Pat'sBlog

Monday, 12 May 2025

On This Day in Math - May 12

The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.

~F N David: Games, God and Gambling (1962)

The 132nd day of the year; 132 and its reversal (231) are both divisible by the prime 11 (132/11 = 12, 231/11 = 21). Note that the resulting quotients are also reversals. *Prime Curios

If you take the sum of all 2-digit numbers you can make from 132, you get 132: These are called Osiros numbers, and there are only three using two digits of a three digit number. One is a year date, and one is a little too big.

12 + 13 + 21 + 23 + 31 + 32 =132

132 = 2 * 3 * 11, these three factors can be arranged in three orders to produce a prime, 2311, 2113, and 1123. (and of course, no arrangement of the original three digits can form a prime ) and of all the 12 permutations of the digits of the three factors, there are 7; (1123, 1213, 1321, 2113, 2131, 2311, and 3121) that are all prime.
And speaking of the factors 11, 2, 3, a nice palindromic expression for 132 is 11*2*3+3*2*11

132 is a Harshad (Joy-Giver) number, since it is divisible by the sum of its digits.

It is also called a refactorable number because it is divisible by the number of its divisors, 12.

132 is also a self number, as there is no number n which added to the sum of the digits of n is equal to 132.

132 is not a palindrome in any base 2-12, but in base 7(246) it has digits that are each the double of the digits in 132. (I just noticed that, and wonder how often something like that happens?)

132 is the last year day which will be a Catalan Number. The Catalan sequence was described in the 18th century by Leonhard Euler, who was interested in the number of different ways of dividing a polygon into triangles (the octagon can be divided into 6 triangles 142 ways. The sequence is named after Eugène Charles Catalan, who discovered the connection to parenthesized expressions during his exploration of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle.

I got a comment in a different post from a Jeffo who gave a pretty solution for the towers problem....

Jeffo said...

If the rods are placed in a circular arrangement instead of linear, then a correct solution will involve always moving the smallest disk one rod clockwise every other move. The alternate moves are forced.

EVENTS

1364 Founding of the Uniwersytet Jagiellonski in Krakow,

Poland and re-established in 1400 by a member of the Jagiello family)
King Casimir III of Poland received permission to found an institution of higher learning (first called Krakow Academy)in Poland from Pope Urban V. A royal charter of foundation was issued on 12 May 1364, and a simultaneous document was issued by the City Council granting privileges to the Studium Generale. The King provided funding for one chair in liberal arts, two in Medicine, three in Canon Law and five in Roman Law, funded by a quarterly payment taken from the proceeds of the royal monopoly on the salt mines at Wieliczka.
Copernicus (1473-1543) was a student in 1491‑1496 (or 1495) and there is a statue in the library courtyard.

1732 Laura Maria Caterina Bassi awarded Doctorate of science from University of Bologna:

The University of Bologna is the oldest university in Europe and at the beginning of the eighteenth century students were still examined by public disputation, i.e. the candidate was expected to orally defend a series of academic theses. At the beginning of 1732 Bassi took part in a private disputation in her home with members of the university faculty in the presence of many leading members of Bolognese intellectual society. As a result of her performance during this disputation she was elected a member of the prestigious Bologna Academy of Science on 20th March. Rumours of this extraordinary young lady quickly spread and on 17th April she defended forty-nine theses in a highly spectacular public disputation. On 12th May following a public outcry she was awarded a doctorate from the university in a grand ceremony in the city hall of Bologna. Following a further public disputation the City Senate appointed her professor of philosophy at the university, making her the first ever female professor at a European university.

See more at *Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus

1796 A paper on “Newton's Binomial Theorem Legally Demonstrated by Algebra” read to the Royal Society by the Rev. William Sewell, A. M. Communicated by Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. K. B. P. R. S.

1819 Sophie Germain penned a letter from her Parisian home to Gauss in which she gave a strategy for a general proof of Fermat’s last theorem. Germain's letter to Gauss contained the first substantial progress toward a proof in 200 years. *WIK "... I have never ceased to think of the theory of numbers. ... A long time before our Academy proposed as the subject of a prize the proof of the impossibility of Fermat's equation, this challenge ... has often tormented me." *MacTutor

"In this letter she laid out her grand plan to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Her goal was to prove that for each odd prime exponent p, there are an infinite number of auxiliary primes of the form 2Np+1 such that the set of non-zero p-th power residues x^p mod (2Np+1) does not contain any consecutive integers. If there were a solution to x^p + y^p = z^p, then Germain observes that any such auxiliary prime would have to necessarily divide one of the numbers x, y, or z. Her letter and manuscripts found in various libraries showed her analysis for the primes p less than 100 and for auxiliary primes with N from 1 to 10." *Larry Riddle

Department of Mathematics, Agnes Scott College

1930, the Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum was opened to the public in Chicago, Illinois. A program using the Zeiss II star projector was presented by Prof. Philip Fox, who resigned from the staff of Northwestern Observatory to take charge of the new $1 million facility. Housed in a granite building, it was donated to the city by Max Adler, retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Co. He had been so impressed when he previously visited the world’s first planetarium at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany, that he resolved to construct America's first modern planetarium open to the public in his home city. Its site was within the fairgrounds of the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34, and was an outstanding attraction. *TIS

1936, the Dvorak typewriter keyboard was patented in the U.S. by Dvorak and Dealey (Patent No. 2,040,248). The efficiency experts August Dvorak (a cousin of the composer) and William Dealey studied the typewriter to determine that they could arrange the keys in a new way which would speed up the operators of the typewriter. They designed a keyboard to maximize efficiency by placing common letters on the home row, and make the stronger fingers of the hands do most of the work. By contrast, the original QWERTY layout was designed for the earlier, less efficient typewriters. Previously, speed would result in two type bars hitting each other in their travel, so the original keyboard was laid out to reduce collisions.

Michael Will wrote, "And yet, here we are, 88 years later and all Qwerty. A testament to the power and plasticity of the human brain and hands. Typing is probably the best high school class I took."

"James Burke always showed how the great advances in science & tech weren't always from brilliant theory. Rather, they often came from simple crossovers between skill sets."

My response was to remark on the fact that just as public schools were starting tp push programming and computer skills classes, they took away typing classes.

