Wednesday, 5 August 2026

Easy?!?! Computations for the Back of a Napkin

Another from the Archives, Enjoy!


Some calculations are easier than you think! I’m drawn to math that can be done on a napkin at a restaurant. Quick mental calculations and methods of approximation that give you the ball park quick answer…”It’s about …blah.” and then I try to look as if I don’t think I’m really clever. I had a couple of these come up recently, so I thought I would share…

One was at a backyard barbecue…an electrical engineer, a graduate physics student, and a math teacher, beers in hand as the hamburgers burned and the hot dogs turned to charcoal… One had just come back from New York City and pointed out that the Empire State bldg. was 1224 feet high to the upper observatory… then someone brought up the old conjecture that a penny dropped from the Empire State building would kill you. The engineer suggests that in truth the penny would reach some terminal velocity that would keep it from actually killing anyone. The physics student suggests that it would not be too hard to figure out using differential equations if we just ignored the air resistance, but he didn’t have his calculator (which apparently is his main resource for doing integration). The math teacher offers, “Well, with only high school math and physics, and a little mental calculation, it should be about 280 feet per second.”

A long silence, followed by “How did you get that number?” So I explained. In physics the big ideas often provide great simplifications…and in this case the big idea was the conservation of energy laws…. The total energy remains constant. The Penny on the 102nd floor has a potential energy equal to its weight times its height. When it hits the ground the potential energy has all been converted to kinetic energy (and a very small amount of heat due to air friction which I ignore) . Epot= m g h and Ekin = ½ m v^2. Cancel the mass on each side and we have gh = ½ v^2. If we use the common value of 32 ft/sec2 for the gravitational force, then we can simplify this all down to v^2= 64 h.. or taking square roots, we get v= 8 times the square root of h…. Now the square root of 1224 is about the same as the square root of 1225 which is 35 (one of those multiplication tricks I teach my students each year) and 8 x 35 = 280, so the answer is about 280 ft/second.

They both look incredulous… so I offer a second approach… OK, an object dropped from rest will fall 16t2 feet in t seconds. To fall 1224 seconds it would take t=sqrt(1224/16) and taking the square root of top and bottom we get 35/4 seconds… OK, so velocity is 32 times t, so 32 times 35/4 = (wait for it…. ) 8 x 35 = 280 again… “Easier than you thought… right”

The second event corrected a misconception I have had for years. I have mentioned earlier that one of my preoccupations on the road is looking at mile markers and license plate numbers and trying to factor them. I know all the easy tricks for divisibility by small numbers, except seven…. The rules for divisibility by seven always seemed harder than just dividing by seven, so I was surprised to read a note from a guy who seems to have invented (I never saw it before) an easy way to test divisibility by seven

Without going into the derivation, here is the rule. Take the number, call it N, and think of it as 10A + B. For example if the number is 2345 the A = 234 and the B= 5. Now the method is just to calculate A-2B and if that answer is divisible by seven, so is the original. And if you don’t know, just reapply the same rule again. For example 2345 is divisible by 7 only if 234-10 = 224 is also….which can be applied again with 22-8 = 14… ohh….. I KNOW that is a multiple of seven, so 2345 is also a multiple of seven, in fact it is 7 x 335.

This is getting a little long, so on a later day I’ll explain how he found it, and even show you a method I found for testing 13 which is almost as easy, and another for testing divisibility by 17… as the tv folks say….stay tuned 

Ok, I put this off for a long time, but here is the reason for the A-2B approach:

Suppose we have a number that is (or isn't) divisible by 7.  you could test divisibility by simply removing multiples of seven until you gey down to a number you know by heart.  In some ways this is the most understandable way of all.  Is 34265 divisible by seven?  Well 2800 is, so we can subtract that to get 6265.  if 34265 is divisible by 7 then so is 6265.  We can work on the other end also.  6265-(9x7)= 6202 and our line of plausibility still stands....either all these numbers are divisible by seven, are all of them are not.  What about lopping off 5600 from 6202. now we are down to 602.  Now 560 looks like a good reduction, and we are down to 42... I think I know that one.  

Ok, so A-2B.... remember the test number is N=10 A + B  and 10≡3(mod7),   sooo N≡3A+B(mod7).

So checking divisibility by 7 is equivalent to asking whether 3A+B0(mod7).

It seems trivial (but it is helpful) to write 2(3A+B)=6A+2B.   Since 6≡−1(mod7),

this becomes   2(3A+B)≡−A+2B≡−(A−2B)(mod7). And that's all there is too it.


On This Day in Math - August 5

  


Mathematics is like checkers in being suitable for the young,
not too difficult, amusing, and without peril to the state. 

