Sunday, 14 June 2026

On This Day in Math - June 14

 



It would be very discouraging if
somewhere down the line 
you could ask a computer if
the Riemann hypothesis is correct 
and it said, 'Yes, it is true, 
but you won't be able to understand the proof.

~Ronald Graham



The 165th day of the year; 165 is a tetrahedral number, and the sum of the first nine triangular numbers. The tetrahedral numbers are found on the fourth diagonal of Pascal's Arithmetic Triangle, and given by the combinations of (n+2 Choose 3) or Tetn = \( \frac {(n)(n+1)(n+2)}{6}\) 

165 is sort of a prime average(or an average of primes) The two nearest primes are 163 and 167, with 165 as their average; The next two nearest are 157 and 173, yeah, 165 is their average; The next two out are 179 and 151, yes again, average is 165; then 149 and 181, yep!.... 139 and 191, yep!.... 137 and 193...Oh Yeah!... 

165 is a sphenic number, the product of three distinct primes.

165 is also the sum of the squares of the first five odd numbers. 165 = 1^2 + 3^2 + 5^2 + 7^2 + 9^2 , it's factors, 165 =3 x 5 x 11, but is more interesting as (9 x 10 x 11) / 6.  Try the sum of the first seven odd squares.  Can you apply this to sum of first six or eight?


165 is the sum of the divisors of the first fourteen integers.


See more Extended math facts for every year date here.



EVENTS


1444 Nilakantha was a mathematician and astronomer from South India who wrote texts on both astronomy and infinite series. The series π/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7 + ... is a special case of the series representation for arctan, namely
tan-1x = x - x3/3 + x5/5 - x7/7 + ...
It is well known that one simply puts x = 1 to obtain the series for π/4. Ranjan  Roy from Beloit College reports on the appearance of these series in the work of Leibniz and James Gregory from the 1670s. The contributions of the two European mathematicians to this series are well known but in his paper, Roy mentions the results on this series in the work of Madhava nearly three hundred years earlier as presented by Nilakantha in the Tantrasamgraha is also discussed.
Nilakantha derived the series expansion tan-1x = x - x3/3 + x5/5 - x7/7 + ... by obtaining an approximate expression for an arc of the circumference of a circle and then considering the limit. An interesting feature of his work was his introduction of several additional series for π/4 that converged more rapidly than π/4 = 1 - 1/3 + 1/5 - 1/7+ ... .;*SAU  

His best known work, written on palm leaves, is called Tantrasangraha [or Tantrasamgraha] (1501).

*MAA



1564 The mathematician/magician John Dee returns to England after five years on the continent and presents his new book, Monas Hieroglyphica, to Queen Elizabeth. The book provides Dees conjecture that the astronomical planet symbols were relics of a lost universal language. He also stated that all the symbols could be combined together into a single symbol, or monad, which was a variant on the sign for Mercury. The monad appears in the center of the book's frontispiece He felt this union exemplified the unity of the universe. *Benjamin Wolley, The Queen's Conjuror

*Wik



1648 Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony. * The Great Geek Manual  (Witches were not the first to be hanged in Massachusetts.  John Billington, a colonist who arrived on the Mayflower, was the first person executed in Massachusetts, in 1630. He was hung for killing John Newcomen. Others were hung for religious differences. William Robinson and Marmaduke Stevenson, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious persecution, are executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious beliefs.


1649 John Wallis appointed as Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford.
Wallis created the term "continued fraction" and popularized the ∞ symbol for infinity. One aspect of Wallis's mathematical skills has not yet been mentioned, namely his great ability to do mental calculations. He slept badly and often did mental calculations as he lay awake in his bed. One night he calculated in his head the square root of a number with 53 digits. In the morning he dictated the 27-digit square root of the number, still entirely from memory. It was a feat that was rightly considered remarkable, and Henry Oldenburg, the Secretary of the Royal Society, sent a colleague to investigate how Wallis did it. It was considered important enough to merit discussion in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1685.