1941 Zuse Completes Z3 Machine:

Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 computer, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It followed in the footsteps of the Z1 - the world’s first binary digital computer - which Zuse had developed in 1938. Much of Zuse’s work was destroyed in World War II, although the Z4, the most sophisticated of his creations, survives. *CHM For a little more information and perspective on Zuse and his creations, see this Renaissance Mathematicus blog.

1984 The Hindu newspaper from Madras, India, reported the unveiling of a statue of Srinivasa Ramanujan. [Mathematics Magazine 57 (1984), p 244]. *VFR

2004 discovery of what was believed to be the world's oldest seat of learning, the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years*TIS

2013, This is the third "Pythagorean Day" of the 21st Century, 5/12/13. The first was on March 4, 2005 (3/4/05) and the second on June 8, 2010. How many more will there be in the 21st Century, and when is the next one?

BIRTHS

1820 Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) is remembered as the mother of modern nursing. But few realize that her place in history is at least partly

linked to her use, following William Farr, Playfair and others, of graphical methods to convey complex statistical information dramatically to a broad audience. An example of "Stigler's Law of Eponomy" (Stigler, 1980), Nightingale's Coxcomb chart did not orignate with her, though this should not detract from her credit. She likely got the idea from William Farr, a close friend and frequent correspondent, who used the same graphic principles in 1852. The earliest known inventor of polar area charts is Andre-Michel Guerry (1829). [gallery of data visualization]
Pearson wrote of here, "Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion. For her Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique sociale is annotated by her on every page. ... she held that the universe -- including human communities -- was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty.
K Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours for Francis Galton (1924). *SAU

1845 Henri Brocard (12 May 1845 – 16 January 1922) who published (1897–99) a two volume catalog of plane curves and their properties. *VFR
His best-known achievement is the invention and discovery of the properties of the Brocard points, the Brocard circle, and the Brocard triangle, all bearing his name. Contemporary mathematician Nathan Court wrote that he, along with Émile Lemoine and Joseph Neuberg , was one of the three co-founders of modern triangle geometry.
In a triangle ABC with sides a, b, and c, where the vertices are labeled A, B and C in counterclockwise order, there is exactly one point P such that the line segments AP, BP, and CP form the same angle, ω, with the respective sides c, a, and b, namely that

$\angle PAB = \angle PBC = \angle PCA.\,$

*Wik

1851 Samuel Dickstein (May 12, 1851 – September 29, 1939) was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin. He was one of the founders of the Jewish party "Zjednoczenie" (Unification), which advocated the assimilation of Polish Jews.
He was born in Warsaw and was killed there by a German bomb at the beginning of World War II. All the members of his family were killed during the Holocaust.
Dickstein wrote many mathematical books and founded the journal Wiadomości Mathematyczne (Mathematical News), now published by the Polish Mathematical Society. He was a bridge between the times of Cauchy and Poincaré and those of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was also thanked by Alexander Macfarlane for contributing to the Bibliography of Quaternions (1904) published by the Quaternion Society.
He was also one of the personalities, who contributed to the foundation of the Warsaw Public Library in 1907.*Wik

1857 Oskar Bolza (12 May 1857–5 July 1942) After studying with Weierstrass and Klein, and realizing the difficulties of obtaining a suitable position in Germany, he came to the U.S. where he played an important role in the development of mathematics at Hopkins, Clark and Chicago. *VFR He published "The elliptic s-functions considered as a special case of the hyperelliptic s-functions" in 1900. From 1910, he worked on the calculus of variations. Bolza wrote a classic textbook on the subject, "Lectures on the Calculus of Variations" (1904). He returned to Germany in 1910, where he researched function theory, integral equations and the calculus of variations. In 1913, he published a paper presenting a new type of variational problem now called "the problem of Bolza." The next year, he wrote about variations for an integral problem involving inequalities, which later become important in control theory. Bolza ceased his mathematical research work at the outbreak of WW I in 1914.*TIS

1902 Frank Yates FRS (May 12, 1902 – June 17, 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. In 1931 Yates was appointed assistant statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station by R.A. Fisher. In 1933 he became head of statistics when Fisher went to University College London. At Rothamsted he worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design. During World War II he worked on what would later be called operational research. *Wikipedia

1910 Dorothy Mary Hodgkin OM FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994), known professionally as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin or simply Dorothy Hodgkin, was a British biochemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain and Edward Abraham had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B12, for which she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules. *Wik

A three dimensional contour map of the electron density of penicillin derived from x-ray diffraction. The points of highest density show the positions of individual atoms in the penicillin. This device was used by Hodgkin to deduce the structure.

1919 Wu Wenjun (Chinese: 吴文俊; 12 May 1919 – 7 May 2017), also commonly known as Wu Wen-tsün, was a Chinese mathematician, historian, and writer. He was an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), best known for Wu class, Wu formula, and Wu's method of characteristic set.

He was also active in the field of the history of Chinese mathematics. He was the chief editor of the ten-volume Grand Series of Chinese Mathematics, covering the time from antiquity to late part of the Qin dynasty.

In 1957, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Berkeley. In 1990, he was elected as an academician of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).

Along with Yuan Longping, he was awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award by President Jiang Zemin in 2000, when this highest scientific and technological prize in China began to be awarded. He also received the TWAS Prize in 1990[3] and the Shaw Prize in 2006. He was the President of the Chinese society of mathematics. He died on May 7, 2017, 5 days before his 98th birthday.

1926 James Samuel Coleman (May 12, 1926 – March 25, 1995) was a U.S. sociologist, a pioneer in mathematical sociology whose studies strongly influenced education policy. In the early 1950s, he was as a chemical engineer with Eastman-Kodak Co. in Rochester, N.Y. He then changed direction, fascinated with sociology and social problems. In 1966, he presented a report to the U.S. Congress which concluded that poor black children did better academically in integrated, middle-class schools. His findings provided the sociological underpinnings for widespread busing of students to achieve racial balance in schools. In 1975, Coleman rescinded his support of busing, concluding that it had encouraged the deterioration of public schools by encouraging white flight to avoid integration.*TIS

1977 Maryam Mirzakhani (12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2005, as a result of her research, she was honored in Popular Science's fourth annual "Brilliant 10" in which she was acknowledged as one of the top 10 young minds who have pushed their fields in innovative directions.

