United States at London, who in 1827 had brought from Europe a troy pound of brass, made at his request by Henry Kater, from which the standard of mass was derived. This troy pound called troy pound of the United States' Mint at Philadelphia or Pound Troy, 1824 was used as the standard for the coining of money until the twentieth century. The avoirdupoids pound adopted by Hassler had 7000 grains, the Pound Troy,1824 having 5760 grains.

In the autumn of 1829, Hassler was appointed as gauger in the New York Custom House. For some time Congress had been discussing the establishment of standard of weights and measure for the United States. Up to this time the various customhouses had worked independently of each other. They used separate weights and measures from wherever they could be obtained - most of them came from England - and in some cases the customhouses depended upon the ordinary standards of local officials. On 29 May 1829, the Senate decided a comparison of weights and measures used at customhouses. Five month later, President Andrew Jackson appointed Hassler United States gauger. With the approval of Secretary of the Treasury Samuel D. Ingham and President Jackson he determined to adopt standards for the United States and produce and distribute them to the customhouses. On 3 March 1831, Samuel D. Ingham reported to the President of the Senate Hassler's inspection far advanced and mentioned the Troughton scale as one of the authentic units adopted for the comparison. The Troughton scale was held to be identical with Bird's Standard Yard of 1760, which had been tested and deemed identical with the British Parliamentary Standard of 1758, which was destroyed in 1834. The fundamentals units of length, mass and capacity recommended by Hassler were adopted by the Treasury Department in 1832. Another meaningful national standard to be adopted in 1832 was the gallon at 231 cubic inches. Appraised by Treasury reports of Hassler's progress, Congress in a joint resolution of June 14, 1836, gave its formal approval and directed the Treasury to fabricate for the customhouses the standards of weights and measures established by Hassler. By reason of the joint resolution of 1836, the Office of Weights and Measures in the Coast Survey is considered formally established as of that date.

He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1838.

He died on November 20, 1843, and was interred in Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia.

Ferdinand Rudolph Hassler memorial in Laurel Hill Cemetery  

*Wik



Tuesday, 19 November 2024

On This Day in Math - November 19

   



A visitor to Niels Bohr's country cottage, noticing a horseshoe hanging on the wall, teasing the eminent scientist about this ancient superstition. 'Can it be true that you, of all people, believe it will bring you luck?'
'Of course not,' replied Bohr, 'but I understand it brings you luck whether you believe it or not.'



The 323rd day of the year; If you put drew every possible path from (0,0) to (8,0) that never dropped below the x-axis using only unit vectorial moves with slopes of 1, 0, or -1 there are 323 possible paths. (alternatively this is the number of different ways of drawing non-intersecting chords on a circle with eight points- this is deceptive because it counts each way of drawing a single chord, and drawing no chords at all, students might want to count how many ways this can be done using four chords.) These are called Motzkin numbers, after Theodore Motzkin.

323 is the sum of nine consecutive primes 323 = 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41 + 43 + 47 + 53 *Derek Orr

323 is a palindrome and also the smallest composite number n that divides the (n+1)st Fibonacci number. *What's Special about this Number

e is approximately 2 + 232 / 323.


EVENTS
On this day in 1812 Jean Victor Poncelet was captured after being left for dead on the battlefield following the Battle of Krasnoi, near Smolensk, while with Napoleon's army retreating from Moscow. He profited from captivity (until his release in June 1814) by resuming his study of mathematics, and while in Russia he did important work on projective geometry.