1770   D/1770 L1, popularly known as Lexell's Comet after its orbit computer Anders Johan Lexell, was a comet discovered by astronomer Charles Messier in June 1770. It is notable for having passed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of only 0.015 astronomical units (2,200,000 km; 1,400,000 mi), or six times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The comet has not been seen since 1770 and is considered a lost comet. 

Charles Messier, who discovered Lexell's Comet




1777 the Continental Congress approved the design of a national flag. Since 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day on June 14, Americans have commemorated the adoption of the Stars and Stripes by celebrating June 14 as Flag Day. Prior to 1916, many localities and a few states had been celebrating the day for years. Congressional legislation designating that date as the national Flag Day was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1949; the legislation also called upon the president to issue a flag day proclamation every year.
According to legend, in 1776, George Washington commissioned Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to create a flag for the new nation. Scholars debate this legend, but agree that Mrs. Ross most likely knew Washington and sewed flags. To date, there have been twenty-seven official versions of the flag, but the arrangement of the stars varied according to the flag-makers' preferences until 1912 when President Taft standardized the then-new flag's forty-eight stars into six rows of eight. The forty-nine-star flag (1959-60), as well as the fifty-star flag, also have standardized star patterns. The current version of the flag dates to July 4, 1960, after Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959. *Library of Congress, On This Day in History (The 48 and 50 star flags are related to an  interesting packing problem. See  The Very Mathematical US Flag Starfield


1822 Charles Babbage read a paper to the Astronomical Society of London entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.” He announced the successful completion of a “Difference engine,” the forerunner of our modern computers. See Dubbey, The Mathematical Work of Charles Babbage, p. 175. *VFR 

Babbage began to construct a small difference engine in 1819 and had completed it by 1822. He announced his invention in a paper Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables read to the Royal Astronomical Society on 14 June 1822.

Although Babbage envisaged a machine capable of printing out the results it obtained, this was not done by the time the paper was written. An assistant had to write down the results obtained. Babbage illustrated what his small engine was capable of doing by calculating successive terms of the sequence n^2 + n + 41.

The terms of this sequence are 41, 43, 47, 53, 61, ... while the differences of the terms are 2, 4, 6, 8, .. and the second differences are 2, 2, 2, ..... The difference engine is given the initial data 2, 0, 41; it constructs the next row 2, (0 + 2), [41 + (0 + 2)], that is 2, 2, 43; then the row 2, (2 + 2), [43 + (2 + 2)], that is 2, 4, 47; then 2, 6, 53; then 2, 8, 61; ... Babbage reports that his small difference engine was capable of producing the members of the sequence at the rate of about 60 every 5 minutes. *SAU

A difference engine was constructed in the 1980's at the Science Museum Library in London. Once completed, both the engine and its printer worked flawlessly, and still do. The difference engine and printer were constructed to tolerances achievable with 19th-century technology,



In 1834, the first U.S. patent for a practical underwater diving suit was issued to Leonard Norcross of Dixfield, Maine (No. X8255).* Calling it a “Diving Armor,” he designed an airtight outfit made from India rubber and leather. It had a brass helmet connected via a rubber hose to an air bellows pump on a boat. To reduce buoyancy, the feet were weighted with lead shot. In May 1834, one month earlier, he tested the diving suit in the Webb River. Norcross named his son Submarinus in honor of the achievement.* The first truly effective diving suit with pump is attributed to an Englishman, Augustus Siebe, who designed it in 1829 and was entrusted with equipping the French Navy until 1857.*



1937 Nobel Winning research rejected by Nature Magazine. The editor of Nature sent the rejection letter below to Hans Kreb. The paper rejected explained his recent discovery of the citric acid cycle, or “Krebs cycle”. He next submitted the paper to the journal Enzymologia in Holland, where it was accepted. Krebs would win the 1953 Nobel Prize for that research. *The Scientist (w/ HT to Ben Gross)