~Plato

On non-leap years, this is the 217th day of the year; 217 is both the sum of two positive cubes and the difference of two positive consecutive cubes in exactly one way: 217 = 63 + 13 = 93 − 83. (How frequently would the difference of two consecutive cubes also be expressible as the sum of two cubes?)

on leap years this is the 218th day of the year; 218 = 72 + 132

218 is the number of nonequivalent ways to color the 12 edges of a cube using at most 2 colors, where two colorings are equivalent if they differ only by a rotation of the cube. 

218 is the smallest number with a Merten funtion =3. (an acceptable definition for students is that the Merten number for n, M(n), is the count of square-free integers up to n that have an even number of prime factors, minus the count of those that have an odd number.) The function is named in honor of Franz Merten, who was a teacher of Schrodinger.
More Math Facts for every Year Day here


EVENTS

1638 One of the early reports on hurricanes came from John Taylor, domestic adventurer, poet, propagandist, Royalist, and sometime overseer of the Company of Watermen in London. In 1638 he seems to have published New and Strange News from St. Christophers, of a tempestuous Spirit, which is called by the Indians a Hurry Cano, which happeneth in many of those Islands of America, or the West-Indies, as it did in August last the 5. 1638. Blowing downe houses, tearing up trees by the rootes, and it did puffe men up from the earth, as they had beene Feathers, killing divers men. *PACHS blog

For those, like me, who are not sure of the meaning of Watermen, "A waterman is a river worker who transfers passengers across and along city centre rivers and estuaries in the United Kingdom and its colonies. Most notable are those on the River Thames and River Medway in England, but other rivers such as the River Tyne and River Dee, Wales, also had their watermen who formed guilds in medieval times. Waterman can also be a person who navigates a boat carrying passengers. These boats were often rowing boat or boats with sails. Over the years watermen acquired additional skills such as local pilotage, mooring vessels at berths, jetties, buoys, and docks, and acting as helmsman aboard large vessel." *Wik

The Doggett's Coat and Badge, the oldest rowing race in the world, sees apprentice watermen competing on the River Thames.  painting by Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827).




1775 Montucla, who was the anonymous editor, served as Royal Censer for a new edition of Jacques Ozanam’s book on mathematical recreations (the first edition was written in Ozanam’s spare time during war time and published in 1694). *VFR The book was later published in English by Charles Hutton in 1803.

Hutton rose from digging coal in the Newcastle area to start his own mathematical school and became an English mathematician and surveyor. He was professor of mathematics at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich from 1773 to 1807. He is remembered for his calculation of the density of the earth from Nevil Maskelyne's measurements collected during the Schiehallion experiment.


*MAA



1766 Eclipse observed southeast of Newfoundland: Eclipse Island (part of Burgeo Islands). Mentioned in the Chronology of Captains James Cooks (1728-1779) travels by Paul Capper. *NSEC


In 1816, Francis Ronalds built a working telegraph in the garden of the family house in Hammersmith in west London. Part of it was underground, but above ground he strung out 8 miles of insulated wire in ribbon-candy fashion, with clocks at each end whose faces contained letters instead of numbers; the electrical signals in some way synchronized the clocks and spelled out a message.  Apparently, the device worked; he gave a demonstration on 5 August, 1816 for the Admiralty, offering it to them gratis, but the Secretary of the Admiralty, John Barrow, rejected it as an unnecessary invention, preferring the semaphore telegraph then in use.  Two years later, Barrow distinguished himself by sending out the first ships in search of a Northwest Passage, but he has never quite lived down the ignominy of rejecting the electrical telegraph as useless.  It would be 20 more years before England re-entered the telegraph business, and by that time, they were well behind the Americans.  Many today regard Ronalds as the true inventor of the telegraph, and there was considerable scholarly commotion in his behalf in 2016, the bicentennial of his invention. *Linda Hall Org

*Linda Hall Org


*Wik



In 1864, Giovanni Batista Donati (1827-73) made the first spectroscopic observations of a comet tail (from the small comet, Tempel, 1864 II). At a distance from the Sun the spectrum of a comet is identical to that of the Sun, and its visibility is due only to reflected sunlight. Donati showed that comet tail formed close to the Sun contains luminous gas. In the spectrum of light from the comet tail, Donati saw three absorption lines bands superimposed on a continuous spectrum, which he named alpha, beta and gamma, and are now known as the Swan bands. These bands were also seen in a comet tail viewed by Pietro Secchi in 1866. Sir William Huggins (1868) identified that these were due to the presence of carbon (molecular carbon, C2).*TIS

Swan bands are a characteristic of the spectra of carbon stars, comets and of burning hydrocarbon fuels.They are named for the Scottish physicist William Swan, who first studied the spectral analysis of radical diatomic carbon (C2) in 1856. *Wik 



1900  On this day in 1900, the engineer Frank Baldwin was awarded a U.S. Patent for his mechanical calculator. This machine was capable of doing a calculation such as  54679285×3298=180332281930 in about 20 seconds with eight turns of the handle.  The  "Baldwin Computing Engine", a machine by which multiplication or division was performed by one stroke for each digit.