Both Maryam Mirzakhani and her friend Roya Beheshti made the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team in 1994. The international competition was held that year in Hong Kong and Mirzakhani scored 41 out of 42 and was awarded a gold medal. Beheshti was awarded a silver medal. Again in 1995 Mirzakhani was a member of the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team. This time the international competition was held in Toronto, Canada, and Mirzakhani scored 42 out of 42 and was again awarded a gold medal.

On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, becoming the first Iranian to be honored with the award and the first of only two women to date. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40

*Wik, *MacTutor

Maryam, (+ epsilon) with the other Field's
Medalist of 2014

DEATHS

1003 Gerbert d'Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II) (c. 946 – 12 May 1003) French scholar who reintroduced the use of the abacus in mathematical calculations. He may have adopted the use of Arabic numerals (without the zero) from Khwarizmi. He built clocks, organs and astronomical instruments based on translations of Arabic works(One of his mechanical instruments was an oracular metal cast head that answered questions yes or no, sort of a tenth century magic 8-ball with speaking ability). (He was often accused after his death of being in league with demons )
He made no original contribution to mathematics or astronomy . However, he served in the all-important role of popularizer, communicating the value and importance of science to the uninitiated public. With the inspiration of Gerbert, Europe began its slow crawl out of the Dark Ages.*TIS

Sylvester, in blue, as depicted in the Gospels of Otto III

1682 Michelangelo Ricci ( 30 Jan., 1619; Rome, - 12 May, 1682; Rome) was a friend of Torricelli; in fact both were taught by Benedetti Castelli. He studied theology and law in Rome and at this time he became friends with René de Sluze. It is clear that Sluze, Torricelli and Ricci had a considerable influence on each other in the mathematics which they studied.
Ricci made his career in the Church. His income came from the Church, certainly from 1650 he received such funds, but perhaps surprisingly he was never ordained. Ricci served the Pope in several different roles before being made a cardinal by Pope Innocent XI in 1681.
Ricci's main work was Exercitatio geometrica, De maximis et minimis (1666) which was later reprinted as an appendix to Nicolaus Mercator's Logarithmo-technia (1668). It only consisted of 19 pages and it is remarkable that his high reputation rests solely on such a short publication.
In this work Ricci finds the maximum of x^m(a - x)ⁿ and the tangents to y^m = kxⁿ. The methods are early examples of induction. He also studied spirals (1644), generalised cycloids (1674) and states explicitly that finding tangents and finding areas are inverse operations (1668). *SAU

In his own time Ricci's fame as a mathematician rested more on the many letters he wrote on mathematical topics, rather than on his published work. He corresponded with many mathematicians across Europe including Clavius, Viviani and de Sluze.

1684 Edme Mariotte(1620 ? – 12 May 1684) Little is known about his early life in the Cote d'Or region of eastern France, but in 1660 he discovered the eye's blind spot.and supposedly amazed the French Royal Court. At this time he may have been working at a Parish Church, but that is not known. In 1668 Colbert invited Mariotte to participate in the "l'Académie des Sciences", and in 1670 he moved to Paris. He published regularly right from his appointment. He is actually pictured in the portrait of the Establishment of the Academy, just to the left of Huygens and Cassini (he is sixth from the right in the picture).

*Wikipedia

The first volume of the Academies papers was released in 1673, and he had many of the articles. His scope reached across the natural sciences including papers on fluid motion, heat, sound and acoustics, air pressure, and freezing water. When he is known at all, it is usually as confirming what we now call Boyle's Law, but in fact his work went well beyond what Hooke and Boyle had shown, and he demonstrated that the pressure decreased in arithmetic progression as the altitude changed in geometric progression. He also was the first to explain how the altitude at a high place could be calculated with a barometer. He did not give a formula, but described a procedure assuming that a rise of 63 "Paris feet" resulted in the drop in the barometric reading of 1 line or 1/144th of an inch. And I choose to call the desk toy called Newton's cradle by so many, Mariotte's cradle, since he was the first to describe this law of impact between bodies. Edme quit the Academy in 1681 and died on 12 May 1684 in Paris.

1742 Joseph Privat de Molières (1677 in Tarascon, Bouches-du-Rhône, France - 12 May 1742 in Paris, France) In 1723 he was appointed to a chair at the Collège Royal to succeed Varignon.
He argued against Newton and for Descartes' view of physics although he knew Newton's to be the more precise. Of course, although we now accept Newton's ideas of gravitation without much thought, it is clear if one thinks about it for a while that the idea of action at a distance through a vacuum is absurd. Many around this time voiced such an opinion (Newton himself realised this was a weakness in his theories) but where Privat de Molières differed from other critics of Newton's theory of gravitation is that he attempted to make a mathematically sound theory based on the idea of vortices. Understanding the accuracy of the theory of gravitation, Privat attempted to bring Newton's calculations into the vortex theory of matter of Malebranche. The problem was Kepler's laws, easily explained by Newton, but the cause of real problems for Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion. In fact in a memoir written in 1733 Privat criticised Newton's theories for being too accurate saying that physical phenomena did not have geometrical precision *SAU

1753 Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (alternative names are Facio or Faccio;) (26 February 1664 – 12 May 1753) was a Swiss mathematician known for his work on the zodiacal light problem, for his very close (some have suggested "romantic" ) relationship with Isaac Newton, for his role in the Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy , and for originating the "push" or "shadow" theory of gravitation.
[Le Sage's theory of gravitation is a kinetic theory of gravity originally proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690 and later by Georges-Louis Le Sage in 1748. The theory proposed a mechanical explanation for Newton's gravitational force in terms of streams of tiny unseen particles (which Le Sage called ultra-mundane corpuscles) impacting all material objects from all directions. According to this model, any two material bodies partially shield each other from the impinging corpuscles, resulting in a net imbalance in the pressure exerted by the impact of corpuscles on the bodies, tending to drive the bodies together.]
He also developed and patented a method of perforating jewels for use in clocks.