1857 Arthur Cayley opens a letter to J. J. Sylvester with, "I have just obtained a theorem that appears to be very remarkable." The theorem would be the centerpiece of his Memoire on the Theory of Matrices. The theorem showed that a matrix was the solution of its own characteristic equation. *A. J. Crilly, Arthur Cayley: Mathematician Laureate of the Victorian Age



1982 Science has an article describing Friedman’s version of Kruskal’s theorem. The important thing is that this is a mathematical (rather than metamathematical) statement independent of arithmetic. *VFR

1992   Sonic The Hedgehog 2 Is Released    Sega releases the second  game for its top franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, for the Sega Genesis platform. Genesis was running second to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System with its franchise creations such as Mario and Starfox. Sonic would be the leading character for Sega platforms throughout the 1990s, and would eventually be licensed to other companies once Sega stopped producing it’s own platforms with its Dreamcast system. *CHM



2010 Experts confirmed that the remains of the 16th-century Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, his wife and another eight people, including five children, were buried in Prague's Church of Our Lady before Tyn. The tin coffin, tied up with a red ribbon, was deposited in the tomb in the overcrowded church that afternoon preceded by a church service celebrated by Prague Archbishop Dominik Duka and including prayers in Czech and Danish. *Wik The grave had been previously opened 1901, on the three hundredth anniversary of his death, the bodies of Tycho Brahe and his wife Kirstine were exhumed in Prague. They had been embalmed and were in remarkably good condition, but the astronomer’s artificial nose was missing, apparently filched by someone after his death. It had been made for him in gold and silver when his original nose was sliced off in a duel he fought in his youth at Rostock University after a quarrel over some obscure mathematical point.






BIRTHS

1711 Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov ( Russian: Михаил Васильевич Ломоносов; 19 November [O.S. 8 November] 1711 – 15 April [O.S. 4 April] 1765) was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. The founder of modern geology, Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.
Statue of Lomonosov at Lomonosov Moscow State University 





1894 Heinz Hopf  (19 November 1894 – 3 June 1971)  topologist   He studied under Ludwig Bieberbach, receiving his doctorate in 1925. In his dissertation, Connections between topology and metric of manifolds (German Über Zusammenhänge zwischen Topologie und Metrik von Mannigfaltigkeiten), he proved that any simply connected complete Riemannian 3-manifold of constant sectional curvature is globally isometric to Euclidean, spherical, or hyperbolic space. He also studied the indices of zeros of vector fields on hypersurfaces, and connected their sum to curvature. Some six months later he gave a new proof that the sum of the indices of the zeros of a vector field on a manifold is independent of the choice of vector field and equal to the Euler characteristic of the manifold. This theorem is now called the Poincaré-Hopf theorem.*Wik


1900 Mikhail Lavrentev (19 Nov 1900 in Kazan, Russia
- 15 Oct 1980 in Moscow, Russia) remembered for an outstanding book on conformal mappings and he made many important contributions to that topic.*SAU
Lavrentyev was born in Kazan, where his father was an instructor at a college (he later became a professor at Kazan University, then Moscow University).

He entered Kazan University, and, when his family moved to Moscow in 1921, he transferred to the Department of Physics and Mathematics of Moscow University. He graduated in 1922. He continued his studies in the university in 1923-26 as a graduate student of Nikolai Luzin.

Although Luzin was alleged to plagiarize in science and indulge in anti-Sovietism by some of his students in 1936, Lavrentyev did not participate in the notorious political persecution of his teacher which is known as the Luzin case or Luzin affair. In fact Luzin was a friend of his father. 

In 1927, Lavrentyev spent half a year in France, collaborating with French mathematicians, and upon returned took up a position with Moscow University. Later he became a member of the staff of the Steklov Institute. His main contributions relate to conformal mappings and partial differential equations. Mstislav Keldysh was one of his students.

In 1939, Oleksandr Bogomolets, the president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, asked Lavrentyev to become director of the Institute of Mathematics at Kyiv.  *Wik



1901 Nina Karlovna Bari (November 19, 1901, Moscow – July 15, 1961, Moscow) was a Soviet mathematician known for her work on trigonometric series.  She is also well-known for two textbooks, Higher Algebra and The Theory of Series. 
She studied trigonometric series and functions under the tutelage of Nikolai Luzin, becoming one of his star students. She presented the main result of her research to the Moscow Mathematical Society in 1922—the first woman to address the society.
She was killed by a train in the Moscow Metro, and her colleagues speculated that she committed suicide, prompted by the death of her mentor Nikolai Luzin ten years earlier, a man who may have been her lover.*Wik