1902 model 



1912  “At the final session of the Spectral Classification Committee, on August 5, the Solar Union dissolved its old committees and regrouped into new ones for the work to be done over the next three years, before they would all meet again in Rome. “When the names of committees were read,” wrote Miss Cannon(Annie Jump Cannon, 49 at this time.), “I was very much surprised to find that I was put on the Committee on Classification of Stellar Spectra—and one of the novel experiences of the summer was to meet with this Committee. They sat at a long table, these men of many nations, and I was the only woman. Since I have done almost all the world’s work in this one branch, it was necessary for me to do most of the talking.””

— The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. She developed the mnemonic "Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!" used by students to memorize the spectral classification of stars. *Wik 




1935 Institute of Mathematical Statistics founded.*VFR The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts of the world. Beginning in 2005, the institute started offering joint membership with the Bernoulli Society for Mathematical Statistics and Probability as well as with the International Statistical Institute.




1962 a lunar occultation on August 5 enabled Australian radio astronomers to more precisely fix the location of the previously known radio source 3C 273, in Virgo. In 1963 this became the first member of a new class of object eventually to be called quasars or "quasi-stellar radio sources." Maarten Schmidt, using the Hale optical telescope, saw it as a faint star-like object with a visible jet. Its spectrum featured unusual emission lines, which he identified as ordinary hydrogen lines shifted toward longer wavelengths (redshifted) by 16%. If the shift is due to velocity, it is moving away at one-sixth the speed of light and one of the most distant objects visible. Quasars radiate as much energy per second as a hundred or more galaxies. 3C273 is the brightest quasar known.*TIS

image:3C 273 as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys. Light from the bright quasar nucleus is blocked by a coronagraph so that the surrounding host galaxy can be more easily seen. Credit: NASA/ESA,  *Wik



1977 Fermilab announces the discovery of what would come to be known as the Bottom Quark. In the summer of 1977, a team of physicists, led by Leon M. Lederman, working on experiment 288 in the proton center beam line of the Fermilab fixed target areas discovered the Upsilon. This discovery was eventually understood as being the bound state of the bottom quark and its antiquark. Their data was confirmed in experiments conducted in 1978 *Fermilab History and Archives Projec 

The bottom quark or b quark, also known as the beauty quark, is a third-generation heavy quark with a charge of −1/3 e.   All quarks are described in a similar way by electroweak and quantum chromodynamics, but the bottom quark has exceptionally low rates of transition to lower-mass quarks. The bottom quark is also notable because it is a product in almost all top quark decays, and is a frequent decay product of the Higgs boson.

The bottom quark was first described theoretically in 1973 by physicists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa to explain CP violation. The name "bottom" was introduced in 1975 by Haim Harari.

Kobayashi and Maskawa won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for their explanation of CP-violation.  *Wik

Image  Wilson Building at Fermilab, named for former director Robert R. Wilson, was reportedly inspired by the Gothic cathedral in Beauvais, France. 



1982 Cook 3061 (1982 UB1): Minor planet discovered October 21, 1982 by E. Bowe II at Anderson Mesa. Named for James Cook (1728-1779), British circumnavigator and one of the first scientific navigators. He observed the Solar Eclipse of 1766 August 5 from Newfoundland and in 1769 measured the transit of Venus from Tahiti. Named proposed by the discoverer.*NSEC






BIRTHS


1798 John Wrottesley, 2nd Baron Wrottesley, (5 August 1798 – 27 October 1867) was an English astronomer, who published Catalogue Of The RA Of 1318 Stars. He was a founder member of the Royal Astronomical Society. From his first Observatory in Blackheath, London, he recorded over 12,000 observations. After he inherited the title and the Staffordshire family estate at Wrottesley in 1841, he built an observatory there. In 1855, the city of Wolverhampton nearby decreed that if any ... furnace chimney ...was built ... within three miles of the observatory, it shall be constructed on the best and approved principles "for consuming the smoke arising ... therefrom". This of course was so that observations from the observatory would not be hampered by smoke pollution.*TIS



1802 Neils Henrik Abel (5 August 1802 – 6 April 1829) was born at Fomm¨oy, a small island near Stavanger in Norway. Before going to the university in 1821 he attacked, with the vigor and immodesty of youth, the problem of the solution of the quintic equation. He submitted a solution for publication but found an error before it was published. In 1823 he proved the impossibility of a solution involving radicals that solves fifth or higher degree equations. *VFR He developed the concept of elliptic functions independently of Carl Gustav Jacobi, and the theory of Abelian integrals and functions became a central theme of later 19th-century analysis. He had difficulty finding an academic position, was troubled by poverty, and died in poverty in his late twenties.*TIS  I love Abel's comment on Gauss' writing style, "He is like the fox, who effaces his tracks in the sand with his tail."