1951 UNIVAC I, the first commercial electronic computer, was demonstrated and dedicated at the Bureau of the Census at Philadelphia. It could accept information from magnetic tape at the rate of 10,000 characters per second, yet could retain a maximum of 1000 numbers. *VFR This "first" statement is often repeated, but I now know of at least two earlier claimants for the title. Wikipedia has (in two different places):
The Ferranti Mark 1, also known as the Manchester Electronic Computer in its sales literature,and thus sometimes called the Manchester Ferranti, was the world's first commercially available general-purpose electronic computer. It was "the tidied up and commercialized version of the Manchester computer". *Wik
In addition, there was The first commercial computer in the world was the BINAC built by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and delivered to Northrop Aircraft Company in 1949.*Wik




1956 Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan send a telegram to Wolfgang Pauli from Los Alamos, "We are happy to tell you that we have definitely detected neutrinos from fission fragments by observing inverse beta decay of protons." Pauli's famous reply, "Everything comes to him who knows how to wait." *Charles P. Enz, No Time to be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli





BIRTHS

1736 Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736 – 23 August 1806) was a French physicist best known for the formulation of Coulomb's law, which states that the force between two electrical charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Coulombic force is one of the principal forces involved in atomic reactions. The inverse-square relationship is also seen in the relationship of the gravitation force between masses. In 1777, he invented a torsion balance which he subsequently modified for electrical measurements. He also did research on friction of machinery, on windmills, and on the elasticity of metal and silk fibres.*TIS

torsion balance, the instrument he invented that allowed him to measure electrical attraction and repulsion:






1832 Nikolaus August Otto (14 June 1832, Holzhausen an der Haide, Nassau - 26 January 1891, Cologne)born. German engineer who developed the four-stroke internal-combustion engine, which offered the first practical alternative to the steam engine as a power source. A French engineer, Alphonse Beau de Rochas, formulated the basic design for the four-stroke internal combustion engine and patented it in 1862, but never built a working model. In 1876, Otto used principles from Beau de Rochas and others to construct the prototype of today's automobile engines, often called the Otto-cycle engine. He sold thousands of copies before Beau de Rochas sued him and invalidated Otto's patent. But light, efficient Otto-cycle engines largely enabled the creation of automobiles, powerboats, motorcycles and even airplanes. *TIS

Father of the ottomobile.........(sorry😓😒



1856 Andrey Andreyevich Markov(14 June 1856 N.S. – 20 July 1922) Russian mathematician who helped to develop the theory of stochastic processes, especially those called Markov chains, sequences of random variables in which the future variable is determined by the present variable but is independent of the way in which the present state arose from its predecessors. (For example, the probability of winning at the game of Monopoly can be determined using Markov chains.) His work based on the study of the probability of mutually dependent events has been developed and widely applied to the biological and social sciences. *TIS



1868 Karel Petr (14 June 1868, Zbyslav, Austria-Hungary – 14 February 1950, Prague, Czechoslovakia) was a Czech mathematician. He was one of the most renowned Czech mathematicians of the first half of the 20th century.

Petr is known for the Petr–Douglas–Neumann theorem in plane geometry, which he proved in 1908, and was independently rediscovered by Jesse Douglas in 1940 and Bernhard Neumann in 1941. 

The Petr–Douglas–Neumann theorem asserts the following.   If isosceles triangles with apex angles 2kπ/n, for an integer k with 1 ≤ k ≤ n − 2 are erected on the sides of an arbitrary n-gon A0, whose apices are the vertices of a new n-gon A1, and if this process is repeated n-2 times, but with a different value of k for the n-gon formed from the free apices of these triangles at each step, until all values 1 ≤ k ≤ n − 2 have been used (in arbitrary order), to form a sequence A1, A2, ... An-2, of n-gons, their centroids all coincide with the centroid of A0, and the last one, An−2 is a regular n-gon .

For a triangle, this means n=3 and n-2 = 1, so only one set of isosceles triangles is needed to form the equilateral triangle. This is the well known Napolean's Theorem.  Several papers have been written concerning this issue which cast doubt upon the idea that Napoleon created it. The problem appears in three questions set in an examination for a Gold Medal at the University of Dublin in October, 1820.