1907 Adrien Albert (19 November 1907, Sydney - 29 December 1989, Canberra) was a leading authority in the development of medicinal chemistry in Australia. Albert also authored many important books on chemistry, including one on selective toxicity.
He was awarded BSc with first class honours and the University Medal in 1932 at the University of Sydney. He gained a PhD in 1937 and a DSc in 1947 from the University of London. His appointments included Lecturer at the University of Sydney (1938-1947), advisor to the Medical Directorate of the Australian Army (1942-1947), research at the Wellcome Research Institute in London (1947-1948) and in 1948 the Foundation Chair of Medical Chemistry in the John Curtin School of Medical Research at the Australian National University in Canberra where he established the Department of Medical Chemistry. He was a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
He was the author of Selective Toxicity: The Physico-Chemical Basis of Therapy, first published by Chapman and Hall in 1951.
The Adrien Albert Laboratory of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Sydney was established in his honour in 1989.[1] His bequest funds the Adrien Albert Lectureship, awarded every two years by the Royal Society of Chemistry *Wik



1918 Hendrik Christoffel van de Hulst (19 Nov 1918; 31 Jul 2000) Dutch astronomer who predicted theoretically (1944) that in interstellar space the amount of neutral atomic hydrogen, which in its hyperfine transition radiates and absorbs at a wavelength of 21 cm, might be expected to occur at such high column densities as to provide a spectral line sufficiently strong as to be measurable. Shortly after the end of the war several groups set about to test this prediction. The 21-cm line of atomic hydrogen was detected in 1951, first at Harvard University followed within a few weeks by others. The discovery demonstrated that astronomical research, which at that time was limited to conventional light, could be complemented with observations at radio wavelengths, revealing a range of new physical processes.*TIS






DEATHS

1672 John Wilkins FRS (1 January 1614 – 19 November 1672) was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death. Along with his inventions (almost all of which were destroyed in the Great Fire) and assorted writings on philosophy, mathematics, and cryptography, John Wilkins distinguished himself by planning the first lunar expedition.(in the 17th century??? Yes… learn more here)
He wrote for the common reader the Discovery (1638) and the Discourse (1640) which showed how reason and experience supported Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo rather than Aristotlian or literal biblical doctrines. In 1641, he anonymously published a small but comprehensive treatise on cryptography. In Mathematical Magick (1648) he described and illustrated the balance lever, wheel, pulley, wedge and screw in a part called "Archimedes or Mechanical Powers" and in a second part "Daedalus or Mechanical Motions" such strange devices as flying machines, artificial spiders, a land yacht, and a submarine. *Wik



1998 Tetsuya Theodore Fujita(23 Oct 1920, 19 Nov 1998) was a Japanese-American meteorologist who increased the knowledge of severe storms. In 1953, he began research in the U.S. Shortly afterwards, he immigrated and established the Severe Local Storms Project. He was known as "Mr. Tornado" as a result of the Fujita scale (F-scale, Feb 1971), which he and his wife, Sumiko, developed for measuring tornadoes on the basis of their damage. Following the crash of Eastern flight 66 on 24 Jun 1975, he reviewed weather-related aircraft disasters and verified the downburst and the microburst (small downburst) phenomena, enabling airplane pilots to be trained on how to react to them. Late in his career, he turned to the study of storm tracks and El Nino. *TIS



2004 Filep László ( Császló , December 6, 1941 – Budapest , November 19 , 2004 ) was a teacher at Nyíregyházi College  and a renowned historian of mathematics.
László Filep's research mainly dealt with two topics: fuzzy algebra and the history of mathematics. He was the one who revealed the efforts of Texas professor GB Halsted in spreading Bolyai 's non-Euclidean geometry to the smallest detail . He conducted research on the topic of fuzzy algebra together with Gyula I. Maurer , and their results were regularly published in several scientific journals.

He considered it important and took an active part in the quality management of higher education, but he is also among the members of many NGOs. At the end of his life, he was the head of the board of trustees of the János Bolyai Foundation , but he was also a member of the ICHM: International Commission on History of Mathematics and the Complex History of Science Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences .*Wik






*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