When Leibniz sent a set of problems for solution to England he mentioned Newton and failed to mention Faccio among those probably capable of solving them. Faccio retorted by sneering at Leibniz as the ‘second inventor’ of the calculus in a tract entitled ‘Lineæ brevissimæ descensus investigatio geometrica duplex, cui addita est investigatio geometrica solidi rotundi in quo minima fiat resistentia,’ 4to, London, 1699. Finally he stirred up the whole Royal Society to take a part in the dispute (Brewster, Memoirs of Sir I. Newton, 2nd edit. ii. 1–5).
In 1707, Fatio came under the influence of a fanatical religious sect, the Camisards, which ruined Fatio's reputation. He left England and took part in pilgrim journeys across Europe. After his return only a few scientific documents by him appeared. He died in 1753 in Maddersfield near Worcester, England. After his death his Geneva compatriot Georges-Louis Le Sage tried to purchase the scientific papers of Fatio. These papers together with Le Sage's are now in the Library of the University of Geneva.
Eventually he retired to Worcester, where he formed some congenial friendships, and busied himself with scientific pursuits, alchemy, and the mysteries of the cabbala. In 1732 he endeavoured, but it is thought unsuccessfully, to obtain through the influence of John Conduitt [q. v.], Newton's nephew, some reward for having saved the life of the Prince of Orange. He assisted Conduitt in planning the design, and writing the inscription for Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey. *Wik

1856 Jacques Philippe Marie Binet (February 2, 1786 – May 12, 1856) was a French mathematician, physicist and astronomer born in Rennes; he died in Paris, France, in 1856. He made significant contributions to number theory, and the mathematical foundations of matrix algebra which would later lead to important contributions by Cayley and others. In his memoir on the theory of the conjugate axis and of the moment of inertia of bodies he enumerated the principle now known as Binet's theorem. He is also recognized as the first to describe the rule for multiplying matrices in 1812, and Binet's formula expressing Fibonacci numbers in closed form is named in his honour, although the same result was known to Abraham de Moivre a century earlier.
$u_n = \frac{(1 + \sqrt{5})^n - (1 - \sqrt{5})^n}{2^n \sqrt{5}}$
*Wik
Cauchy wrote his obituary, the only one he ever wrote. Apparently Cauchy was motivated by their common Bourbon fervour. [Ivor Grattan-Guiness, Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800–1840, p. 192] *VFR

1859 Robert Leslie Ellis (25 August 1817 – 12 May 1859) was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of Francis Bacon. A brilliant man with broad interests and abilities who suffered from ill health all his short life. Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical tripos at Cambridge and also First Smith's prizeman. In 1840 he became a fellow of Trinity College and was interested in areas of mathematics which involved philosophical ideas. *SAU

1910 Sir William Huggins (7 Feb 1824; 12 May 1910 at age 86) English astronomer who explored the spectra of stars, nebulae and comets to interpret their chemical composition, assisted by his wife Margaret Lindsay Murray. He was the first to demonstrate (1864) that whereas some nebulae are clusters of stars (with stellar spectral characteristics, ex. Andromeda), certain other nebulae are uniformly gaseous as shown by their pure emission spectra (ex. the great nebula in Orion). He made spectral observations of a nova (1866). He also was first to attempt to measure a star's radial velocity. He was one of the wealthy 19th century private astronomers that supported their own passion while making significant contributions. At age only 30, Huggins built his own observatory at Tulse Hill, outside London *TIS

1952 George Lidstone (11 Dec 1870 in London, England - 12 May 1952 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was an actuary who worked for various Edinburgh insurance companies. He wrote papers on various numerical and statistical topics. *SAU Actuary in the modern sense originated in the middle of the 19th Century. Before that, the term was used for a court clerk. the term is from the Latin for bookkeeper.

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, 11 May 2025

How the term Scientist came to be-

Re-posted from a 2011 Post:

John Cook, at the Endeavour just wrote a nice tid-bit about science/language regarding the creation of the word scientist. I knew the story, but apparently from a flawed source as I had credited the wrong poet (I had Wordsworth... not a bad poet, but not correct) .. so I will correct my notes, and along the way, supplement John's blog with a little more interesting detail from my notes about the topic.. (I think most of this is right).
John Wrote:

For most of history, scientists have been called natural philosophers. You might expect that scientist gradually and imperceptibly replaced natural philosopher over time. Surprisingly, it’s possible pinpoint exactly when and where the term scientist was born.

It was June 24, 1833 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in attendance. (He had previously written about the scientific method.) Coleridge declared that although he was a true philosopher, the term philosopher should not be applied to the association’s members. William Whewell responded by coining the word scientist on the spot. He suggested

by analogy with artist, we may form scientist.

Since those who practice art are called artists, those who practice science should be called scientists.

This story comes from the prologue of Laura Snyder’s new book The Philosophical Breakfast Club. The subtitle is “Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World.” William Whewell was one of these four friends. The others were John Herschel, Richard Jones, and Charles Babbage.

I also found a note about what might be the first use in print. "Interestingly, the philosopher William Whewell wrote a review of On the Connexion of the Sciences in 1834, ( by Mary Sommerville) and in the review he coined the word "scientist" as an appropriate name for a person who dabbles in experimental natural philosophy. "(*Linda Hall Org)

John Cook was good enough to share some material from the book and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the history of science, or just a good story. This is my first read of anything by Laura Snyder, but I hope it will not be the last.

And now, here is the part from my notes which I hope adds to the story:
Whewell was also frequently in correspondence with Michael Faraday, and created the scientific terms anode, cathode, and ion. A letter between the two discussing these three terms is in the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. I have tried to capture an image below, but the library does not allow flash and the image is taken through the glass case... my apologies that it is not clearer.

In spite of its creation at such a high academic level, the word scientist was not well accepted for a long time. Its eventual acceptance came first in America, but it seems even there it encountered fierce opposition to its formal use well into the Twentieth Century. In The American Language in 1921, H. L. Mencken wrote
The last-named scientist was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it. Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it. The use of the word aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as "an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."

The term Natural Philosopher which scientist replaced had not been around long itself. Prior to the time of Galileo a Philosopher was indifferent to the observed facts, and dealt only with moral and logical theory. Galileo thought that,"The proper object of Philosophy is the great book of nature..." and not the words of other men. Eventually these new students of the "book of nature" became the "Natural Philosophers".