Question 10. Three equilateral triangles are thus constructed on the sides of a given triangle, A, B, D, the lines joining their centres, C, C', C" form an equilateral triangle. [The accompanying diagram shows the equilateral triangles placed outwardly.]

Question 11. If the three equilateral triangles are constructed as in the last figure, the lines joining their centres will also form an equilateral triangle. [The accompanying diagram shows the equilateral triangles places inwardly.]

Question 12. To investigate the relation between the area of the given triangle and the areas of these two equilateral triangles.

Petr–Douglas–Neumann theorem as applied to a quadrilateral A0 = ABCD. A1 = EFGH is constructed using apex angle π/2 and A2 = PQRS with apex angle π.



*Wik 



1903 Alonzo Church(June 14, 1903 – August 11, 1995) made important contributions to mathematical logic and theoretical computer science. *SAU
The lambda calculus emerged in his famous 1936 paper showing the unsolvability of the Entscheidungsproblem. This result preceded Alan Turing's famous work on the halting problem, which also demonstrated the existence of a problem unsolvable by mechanical means. Church and Turing then showed that the lambda calculus and the Turing machine used in Turing's halting problem were equivalent in capabilities, and subsequently demonstrated a variety of alternative "mechanical processes for computation." This resulted in the Church–Turing thesis.
The lambda calculus influenced the design of the LISP programming language and functional programming languages in general. The Church encoding is named in his honor. *Wik




1910 Fritz John (14 June 1910 – 10 February 1994) was a German-born mathematician specialising in partial differential equations and ill-posed problems. His early work was on the Radon transform and he is remembered for John's equation. 

John published his first paper in 1934 on Morse theory. He was awarded his doctorate in 1934 with a thesis entitled Determining a function from its integrals over certain manifolds from Göttingen. With Richard Courant's assistance he spent a year at St John's College, Cambridge. During this time he published papers on the Radon transform, a theme to which he would return throughout his career.*Wik



1917 Alte Selberg (14 June 1917, Langesund, Norway – 6 August 2007) Norwegian-born mathematician who is one of the foremost analytic number theorists. After working in isolation during WW II, due to the occupation of Norway by the Nazis, his accomplishments in the theory of the Riemann zeta function became known. During the 1950's he developed the Selberg trace formula, his most famous accomplishment. It establishes a duality between the length spectrum of a Riemann surface and the eigenvalues of the Laplacian which is analogous to the duality between the prime numbers and the zeros of the zeta function. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 1950 for his work in number theory on generalizations of the sieve methods of Viggo Brun. In 1986 he won the Wolf Prize. *TIS



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

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



DEATHS


1746 Colin MacLaurin(February 1698 – 14 June 1746) organized the defence of Edinburgh, Scotland, during the Jacobite rebellion. Due to the exertion and exposure he ruined his health and died on this date of edema. For the previous twenty years his main work was on fluxions, although he was a popular lecturer on many subjects at the University of Edinburgh. *VFR His major work on the fluxions was in response to the attack on the calculus by Bishop Berkeley.




1768 James Short, (10 June O.S. (21 June N.S.) 1710 – 14 June 1768) British optician and astronomer who produced the first truly parabolic and elliptic (hence nearly distortionless) mirrors for reflecting telescopes. During his working life of over 35 years, Short made about 1,360 instruments - not only for customers in Britain but also for export: one is still preserved in Leningrad, another at Uppsala and several in America. Short was principal British collator and computer of the Transit of Venus observations made throughout the world on 6th June 1761. His instruments traveled on Endeavour with Captain Cook to observe the next Transit of Venus on 3rd June 1769, but Short died before this event took place.*TIS Died within one week of his birth date (10 June)




1875 Heinrich Louis d'Arrest (13 August 1822 – 14 June 1875) was a German astronomer, born in Berlin. His name is sometimes given as Heinrich Ludwig d'Arrest.
While still a student at the University of Berlin, d'Arrest was party to Johann Gottfried Galle's search for Neptune. On 23 September 1846, he suggested that a recently drawn chart of the sky, in the region of Urbain Le Verrier's predicted location, could be compared with the current sky to seek the displacement characteristic of a planet, as opposed to a stationary star. Neptune was discovered that very night.