1855 William Henry Dines (5 August 1855 – 24 December 1927) was an English meterologist and inventor of related measurement instruments such as the Dines pressure tube anemometer (the first instrument to measure both the velocity and direction of wind, 1901), a very lightweight meteorograph, and a radiometer (1920). He joined the Royal Meteorological Society study of the cause of the disastrous Tay Bridge collapse of 1879. His measurements of upper air conditions, first with kites and later by balloon ascents (1907), brought an understanding of cyclones from dynamic processes in the lower stratosphere rather than thermal effects nearer to the ground.*TIS




1855  Alfredo Capelli (5 Aug 1855, Milan, Italy – 28 Jan 1910, Naples, Italy) was an Italian mathematician who discovered Capelli's identity.


Capelli graduated from the University of Rome in 1877, and moved to the University of Pavia where he worked as an assistant for Felice Casorati. In 1881 he became a professor at the University of Palermo, replacing Cesare Arzelà who had recently moved to Bologna. In 1886, he moved again to the University of Naples, where he held the chair in algebra. He remained at Naples until his death in 1910. As well as being a professor there, he was editor of the Giornale di Matematiche di Battaglini from 1894 to 1910, and was elected to the Accademia dei Lincei.*Wik

In mathematics, Capelli's identity, named after Alfredo Capelli (1887), is an analogue of the formula det(AB) = det(A) det(B), for certain matrices with noncommuting entries, related to the representation theory of the Lie algebra . It can be used to relate an invariant ƒ to the invariant Ωƒ, where Ω is Cayley's Ω process.




1878 Louis Charles Karpinski (5 August 1878 – 25 January 1956) was an American mathematician.

He was born on August 5, 1878, in Rochester, New York. His parents were Henry Hermanagle Karpinski of Warsaw, Poland and Mary Louise Engesser of Guebwiller, France. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at Cornell University in 1901 and his Ph.D. at Universität Straßburg in 1903.

At Columbia University, Karpinski became a fellow and a university extension lecturer. He taught at Berea College and at the Normal School in Oswego, New York, now SUNY Oswego. He then accepted a position at the University of Michigan, where he became a full professor of mathematics by 1919. He devoted his attention chiefly to the history and pedagogy of mathematics.

Karpinski served as the president of the History of Science Society from 1943 to 1944



1930 Neil Alden Armstrong, (August 5, 1930, August 25, 2012) U.S. astronaut, was the first man to walk on the moon (20 Jul 1969, Apollo 11). He served as a Navy pilot during the Korean War, then joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (which became NASA), as a civilian test pilot. In 1962, he was the first civilian to enter the astronaut-training program. He gained experience as command pilot of the Gemini 8 mission, which accomplished the first physical joining of two orbiting spacecraft. Later he was commander of the Apollo 11 lunar mission. From 1971, he worked as professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati. He was a member of the commission that investigated the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster.*TIS 

Armstrong died following complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures. *Mercury News





1936 Ki-Hang Kim (5 August 1936 – 15 January 2009), also known as Kim Ki-Hang Butler, Hang Kim, Keyhany Keem, or Kim Ki-Hang was a Korean-American Mathematician and Alabama State University professor known for his contributions in semigroups, Boolean matrices, and Social Sciences. He frequently co-wrote with Fred Roush.
Kim graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi in 1960 with a B.S. in mathematics. He received a M.S. a year later, in 1961. Unable to fund a Ph.D., Kim taught briefly at University of Hartford. He then obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics from George Washington University in 1970, for On (0,1)-Matrix Semigroups.

Kim began teaching at St. Mary's College in 1968, moving to Pembroke State University in 1971. Finally, he accepted the position of professor of mathematics and Director of the Mathematics Research Group at Alabama State University. Kim additionally taught at institutions abroad, in Portugal and India, as well as attending many international conferences, including those in China and Hungary, particularly the conference on Algebraic Semigroup Theory in Szeged, Hungary, where he was the only American invited. He was also active in many conferences within the US, including the American Mathematical Society meeting at Auburn University in 1971, Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, Computing in Boca Raton, Florida in 1974. Kim spent 35 years teaching at Alabama State University, ending his tenure in 2007.

From 1971 to 1976, Kim published 25 papers on semigroups and Boolean matrices (under the name Kim Butler). Following meeting fellow mathematician Fred Roush, Kim published over 150 more papers over a variety of subjects. He is remembered for bridging the gap between social sciences, particularly economics, psychology, and political sciences. In 1980, he launched and became editor of Mathematical Social Sciences, focusing on Game Theory and Social Choice Theory. Kim also disproved an established theorem dictating the way computer coding was written. Kim wrote seven books, most co-authored by Roush.