Despite several common assertions to the fact that Whewell coined the term in 1840,[Did they get the wrong date?... see date above in John Cook's story] the OED lists an earlier use in print, "1834 Q. Rev. LI. 59 Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers... Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist(***see below), economist, and atheist but this was not generally palatable."

It seems like they are talking about the same event with a different date on this article.

William Whewell is buried in Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge, UK. A memorial marker in the chapel is shown here and there is a statue in the ante-chapel

Addendum: I recently came across notes that suggest that Faraday didn't really accept the term despite his close relation with Whewell and his public endorsement of it; "As for hailing [the new term] scientist as 'good', that was mere politeness: Faraday never used the word, describing himself as a natural philosopher to the end of his career." It also appears he didn't like physicist, "[The new term] Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of i in one word is too much." *Sydney Ross Nineteenth-Century Attitudes: Men of Science (1991), 10.

A few years after I wrote this, Thony Christie featured a guest post on his Renaissance Mathematicus by Dr Melinda Baldwin with lots more information. The entire article is worthy of your reading, but I have "liberated" a few sections here:

"Most nineteenth-century scientific researchers in Great Britain, however, preferred another term: “man of science.” The analogue for this term was not “artist,” but “man of letters”—a figure who attracted great intellectual respect in nineteenth-century Britain. “Man of science,” of course, also had the benefit of being gendered, clearly conveying that science was a respectable intellectual endeavor pursued only by the more serious and intelligent sex."

And this which has lots of information about the 20th century use of "scientist" even by "scientific" journals:

"Feelings against “scientist” in Britain endured well into the twentieth century. In 1924, “scientist” once again became the topic of discussion in a periodical, this time in the influential specialist weekly Nature. In November, the physicist Norman Campbell sent a Letter to the Editor of Nature asking him to reconsider the journal’s policy of avoiding “scientist.” He admitted that the word had once been problematic; it had been coined at a time “when scientists were in some trouble about their style” and “were accused, with some truth, of being slovenly.” Campbell argued, however, that such questions of “style” were no longer a concern—the scientist had now secured social respect. Furthermore, said Campbell, the alternatives were old-fashioned; indeed, “man of science” was outright offensive to the increasing number of women in science.

In response, Nature’s editor, Sir Richard Gregory, decided to follow in Carrington’s footsteps. He solicited opinions from linguists and scientific researchers about whether Nature should use “scientist.” The word received more support in 1924 than it had thirty years earlier. Many researchers wrote in to say that “scientist” was a normal and useful word that was now ensconced in the English lexicon, and that Nature should use it.

However, many researchers still rejected “scientist.” Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a zoologist, argued that “scientist” was a tainted term used “by people who have no great respect either for science or the ‘scientist.’” The eminent naturalist E. Ray Lankester protested that any “Barney Bunkum” might be able to lay claim to such a vague title. “I think we must be content to be anatomists, zoologists, geologists, electricians, engineers, mathematicians, naturalists,” he argued. “‘Scientist’ has acquired—perhaps unjustly—the significance of a charlatan’s device.”

In the end, Gregory decided that Nature would not forbid authors from using “scientist,” but that the journal’s staff would continue to avoid the word."

*** Sciolist..... If you recognized this term you are ahead of me...I looked it up and found:

Noun 1. sciolist - an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge
a dabbler, a dilettante (thank goodness they didn't use my name or picture)

[From Late Latin sciolus, smatterer, diminutive of Latin scius, knowing, from scre, to know; (This is the same root that gives us science.) *PB

On This Day in Math - May 11

A mind which has a taste for scientific inquiry,and has learned the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur,has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

~John Herschel

The 131st day of the year; 131 is the sum of three two-digit primes (31 + 41 + 59) whose concatenation is the decimal expansion of first six digits of pi (3.14159...).

Any ordering of the digits of 131 is still prime. This is called an "absolute" prime.

131 is the sum of three prime numbers that all begin with the same digit. *Prime Curios

bonus: 131 is the 32nd prime and the sum of the digits of both numbers is 5. 32 & 131 is the smallest n, P(n) pair with this property. Such numbers are often called Honaker Primes after G. L. Honaker, Jr, from Prime Curios. There is only one more such prime that is a year day.

The reciprocal of 131 repeats with a period of 130 digits, 1/131 =0.007633587786259
54198473282442748091603053435114503816793893129770992366412213740458
015267175572519083969465648854961832...

EVENTS

1892 Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's ﬁrst Newmarch lecture. In May and June of 1892 Edgeworth, newly appointed to the Oxford chair and editor of The Economic Journal, gave six Newmarch lectures, "On the Uses and Methods of Statistics."

He was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.

1894 The Mississippi Weather Almanac lists this date as the date of the "most unusual weather event in the states history." In the little town of Bovina, just a short run from Vicksburg (Grant had his Army make Bovina a field hospital during the siege of Vicksburg) during a hail storm a 6" by 8" gopher turtle fell from the sky encased in ice. (admit it, you just don't find that kind of fascinating science information on your typical blog) * "Queen of the Turtle Derby" by Julia Reed.

According to Wikipedia, "The gopher tortoise is a representative of the genus Gopherus, which contains the only tortoises native to North America.

1897 black American inventor, William U. Moody was issued a U.S. design patent for a “game board design.” . It shows a rectangular board with a particular arrangement of partitions in the form of arcs of concentric circles and some other shorter partitions causing a complex route for a ball to travel from one corner to the diagonal corner, presumably, by tilting the board. *TIS
This was one of a number of variants of the most popular maze game of the period. Charles Martin Crandall produced many popular toys from his plant in Pennsylvania, and his "Pigs in Clover", release in 1889, captured the nation in a frenzy. The New York Tribune's March 13, 1889 issue reported Senator William M. Evarts purchased one from a street fakir in order to get rid of him. He took the puzzle home and worked it for hours. The following morning he brought it with him into senate chambers where Senator George Graham Vest stopped by Evarts' desk, borrowed the puzzle and took it to a cloak room. Soon thereafter he was joined by Senators James L. Pugh, James B. Eustis, Edward C. Walthall and John E. Kenna. A page was sent out to buy five of the puzzles and upon his return, the group engaged in a "pig driving contest". About 30 minutes later, Senator Vest announced his accomplishment of driving the last pig in the pen. A few days later a political cartoon in the New York World's March 17, 1889 issue lampooned President Benjamin Harrison's advisors and cabinet members showing the group sitting around playing the game. The caption read "Will Mr. Harrison be able to get all these hungry pigs in the official pen?"