D'Arrest's later work at the Leipzig Observatory led him, in 1851, to the discovery of the comet named for him (formally designated 6P/d'Arrest). He also studied asteroids, discovering 76 Freia, nebulae, and galaxies, discovering NGC 1 in 1861 and NGC 26 and NGC 358 in 1865.

In 1864 D'Arrest made an unsuccessful search for Martian satellites, and posited an upper limit of 70 minutes of arc as the distance from Mars within which a moon should be sought.

He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1875.

In 1857, he married Auguste Emilie Möbius, daughter of his then-supervisor, August Ferdinand Möbius. He died in Copenhagen, Denmark.




1938 William Wallace Campbell (11 Apr 1862 near Findlay in Hancock county, Ohio; 14 Jun 1938 at age 76) American astronomer known particularly for his spectrographic determinations of the radial velocities of stars--i.e., their motions toward the Earth or away from it. In addition, he discovered many spectroscopic binary stars, and in 1924 he published a catalog listing more than 1,000 of them.*TIS
 After a few years of local schooling he entered in 1882 the University of Michigan to study civil engineering, graduating Bachelor of Science in 1886. Whilst at university he developed his interest in astronomy when he read Simon Newcomb's Popular Astronomy.
After graduating he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the University of Colorado but soon moved back to Michigan as an instructor in astronomy. In 1891 he was invited to work on spectroscopy at Lick Observatory in California. Campbell was a pioneer of astronomical spectroscopy and catalogued the radial velocities of stars. He was also recognized for his work in solar eclipse photography. In 1893 he discovered the Wolf–Rayet star HD 184738 (also known as Campbell's hydrogen envelope star). He was made a director of Lick Observatory from 1901 to 1930.



1946 Federigo Enriques (5 January 1871 – 14 June 1946) died in Rome. He was an Italian mathematician, now known principally as the first to give a classification of algebraic surfaces in birational geometry, and other contributions in algebraic geometry. *SAU




2008 Yurii Alekseevich Mitropolskiy (3 January 1917 — 14 June 2008) was a renowned Soviet, Ukrainian mathematician known for his contributions to the fields of dynamical systems and nonlinear oscillations.

He received his Ph.D. from Kyiv University, under the supervision of theoretical physicist and mathematician Nikolay Bogolyubov. Mitropolskiy is one of the most frequently joint-published mathematicians known, with at least 240 collaborators. Member of the Communist Party since 1945.
*Wik




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

Saturday, 13 June 2026

A Brief History of Blackboards and Slates

 


My career in education began with the use of chalk and a blackboard, transitioned into a room with only dry erase marker boards, and finished in a class with only an electronic smart board. Except for the few times I was inconvenience by a projector bulb picking a bad moment to go bad (and if a chalk board had been available, I would have been grateful) I loved the improvements that each transition brought to my ability to more effectively convey my ideas.
But for the period from 1800 to 2000 few things were as ubiquitous in a mathematics classroom as the blackboard. Today modern "white boards" may have taken their place in many institutions, or even an electronic version called a smart board; but board work still seems to be a part of the current classroom procedure. In a recent talk, Keith Devlin began by saying, "I step back from the (now largely metaphorical) blackboard and .. "
Whatever the present state of its demise, the classic chalkboard was so common a classroom presence that it was part of a frequently repeated gag sequence on the popular Simpsons cartoon series.(Not sure if the use shown above could be termed "educational")

It appears that the blackboard first came into American education around 1800. The National Museum of American History website on colonial education says,:

"Mathematics teachers with ties to England and France introduced blackboards into the United States around 1800. By the 1840s, these erasable surfaces were used for teaching a wide range of subjects in elementary schools, colleges, and academies. The Massachusetts educator William A. Alcott visited over 20,000 schoolhouses. “A blackboard, in every school house," he wrote, "is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace."