1946 Shirley Ann Jackson (August 5, 1946; Washington D.C. - ) is an American physicist, and the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1973, becoming the first African American woman to earn a doctorate from MIT in nuclear physics.

Jackson joined the Theoretical Physics Research Department at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1976, examining the fundamental properties of various materials. She began her time at Bell Labs by studying materials to be used in the semiconductor industry. In 1978, Jackson became part of the Scattering and Low Energy Physics Research Department, and in 1988 she moved to the Solid State and Quantum Physics Research Department. At Bell Labs, Jackson researched the optical and electronic properties of two-dimensional and quasi-two dimensional systems. In her research, Jackson has made contributions to the knowledge of charged density waves in layered compounds, polaronic aspects of electrons in the surface of liquid helium films, and optical and electronic properties of semiconductor strained-layer superlattices. On these topics and others she has prepared or collaborated on over 100 scientific articles.
Jackson served on the faculty at Rutgers University in Piscataway and New Brunswick, New Jersey from 1991 to 1995, in addition to continuing to consult with Bell Labs on semiconductor theory. Her research during this time focused on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional systems.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton appointed Jackson to serve as Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), becoming the first woman and first African American to hold that position.*Wik





DEATHS


1729 Thomas Newcomen (shortly before 24 February 1664 – 5 August 1729) inventor of the atmospheric steam engine, died in London. His invention of c.1711 came into use to pump water out of coal mines by 1725. It had a piston connected to one end of a large crossbeam; the other end was connected to a very heavy pump piston. On each stroke, water chilled and condensed the steam in the cylinder, dropping the piston thus moving the crossbeam and operating the pump. This was wasteful of fuel needed to reheat the cylinder for the next stroke. Although it was slow and inefficient, Newcomen's engine was relied on for the first 60 years of the new steam age it began. *TIS





1853 Théodore Olivier (21 Jan 1793 in France - 5 Aug 1853 in France) From the 1840's Olivier wrote textbooks. His greatest fame, however, is as a result of the mathematical models which he created to assist in his teaching of geometry. Some of the models were of ruled surfaces, with moving parts to illustrate to students how the ruled surfaces were generated. Others were designed to illustrate the curves of intersection of certain surfaces. In fact Olivier earned quite a good income from selling these models, particularly in the United States.
The United States Military Academy at West Point had 23 mathematical models made for them by Olivier to use as teaching aids.
These models are built on wooden boxes as bases, have metal supports, and consist of strings suspended from movable arms and arranged to form a variety of geometrical figures. The strings are held in place by lead weights that are concealed by the bases. The models illustrate such things as the intersection of two half cones, the intersection of a plane, hyperbolic paraboloid and a hyperboloid of one sheet, and the intersection of two half cylinders.
Other institutions in the United States such as the Columbia School of Mines also purchased models from Olivier while Princeton had copies of Olivier's models made for them. In 1849 Olivier presented a full set of the range of models he had created to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. The models had been manufactured by the firm of Pixii, Père et Fils, and later by the firm of Fabre de Lagrange which took over their manufacture. In 1857, four years after Olivier died, Harvard University purchased 24 of Olivier's models from Fabre de Lagrange and after the university received the order Benjamin Peirce gave a series of lectures on the mathematics which they illustrated. These models are still in Harvard's collection of scientific instruments.
Even after giving a complete set of his models to the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, forty models were still in Olivier's possession at the time of his death. These were sold in 1869 to William Gillispie from Union College in Schenectady, east-central New York, United States. Gillispie exhibited the models at Union College which was appropriate since, twenty years earlier, Union College had became one of the first liberal arts colleges in the United States to give engineering courses. When Gillispie died Olivier's models were sold to the college. *SAU


1872 Charles-Eugène Delaunay (9 April 1816 – 5 August 1872) French mathematician and astronomer whose theory of lunar motion advanced the development of planetary-motion theories. After 20 years of work, he published two volumes on lunar theory, La Théorie du mouvement de la lune (1860,1867). This is an important case of the three body problem. Delaunay found the longitude, latitude and parallax of the Moon as infinite series. These gave results correct to 1 second of arc but were not too practical as the series converged slowly. However this work was important in the beginnings of functional analysis. Delaunay succeeded Le Verrier as director of the Paris Observatory in 1870 but two years later he and three companions drowned in a boating accident.*TIS