1905 Albert Einstein's paper, "On the motion of small particles suspended in liquids at rest required by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat." (Brownian motion paper) is received by Annalen der Physik, .
"In this paper Einstein reports that the kinetic theory of heat predicts that small particles suspended in water must execute a random motion visible under the microscope. He suspects this motion is Brownian motion but has insufficient datato affirm it. The prediction is a powerful test of the truth of the kinetic theory of heat. A failure to observe the effect would refute the theory. If it is seen and measured, it provides a way to estimate Avogadro's number. The domain in which the effect is observed is one in which the second law of thermodynamics no longer holds, a disturbing result for the energeticists of the time. " * John D. Norton, Einstein, 1905 Pitt.edu

Einstein completed six papers in 1905. Each was published by the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik. Four of the papers were published in 1905 and the other two in 1906. The papers were:

"On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," completed March 17, 1905. This work includes the light quanta hypothesis and study of the photoelectric effect. This was fundamental in the development of the quantum theory and was the basis of the justification for Einstein receiving the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.

"On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat," completed in May 1905. (above)

"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," completed in June 1905. This is this paper that founded the special theory of relativity.

"Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?," completed in September 1905. This is a follow-up to the special relativity paper in which Einstein presents a preliminary version of the equation E=mc^2.

"A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," completed April 30, 1905 and revised on August 19, 1905. This is Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation work from the University of Zurich. It contains a new method for the determination of molecular sizes and of Avagadro's number.

"On the Theory of Brownian Motion," completed December 19, 1905. This appeared , in 1906. This is a second paper on Brownian motion. *Gardnerr

1920 Oxford University passed a statute admitting women to degrees. *VFR Women had been allowed to take examinations at Oxford since 1883. In 1892 Grace Chisholm took the exam for the Final Honours School in mathematics (as an unofficial candidate) and out-performed all the Oxford students. She took the test (unofficially) on a challenge, with Isabel Maddison. Both women earned a First Class degree in the Mathematical Tripos examinations.

1928 radio station WGY, in Schenectady, NY, began America’s first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. The programs lasted from 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Most of the viewers were on the technical staff at nearby General Electric, which had designed the system and was using the broadcasts to refine its equipment. A handful of hobbyists who had built their own sets were also able to watch. Those who tuned in had to make constant adjustments, turning two knobs at once to keep the blurry picture discernible on their three-inch-square screens. By the end of 1928, 17 more stations around the country began scheduled broadcasts, designed to test the apparatus rather than attract viewers. *TIS

Beginning in 1926, Ernst Alexanderson worked on an experimental mechanical television system. This led, on September 11, 1928, to the WGY Players broadcasting the first televised play, an old spy melodrama titled The Queen's Messenger and starring Izetta Jewel and Maurice Randall. Alexanderson's development of a portable and simplified television transmitter made the broadcast possible. The only viewers were newspaper and magazine writers watching the program on a 3x3-inch (7.6 cm) screen located three miles (five kilometers) away in the WGY studio. The broadcasts took place at 1:30 and 11:30 p.m.

WGY Radio Players performing a dramatic scene from William Vaughn Moody's "The Great Divide" (1923)

1940 At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940, to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-week period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games.

Nim is a two-player mathematical game of strategy where players take turns removing objects from distinct piles. The winner is the player who removes the last object.

Variants of nim have been played since ancient times. The game is said to have originated in China—it closely resembles the Chinese game of jiǎn-shízǐ (捡石子), or "picking stones"—but the origin is uncertain; the earliest European references to nim are from the beginning of the 16th century. Its current name was coined by Charles L. Bouton of Harvard University, who also developed the complete theory of the game in 1901, but the origins of the name were never fully explained. The Oxford English Dictionary derives the name from the German verb nimm, meaning "take". *Wik

1951, Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

"Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time. In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. *Wired

Diagram of a 4×4 plane of magnetic core memory in an X/Y line coincident-current setup. X and Y are drive lines, S is sense, Z is inhibit. Arrows indicate the direction of current for writing. *Wik

1957 Howard F. Fehr, of Columbia University Teachers College, in an address at Syracuse: “A mathematics professor who talks at length affects both ends of the listener—he makes one end feel numb and the other feel dumb.” [Eves, Revisited, p. 151] . *VFR

1959 Eugene P. Wigner delivered a penetrating Courant Lecture at NYU on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which is well worth reading. *VFR

1979 VisiCalc Introduced. It was the ﬁrst program operable by inexperienced computer users. As it ran only on the Apple, the company soon was on top of the market. *VFR

1986 A specially designed bicycle set the human powered land speed record of 105.37 km per hour (65.48 miles per hour). *VFR In September of 2016 the record was shattered by a Canadian team with an enclosed bicycle travelling at 89,6 MPH.

The bike, named Eta for the Greek symbol used to denote efficiency in engineering, uses a highly aerodynamic shape and coating, an ergonomic reclining position for the rider, and modern composite materials such as carbon fiber weaves to provide as much power transfer as possible through the stiff bike frame. *Popular Mechanics

1997 Garry Kasparov loses in the rematch with IBM's Deep Blue in the first match of what many considered a test of artificial intelligence. The world's best chess player, Kasparov lost the match and $1.1 million purse to the IBM supercomputer, which he had claimed could never surpass human chess ability. After losing the sixth and final game of the match, Kasparov accused IBM of building a machine specifically to beat him. Observers said he was frustrated by Deep Blue's quickness although they expected him to win with unconventional moves. *CHM On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. *Wik

BIRTHS

1702 Isaac Greenwood. (11 May 1702 Boston, Massachusetts – 22 October 1745 Charleston, South Carolina ) In 1727 he was installed at Harvard as the ﬁrst Hollis professor of mathematics and natural and experimental philosophy. He strengthened and modernized the science program at Harvard. *VFR
During his tenure, he wrote anonymously the first natively-published American book on mathematics – the Greenwood Book, published in 1729. This book made the first published statement of the short scale value for billion in the United States, which eventually became the value used in most English-speaking countries.
He was removed from the Chair for intemperance (drunkenness) in 1737.
Unable to support his family, he joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain – HMS Rose in 1742, and later HMS Aldborough in 1744. He was released from service in Charleston, South Carolina, on 22 May 1745.
He drank himself to death a few months later on 22 October 1745.*Wik

In his Arithmetick, Greenwood chose to use the short scale value for one billion, i.e. 1 billion = 1000 x 1 million, or 10^9. This standard has been retained by the English speaking countries of the world. The continental countries of Europe use the long scale, i.e. 1 billion = 1 million million, or 10^12.