James Pillan, a Scottish teacher and education reformer is often cited as the "inventor" of the blackboard, but this seems to be a misunderstanding based on a letter from Pillan which appeared in Jeremy Bentham's Chrestomathia (1815). It was entitled Successful application of the new system to language-learning, and dated 1814; it mentions the use of chalk and blackboard in teaching geography. But Pillan only began teaching in 1810, almost a decade after the board made its way to America, and as we shall see, literally hundreds of years too late to "invent" the chalkboard.  He may, however, be the inventor of colored chalk. He is reported to have had a recipe with ground chalk, dyes and porridge.

Blackboards and slates were seemingly used well before any of the previous examples in musical study. In Composers at Work, author Jessie Ann Owens devotes several pages to the existence of several types of slate and wood "cartella" which were used to write out musical ideas. She describes the discoveries of these with five or ten line staves dating to the 16th century. Much larger wall size examples seem to have been used but have only been confirmed by iconography. The book includes an image from a woodcut by Hieronymus Holtzel of Nuremberg in 1501.


In America they seem to have very quickly become and essential part of daily school life. [From a web page of Prof. Rickey]

Perhaps no one method has so influenced the quality of the instruction of the cadets as the blackboard recitations. Major Thayer (Superintendent from 1817) insisted on this form, although old records show that it was introduced at West Point by Mr. George Baron, a civilian teacher, who in the autumn of 1801 gave to Cadet Swift "a specimen of his mode of teaching at the blackboard." Today it is the prominent feature in Academic instruction. [Quoted from Richardson 1917, p. 25] There is indication that the blackboard was used in a few schools in the US before it was used at USMA. See Charnel Anderson, Technology in American Education, 1650-1900, published by the
US Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare 1961(I have read this document and he credits Frenchman Claude Crozet with introducing the blackboard to the USMA and that he built and painted one to teach his classes.  It may well be that after Baron left under a cloud in 1802, the method was not used by other teachers there until Crozet arrived in 1817. 


Thayer had visited the Ecole Polytechnique in France to study their methods and was heavily influence by the "French" method when he became superintendent, even to the point of extending instruction in French so that the students could better master the French texts in advanced math.. I can't find an early example of the use of chalk or slate in France, but they seem to have been very much a part of the educational process by the time Galois threw an eraser at his examiner in July of 1829.

Galois was not the only one who reacted negatively to some of the innovations in education connected to the blackboard. At Yale, there were two "rebellions" in which students refused to accept some changes in testing practice. Here is a paragraph from Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology By David B. Williams.

This "rebellion" occurred in 1830, with 43 rebels expelled, including Andrew Calhoun, the son of John C Calhoun, and Alfred Stillé, who eventually did get a degree from Yale and another from  U of Pennsylvania before he became a somewhat famous doctor, and one of the first to distinguish Typhus from Typhoid fever. His rebellious side wasn't limited to college however, as he refused to accept germ theory and laboratory medicine. There had been a similar event in 1825 at Yale, but those students recanted and were readmitted.

One of the earliest mentions of blackboards I have found has nothing to do with education, however. It seems that a custom developed in London's financial district in the later part of the 19th century to list the names of debtors on a blackboard to shame them into paying, and it seems to have persisted for a long time. Here is a description of the practice from Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange
By John Francis, Daniel Defoe; printed in 1850.


From Wikipedia I learned that the Oxford English Dictionary provides a citation from 1739, to write "with Chalk on a black-Board". I know it is common in England for Pubs to advertise with a blackboard outside their doors on the sidewalk, but have no idea how far back this idea originated.
 
Prior to the use of blackboards students learned their early lessons from an object called a hornbook. Here is a description of one from the Blackwell Museum webpage at Northern Illinois University

Paper was pretty expensive once and hornbooks were made so children could learn to read without using a lot of paper. A hornbook was usually a small, wooden paddle with just one sheet of paper glued to it. But because that paper was so expensive, parents and teachers wanted to protect it. So they covered the paper with a very thin piece of cow's horn. The piece of cow's horn was so thin, you could see right through it. That's why these odd books were called "hornbooks."