1910 Julius Petersen (16 June 1839, Sorø, West Zealand – 5 August 1910, Copenhagen) was a Danish mathematician who worked on geometry and graph theory. He is best remembered for the Petersen graph. *SAU  In the mathematical field of graph theory, the Petersen graph is an undirected graph with 10 vertices and 15 edges. It is a small graph that serves as a useful example and counterexample for many problems in graph theory. The Petersen graph is named for Julius Petersen, who in 1898 constructed it to be the smallest bridgeless cubic graph with no three-edge-coloring. Although the graph is generally credited to Petersen, it had in fact first appeared 12 years earlier, in a paper by A. B. Kempe (1886). Donald Knuth states that the Petersen graph is "a remarkable configuration that serves as a counterexample to many optimistic predictions about what might be true for graphs in general."  *Wik

One of the remarkable things about the Petersen graph is that is the smallest hypohamiltonian graph -- it has no Hamiltonian cycle, but deleting any vertex makes it Hamiltonian. In less formal terms, it's possible to start at any node and visit all 10 nodes while traveling on line segments alone, but there's no way to close the loop and return to the starting node at the end of the trip; but if you remove one vertex, any of them, then it is possible to connect every node in a complete circuit.  This fact seems to have first been discovered by  René Sousselier in 1963.  




1957 Heinrich Otto Wieland (4 June 1877 – 5 August 1957) was a German chemist. He won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the bile acids.

German chemist, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his studies of steroid chemistry in which he determined the molecular structure of bile acids. He is also noted for studying the conversion of food into energy. In 1912, he began work on bile acids, secretions of the liver known for the best part of a century to consist of a large number of substances. He studied three of them: cholic acid, deoxycholic acid, and lithocholic acid, finding that they were all steroids, very similar to each other, and all convertible into cholanic acid. After 1921, he studied some curious alkaloids including toxiferin (curare's active ingredient), bufotalin (in venom from toads), and phalloidine and amatine (poisonous ingredients in the deadly amanita mushroom). *TiS



1981 Jerzy Neyman, (April 16, 1894 – August 5, 1981) in a paper with his long-time friend and colleague Elizabeth Scott, wrote:

Each morning before breakfast every single one of us approaches an urn filled with white and black balls. We draw a ball. If it is white, we survive the day. If it is black, we die. The proportion of black balls in the urn is not the same for each day, but grows as we become older ... Still there are always some white balls present, and some of us continue to draw them day after day for many years.

On this date, Neyman, age 87, drew a black ball. As he wished of many of his friends, “May the earth rest lightly on him.” [From a review, by Robert V. Hogg, of Neyman—From Life, by Constance Reid (Springer, 1983), in the The College Mathematics Journal, 15(1984), 82–84]*VFR
Neyman was a Russian-American mathematician who was one of the principal architects of modern theoretical statistics. His papers on hypothesis testing (1928-33) helped establish the subject. During 1934-38, he gave a theory of confidence intervals (important in the analysis of data); extended statistical theory to contagious distributions, (for interpretation of biological data); wrote on sampling stratified populations (which led to such applications as the Gallup Poll); and developed the model for randomised experiments (widely relevant across the fields of science, including agriculture, biology, medicine, and physical sciences). His later research applied statistics to meteorology and medicine. In 1968 he was awarded the prestigious National Medal of Science.*TIS



1985 Mary P. Dolciani Halloran, noted writer of several High School texts, of Hunter College died at the age of 62. The MAA book series Dolciani Mathematical Expositions is named in her honor. *VFR

Dolciani earned her Bachelor of Arts degree (B.A.) at Hunter College in New York City, and she completed her Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) degree at Cornell University in 1947 with B. W. Jones as thesis advisor. She taught briefly at Vassar College before returning to Hunter, where she spent the next forty years. Dolciani taught mathematics there, and at times, she also served as a Dean or the Provost.

Although Dolciani is not well known by the general public, she was influential in developing the basic modern method used for teaching basic algebra in the United States (called "Dolciani algebra", which teaches it on the basis of drill like arithmetic, rather than on the basis of proofs as in Euclidean geometry). Dolciani also popularized the short-form names of the Properties that are familiar to many high school algebra students, e.g. the "Zero Property". *Wik




1986 Banesh Hoffmann,(September 6, 1906 - August 6, 1986) a physicist, mathematician and author who was a colleague and biographer of Albert Einstein.