I recently learned that Greenwood was the first American born Dentist.

1744 José Anastácio da Cunha (May 11, 1744 – January 1, 1787) was a Portuguese mathematician. He is best known for his work on the theory of equations, algebraic analysis, plain and spherical trigonometry, analytical geometry, and differential calculus.

Da Cunha wrote a 21 part encyclopedia of mathematics Principios Mathemáticos which he began to publish in parts from 1782 (it was published as a complete work in 1790) which contained a rigorous exposition of mathematics, in particular a rigorous exposition of the calculus. The book contained the elements of geometry and algebra in addition to the calculus. In all areas da Cunha paid unusual attention to methodology as well as rigour. Struik, reviewing writes:-

His importance for the history of mathematics is due to his "Principios Mathemáticos", published posthumously in 1790 and translated into French by J M d'Abreu [Racle, Bordeaux, 1811]. This book is characterized by the attempts at rigor, especially in the calculus. Da Cunha develops a criterion for the convergence of a series which he uses to define the exponential function in a rather modern way, and from these develops the binomial series.

1871 Frank Schlesinger (May 11, 1871 New York City – July 10, 1943 Old Lyme, Connecticut) American astronomer who pioneered in the use of photography to map stellar positions and to measure stellar parallaxes, which could give more precise determinations of distance than visual ones, and with less than one hundredth as much time at the telescope. He designed instruments and mathematical and numerical techniques to improve parallax measurements. He published ten volumes of zone catalogs, including some 150,000 stars. He compiled positions, magnitudes, proper motions, radial velocities, and other data to produce the first edition and, with Louise Jenkins, the second, of the widely-used Bright Star Catalogues, making Yale a leading institution in astrometry. He established a second Yale observatory in South Africa. *VFR

1875 Harriet Quimby (May 11, 1875 – July 1, 1912) Harriet Quimby of Coldwater, Michigan, the first American woman to earn a pilot's license, on August 1, 1911, when she earned license #37 from the Aero Club of America. She later becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel. Her accomplishment received little media attention, however, as the sinking of the Titanic ocean liner the day before riveted the interest of the public and filled newspapers.

The Vin Fiz Company, a division of Armour Meat Packing Plant of Chicago, recruited Quimby as the spokesperson for the new grape soda, Vin Fiz in April 1912. Her distinctive purple aviator uniform and image graced many of the advertising pieces of the day.

1881 Theodore von Karman (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963) Hungarian-American aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.*Wik; He was director of the Institute for Aerodynamics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in AACHEN, Nordrhein-Westfalen, in 1913-1934. The main lecture theatre complex is named the Kármán Auditorium and there is a photo and a bust of him in the foyer.

President Kennedy presenting the first National Medal of Science to Theodore von Kármán, 1963 (jfklibrary.ord)

1902 Edna Ernestine Kramer Lassar (May 11, 1902 – July 9, 1984), born Edna Ernestine Kramer, was an American mathematician and author of mathematics books.

Kramer was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics from Hunter College in 1922. While teaching at local high schools, she earned her M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1930 in mathematics (with a minor in physics) from Columbia University with Edward Kasner as her advisor.

She wrote The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, A First Course in Educational Statistics, Mathematics Takes Wings: An Aviation Supplement to Secondary Mathematics, and The Main Stream of Mathematics.

Kramer married the French teacher Benedict Taxier Lassar on July 2, 1935. Kramer-Lassar died at the age of 82 in Manhattan of Parkinson's disease

1924 Eugene Borisovich Dynkin ( May 11, 1924 — 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician. He has made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named for him.
In 1968, Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He worked there on the theory of economic growth and economic equilibrium. He remained at the Institute until 1976, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1977, he became a professor at Cornell University, where he died in 2014. *Wik

1918 Richard Phillips Feynman (11 May, 1918 – 15 February, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1942, he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. After the war, he developed Feynman Diagrams, a simple notation to describe the complex behavior of subatomic particles. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics. *TIS

1924 Antony Hewish FRS FInstP (11 May 1924 – 13 September 2021) was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his role in the discovery of pulsars. ( Several prominent scientists protested the omission of Bell Burnell, though she maintained that the prize was presented appropriately given her student status at the time of the discovery) He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969

In late Nov 1967, using a radio telescope, Hewish and Ph.D. student Jocelyn Bell observed an unusual signal corresponding to a sharp burst of radio energy at a regular interval of approximately one second. It is believed that rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense electromagnetic fields emit radio waves from their north and south poles. From a great distance, these radio emissions are perceived in pulses, similar to the way one sees the light from a lighthouse's rotating lantern. Hewish and Bell's discovery served as the first evidence of this phenomenon.

1930 Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. Among his contributions to computer science are the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra's algorithm; Reverse Polish Notation* and related Shunting yard algorithm; the THE multiprogramming system, an important early example of structuring a system as a set of layers; Banker's algorithm; and the semaphore construct for coordinating multiple processors and programs. Another concept due to Dijkstra in the field of distributed computing is that of self-stabilization – an alternative way to ensure the reliability of the system. Dijkstra's algorithm is used in SPF, Shortest Path First, which is used in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. *Wik

*The Reverse Polish Notation was first created by Polish logician Jan Łukasiewicz, who invented Polish notation in 1924. The first computer to use postfix notation, though it long remained essentially unknown outside of Germany, was Konrad Zuse's Z3 in 1941 as well as his Z4 in 1945. The reverse Polish scheme was again proposed in 1954 by Arthur Burks, Don Warren, and Jesse Wright and was independently reinvented by Friedrich L. Bauer and Edsger W. Dijkstra in the early 1960s to reduce computer memory access and use the stack to evaluate expressions.