Hornbooks seem to have been totally imported from England into the American Colonies, and almost all had a cross on the upper left, with the Lord's Prayer at bottom.  The American Revolution seemed to have almost completely eliminated the import of Hornbooks in rejection of all things English at the time.  The education conversion to the blackboard seems to have finished the hornbooks very quickly afterward judging from this quote from the OED about Hornbooks, (a1842 HONE in A. W. Tuer Hist. Horn-Bk. I. i. 7) " A large wholesale dealer in..school requisites recollects that the last order he received for Horn-books came from the country, about the year 1799. From that time the demand wholly ceased..In the course of sixty years, he and his predecessors in business had executed orders for several millions of Horn-books".
.
Early blackboards were usually made of wood, (but some may have been made of paper mache') and painted with many coats as true slate boards were very expensive. Schools purchased large pots of "slate paint" for regular repainting of the boards. The Earliest quotes from the OED date to 1823.

1823 PILLANS Contrib. Cause Educ.    A large black board served my purpose. On it I wrote in chalk. 1835 Musical Libr. Supp., Aug. 77 The assistant wrote down the words..on a blackboard. 1846 Rep. Inspect. Schools I. 147 The uses of the black board are not yet fully developed.

However under "slates" I found other  earlier uses. In "1698 FRYER Acc. E. India & P. 112 A Board plastered over, which with Cotton they wipe out, when full, as we do from Slates or Table-Books" which indicates that boards covered with Plaster or other materials were used to write upon much earlier than the earliest use of "blackboards" in classrooms.

Another early use of slates is given in David E. Smith's Rara arithmetica of a book printed in 1483 in Padua of the arithmetic of Prosdocimo containing a mention of the use of a slate. This led Smith to conclude that at this time the merchants would actually erase and replace numbers (as was originally done by the Hindu mathematicians working in their sand trays) in division rather than showing the cross-outs that distinguish the galley method of division after it was adopted to use on paper.

The very earliest claim for slates I have found is of use in the 11th century. A work called Alberuni's India (Tarikh Al-Hind), "They use black tablets for the children in the schools, and write upon them along the long side, not the broadside, writing with a white material from the left to the right."

Chalkboards became so important for teaching that teachers in the 19th century sometimes went to extremes to create one. In Glen Allen, Virginia; a school is named for Elizabeth Holladay, a pioneer teacher who started the first public school in the Glen Allen area of Henrico County at her home in 1886. On a note about the history of the school it says she had, "Black oilcloth tacked to another part of the shipping crate served as a blackboard." 

The slate was used even after paper became a relatively commonplace item. Many school histories report the use of slates into the 20th Century. This use may have been significant. The Binney & Smith company, better known to many for their creation of the Crayola Crayon, began the production of slate pencils, for writing on slate, in the year 1900. As an aside, they also won a Gold Medal at the St. Louis Fair.

A local museum in Roxbury, New Zealand has Binney and Smith Slates and Pencils displayed in a school started in 1872.  I am searching for records of cost of slates, lead pencils, paper and such in 1800-1920 period, and any help is appreciated.  These slate pencils were solid cylinders of lead or stone.

An add for an "Andrews Quiet Drawing Slate'" from 1870's was priced at 40 cents.


The same museum also has a display of wooden slate pencils, which look like regular lead pencils, but with lead filing.  



Slate pencils prior to 1800 were known as Dutch Pencils in England, but increased slate mining in Wales around 1800 led to more domestic production, and use of slates, and slate pencils in England.   In the journal Australian Historical Archaeology, (2005) Peter Davies reports that in the excavation of a site called Henry Mill that was only operational from 1904 until around 1930 they found 30 slate pencils, remnants of four slates, and a single graphite pencil core. 

The National Museum of American has a  pastel of “School Boy with Slate.” from 1822.