In 1935, Mr. Hoffmann joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., where he worked with Einstein and a Polish physicist, Leopold Infeld, on a paper, "Gravitational Equations and the Problem of Motion."
While at Oxford, he was invited to go to Princeton and work as research associate to Dr. Oswald Veblen, a mathematics professor. In 1932, he received a doctorate in mathematics and physics from Princeton.
Mr. Hoffman worked as instructor at the University of Rochester from 1932 until 1935 and joined the faculty of Queens College in 1937. He rose to full professor and retired in the late 70s.
Hoffmann had been for the last quarter-century perhaps the best-known critic of multiple-choice testing. In his 1962 book The Tyranny of Testing and other writings, Mr. Hoffmann vehemently opposed standardized tests as superficial measures of a person`s knowledge. He died August 6, 1986 at his home in Flushing, N.Y. He was 79. *Sun Sentinal Obituary





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




Tuesday, 4 August 2026

# 4 from old math term notes, Argand Diagram

     Argand Diagram Argand Diagrams, the method of drawing complex numbers as vectors on a coordinate plane, are named for Jean R. Argand (1768-1822), an amateur mathematician who described them in a paper in 1806. A similar method, although less complete, had been suggested as early as 120 years before by John Wallis, and developed extensively by Casper Wessel(1745-1818), a Norwegian surveyor. (Actually, at the time Wessel lived, the area where he was born was a part of Denmark. Norway became an independent government in 1905 after years of domination by Denmark and Sweden.) It may be that even then, the method was unknown to Gauss and he had to rediscover it for himself in 1831 although it has been suggested that Gauss may have discovered the idea as early as Wessel. Some parts of his Demonstratio Nova would seem almost miraculously derived without a knowledge of the ideas of the geometry of complex numbers. 

Wessel's paper was published in Danish, and was not circulated in the languages more common to mathematics at that time. It was not until 1895 that his paper came to the attention of the mathematical community, long after the name Argand Diagram had stuck. Incredibly, there were at least three more individuals who may have independently discovered and written on the same idea; Abbe Bruee, C. V. Mourney, and John Warren.

Argand's Book, Essai sur une maniere de representer les quantities imaginaires dans les constructions geometriques, might have suffered the same fate as Wessel except for an unusual chain of events. I give here the version as presented by Michael Crowe in his A History of Vector Analysis

In 1813 J. F. Francais published a short memoir in volume IV of Gergonne's Annales de mathematiques in which Francais presented the geometrical representation of complex numbers. At the conclusion of his paper Francais stated that the fundamental ideas in his paper were not his own, he had found them in a letter written by Legendre to his (Francis') brother who had died. In this letter Legendre discussed the ideas of an unnamed mathematician. Francis added that he hoped this mathematician would make himself known and publish his results.

The unnamed mathematician had in fact already published his ideas, for Legendre's friend was Jean Robert Argand. Hearing of Francais' paper, Argand immediately sent a communication to Gergonne in which he identified himself as the mathematician in Legendre's letter, called attention to his book, summarized its contents, and finally presented an (unsuccessful) attempt to extend his system to three dimensions.

Even with so much interest and attention to the geometry of complex numbers, it was not until Gauss published a short work on the ideas that they became popular.


Translations of both Wallis' and Wessel's papers on the imaginaries can be found in A Sourcebook of Mathematics by David Eugene Smith.

Politics and math, A Drama in Four Parts

    Politics and math

I received a nice e-mail from Dan MacKinnon, a Canadian math/computer teacher (who writes a nice recreational math blog)  after my blog about Karl Marx and Mathematics.  
He wrote:
I enjoyed your short post on Karl Marx's mathematics.
I first heard about Marx's mathematical work when I was a student at Dalhousie University in Halifax. While I was there, I heard a story that back in 1970 a prof there was pushed out by the admin because he was using Marx's stuff as the basis for a course he was teaching on Real Analysis. I wish I knew the whole story - what made it more interesting was that the prof was F.W. Lawvere (pretty famous Category Theorist) and he was pushed out during the October Crisis (a terrorist incident in Montreal, 1970), which was used as a pretext to get rid of a number of radicals and undesirables in a lot of Canadian institutions.   [MY INSERT- I have found online that  “Dalhousie University in 1969 set up a group of 15 Killam-supported researchers with Lawvere at the head; but in 1971 it terminated the group. Lawvere was controversial for his political opinions, for example, his opposition to the 1970 use of the War Measures Act, and for teaching the history of mathematics without permission. (?boy they could lock me up any day?) But in 1995 Dalhousie hosted the celebration of 50 years of category theory with Lawvere and Saunders Mac Lane present.”   Not sure how long it took to be “pushed out”.]
In connection with this this story, I was told that politics and mathematics go together surprisingly often. In the early days of Category Theory, this area of mathematics was perceived as "leftist" - even Saunders Mac Lane's famous book, "Categories for the Working Mathematician" used "working" with a slightly political nuance. I was also told that while category theorists were perceived as progressives, set-theorists were perceived as reactionaries. I have no idea whether or not these supposed political distinctions among mathematicians is true today, or if they were ever true.