1958 Kristie Irene Macrakis (March 11, 1958 – November 14, 2022) was an American historian of science, author and professor in the School of History, Technology and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was the author or editor of five books and was widely known for her work at the intersection of history of espionage and history of science and technology.

Macrakis received her PhD in the history of science at Harvard University. After teaching at Harvard University for a year as a lecturer, Macrakis spent a year in Berlin on an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Chancellor's Scholar for Future Leaders, before taking up a position at Michigan State University where she advanced from Assistant to Full Professor, before taking up a Full Professor position at Georgia Tech.

Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies (2014) and Seduced by Secrets (2008) were her single authored books. Nigel Jones wrote in The Spectator that Prisoners, Lovers and Spies is "beguilingly informative and sweeping survey of hidden communication. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the best nonfiction books of 2014 and called it "lively...engaging" and "An engrossing study of unseen writing and the picaresque misadventures of those who employ it."

Seduced by Secrets was hailed as the "best book" on the Ministry for State Security by Benjamin Fischer in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence,[while Joseph Goulden, of the Washington Times, gave it "a five cloak-and-dagger rating. Good reading for the specialist and the layman alike."]

Macrakis was also the author of numerous articles, both scholarly and popular. While a graduate student at Harvard she found that the Rockefeller Foundation funded science in Nazi Germany; that work was covered in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 October 1986). Her most widely read popular magazine article is "The Case of Agent Gorbachev," published in American Scientist.

Following a brief illness, Macrakis died on November 14, 2022, at the age of 64.

DEATHS

1610 Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552; Macerata – May 11, 1610;Beijing )was an Italian Jesuit who went to China as a missionary and introduced the Chinese to Western mathematics.*SAU
There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate Ricci's six-year stay there, as well as a "Ricci Memorial Centre", in a building dating from the 1860's.

Ricci arrived at the Portuguese settlement of Macau in 1582 where he began his missionary work in China. He mastered the Chinese language and writing system. He became the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601 when invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calendrical science. He emphasized parallels between Catholicism and Confucianism but opposed Buddhism. He converted several prominent Chinese officials to Catholicism. He also worked with several Chinese elites, such as Xu Guangqi, in translating Euclid's Elements into Chinese as well as the Confucian classics into Latin for the first time in history.*Wik

1686 Otto von Guericke (originally spelled Gericke) (November 20, 1602 – May 11, 1686 (Julian calendar); November 30, 1602 – May 21, 1686 (Gregorian calendar)) was a German scientist, inventor, and politician. He is best remembered for his invention of the Magdeburg hemispheres, popularized in the writings of Caspar Schott. His major scientific achievements were the establishment of the physics of vacuums, the discovery of an experimental method for clearly demonstrating electrostatic repulsion, and his advocacy of the reality of "action at a distance" and of "absolute space". *Wik

1871 1st Baronet) Sir John (Frederick William) Herschel (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English astronomer. As successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, he discovered another 525 nebulae and clusters. John Herschel was a pioneer in celestial photography, and as a chemist contributed to the development of sensitized photographic paper (independently of Talbot). In 1819, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate dissolved silver salts, as used in developing photographs. He introduced the terms positive image and negative image. Being diverse in his research, he also studied physical and geometrical optics, birefringence of crystals, spectrum analysis, and the interference of light and sound waves. To compare the brightness of stars, he invented the astrometer.*TIS [He was buried in Westminster Abbey.]

1957 Théophile Ernest de Donder (19 August 1872 – 11 May 1957) was a Belgian mathematician and physicist famous for his 1923 work in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.
He received his doctorate in physics and mathematics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1899, for a thesis entitled Sur la Théorie des Invariants Intégraux (On the Theory of Integral Invariants).
He was professor between 1911 and 1942, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Initially he continued the work of Henri Poincaré and Élie Cartan. As from 1914 he was influenced by the work of Albert Einstein and was an enthusiastic proponent of the theory of relativity. He gained significant reputation in 1923, when he developed his definition of chemical affinity. He pointed out a connection between the chemical affinity and the Gibbs free energy.
He is considered the father of thermodynamics of irreversible processes. De Donder’s work was later developed further by Ilya Prigogine. De Donder was an associate and friend of Albert Einstein. *Wik

Théophile Ernest de Donder at the 1927 Solvay Conference . Appearing in front of de Donder is Paul Dirac .

1965 Jason John Nassau (29 March 1893 in Smyrna, (now Izmir) Turkey - 11 May 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) was an American astronomer.
He performed his doctoral studies at Syracuse, and gained his Ph.D. mathematics in 1920. (His thesis was Some Theorems in Alternants.) He then became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in 1921, teaching astronomy. He continued to instruct at that institution, becoming the University's first chair of astronomy from 1924 until 1959 and chairman of the graduate division from 1936 until 1940. After 1959 he was professor emeritus.
From 1924 until 1959 he was also the director of the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a pioneer in the study of galactic structure. He also discovered a new star cluster, co-discovered 2 novae in 1961, and developed a technique of studying the distribution of red (M-class or cooler) stars.*Wik

1897 Odd Hassel (17 May 1897 – 11 May 1981) was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.

He shared (with Sir Derek H.R. Barton of Great Britain) the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in establishing conformational analysis (the study of the 3-D geometric structure of molecules). A ring of six carbon atoms has two conformations - the chair and boat forms. These easily interchange - about a million times in a second at room temperature. One of the conformations is, however, strongly predominant (about 99%). Hassel carried out fundamental investigations on this system and showed how heavy or bulky groups, attached to the carbon atoms, take up their positions relative to the ring and to each other. Such work is of great importance for predicting the mode of reaction of a certain molecule. *TIS

2012 Fritz Joseph Ursell FRS (28 April 1923 – 11 May 2012) was a British mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially in the area of wave-structure interactions. He held the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester from 1961–1990, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972 and retired in 1990.

Ursell came to England as a refugee in 1937 from Germany. From 1941 to 1943 he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a bachelor degree in mathematics. *Wik