Saunders Mac Lane


I got a  note from Dan McKinnon after I had written this commenting on another reader, Kevin's,  comment that, " I think the early term was "general abstract nonsense" which may still apply in my limited understanding."  Prof. McKinnon's response was, " ..my understanding is that many Category Theorists don't mind the term "abstract nonsense" and have appropriated it somewhat. While at the chalkboard and carrying out some "routine" diagram pasting they'll say "and now by the usual abstract nonsense we get the result..."

Mathematicians getting in trouble because of their political/religious views is not a new idea... as I found in this old cut from the introduction to a geometry textbook.. In this case, one might suggest that bad politics lead to good math.  

And one of my favorite math stories is  from George Gamow's autobiography and is about the Nobel Laureate, Igor Tamm.
 "Here is a story told to me by one of my friends who was at that time

a young professor of physics in Odessa. His name was Igor Tamm (Nobel
Prize laureate in Physics, 1958). Once when he arrived in a neighboring
village, at that period when Odessa was occupied by the Reds, and was
negotiating with a villager as to how many chickens he could get for
half a dozen silver spoons, the village was captured by one of the
Makhno bands, who were roaming the country, harassing the Reds. Seeing
his city clothes (or what was left of them), the capturers [sic]
brought him to the Ataman, a bearded fellow in a tall black fur
hat with machine-gun cartridge ribbons crossed on his broad chest and
a couple of hand grenades hanging on the belt.
'You son-of-a-bitch, you Communist agitator, undermining our Mother
Ukraine! The punishment is death.'
'But no,' answered Tamm, 'I am a professor at the University of Odessa
and have come here only to get some food.'
'Rubbish!' retorted the leader. 'What kind of professor are you ?'
'I teach mathematics.'
'Mathematics?' said the Ataman. 'All right! Then give me an estimate of
the error one makes by cutting off Maclaurin's series at the nth term.
Do this, and you will go free. Fail, and you will be shot!'
Tamm could not believe his ears, since this problem belongs to a rather
special branch of higher mathematics. With a shaking hand, and under
the muzzle of the gun, he managed to work out the solution and handed
it to the Ataman.
'Correct!' said the Ataman. 'Now I see that you really are a professor.
Go home!'
Who was this man? No one will ever know. If he was not killed later, he
may well be lecturing now on higher mathematics in some Ukrainian
university."
I told this story every other year or so to my physics students when
they cannot be bothered to remember the form of the remainder in Taylor
expansions...."

Igor Tamm


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I recently had occasion to learn of a fourth incident I wanted to include....

 In 1922 Issai Schur was elected to the Prussian Academy, proposed by Planck, the secretary of the Academy. Planck's address which listed Schur's outstanding achievements had been written by Frobenius, at least five years earlier, as Frobenius died in 1917. 

On 29 March 1938 Bieberbach wrote below Schur's signature on a document of the Prussian Academy:- "I find it surprising that Jews are still members of academic commissions."

Just over a week later, on 7 April 1938, Schur resigned from Commissions of the Academy. However, the pressure on him continued and later that year he resigned completely from the Academy. Schur left Germany for Palestine in 1939, broken in mind and body, having the final humiliation of being forced to find a sponsor to pay the 'Reichs flight tax' to allow him to leave Germany. Without sufficient funds to live in Palestine he was forced to sell his beloved academic books to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He died two years later on his 66th birthday.

Only five years earlier  "On 7 April 1933 the Nazis passed a law which, under clause three, ordered the retirement of civil servants who were not of Aryan descent, with exemptions for participants in World War I and pre-war officials. Schur had held an appointment before World War I which should have qualified him as a civil servant, but the facts were not allowed to get in the way, and he was 'retired'. M M Schiffer wrote :-When Schur's lectures were cancelled there was an outcry among the students and professors, for Schur was respected and very well liked. The next day Erhard Schmidt started his lecture with a protest against this dismissal and even Bieberbach, who later made himself a shameful reputation as a Nazi, came out in Schur's defence. Schur went on quietly with his work on algebra at home."  #SAU

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Just one more, a famous one that many already have heard.  André Weil, renowned for the breadth and quality of his research output, its influence on future work, and the elegance of his exposition, was also once imprisoned.. 
To avoid the draft, he went to Finland. ''As a soldier,'' he said, ''I would be entirely useless, but as a mathematician I could be of some use.'' The Finns returned him to the French, who imprisoned him for six months. In prison, he formulated what are now called the Weil conjectures.
These conjectures concerned zeta functions of algebraic varieties over finite fields. They were related to the Riemann hypothesis ,and became a basic element of number theory and are regarded as one of his most insightful mathematical achievements, .

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I imagine that as long as you do math, or teach math  (or just teach) in a public environment, we will be subject to political influences. From the John Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, to the current educational turmoil in the US in 2023, history reaffirms this constancy.  I’m not sure it is always bad..... but....



Addendum, reflection from 2025: My fears of the negative impact of political influences in our schools has now gone off the charts...