In "Slates Away!": Penmanship in Queensland, Australia, John Elkins, who started primary school in 1945, writes that he used slates commonly until around the third year of school.


I think in Prep 1 that we had some paper to write on with pencils, but my memory of the routine use of slates is much more vivid. Each slate was framed in wood and one side was inscribed with lines to guide the limits for the upper and lower extremities of letters. The slate "pencils" were made of some pale gray mineral softer than slate which had been milled into cylinders some one-eighth of an inch in diameter and inserted into metal holders so that about an inch protruded.
Each student was equipped with a small tobacco tin in which was kept a damp sponge or cloth to erase the marks. Sharpening slate pencils was a regular task. We rubbed them on any suitable brick or concrete surface in the school yard. Teachers also kept a good supply of spares, all writing materials and books being provided by the school. It is possible that the retention of slates stemmed from the political imperative that public education should be free.
Slates were advertised in newspapers in the US as early as 1737. Slates, as indicated above, show up as commonplace in quotes from the OED as early as 1698. It seems they may have been used for some artistic or educational purposes as early as the end of the 15th Century. In the famous painting of Luca Pacioli,
Ritratto di Frà Luca Pacioli, Pacioli is shown drawing on a slate to copy an example from Euclid in the open book before him. The closed book, which has the dodecahedron upon it, is supposedly Pacioli's Somma di aritmetica which was written in 1494.
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In the Dec 2003 issue of Paradigm, the Journal of the Textbook Colloquium, is an article by Nigel Hall titled, "The role of the slate in Lancasterian schools as evidenced by their manuals and handbooks". A couple of snips from the article appear below:

The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first citation for slate being used as a writing tool a quotation from Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe written about 1391. Whether usage began around this time or had begun much earlier is unknown, although as a technology it shared many characteristics with the wax tablet, used extensively from before the time of the Greeks until the 1600s in Europe, and even surviving in some usages until the early twentieth century (Lalou, 1989). Knowledge of the use of slate for writing after Chaucer is limited until one reaches the second half of the eighteenth century. The mathematician Digges (1591) refers to writing on slates and in the new colony of America an inventory (Plymouth Colony Archive, n.d.) made on 24 October 1633 of the possessions of the recently deceased Godbert and Zarah, noted among many items, ‘A writing table of slate’ (table here being a tablet of slate).
Hall goes on to suggest that, in fact, the use of slates may not have been very common in England until the end of the 18th Century because reading (beginning with hornbooks) was much more commonly taught than writing. He credits Lancaster for the promotion of slates for writing and math, but suggests that the slate was a principal element in the "monotorial system" in which more advanced students taught the lower group. An illustration showing the use of slates (now broken) and the student monitor below is taken from the article. [See the full article here]


The blackboard was extended to some specialty uses as well. A "Slated Globe" was advertised in The New York Teacher, and the American Educational Monthly, Volume 6 in 1869 for use in spherical geometry and geography classes. A four inch diameter globe sold for $1.50



I also recently found this image on a Wikipedia article about Benjamin Pierce. He seems to be standing beside a stand with a spherical blackboard resting on it, but can not be sure that is what it was.


In an 1899 article for the proceedings of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Professor Arthur E Haynes of the University of Minnesota had an article for, "The Mounting and Use of a Spherical Blackboard, which included this image.


Recently, J F Ptak posted an article on his Science Books blog from Scientific American, (Sep 13, 1890) about a pen-tip eraser for slate pens meant to be wetted to erase the marks on a slate by the pen.  The article described the invention with credit to the inventor, Mrs Emma C. Hudson

On This Day in Math - June 13

 


Mathematics is not a careful march
down a well-cleared highway,
but a journey into a strange wilderness,
where the explorers often get lost.
Rigour should be a signal to the historian
that the maps have been made,
and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.
~W.S. Anglin



The 164th day of the year; With the ordered digits of 164 we can form 3 2-digits numbers. Those 3 numbers ± 3 are all prime (16 + 3 = 19, 16 - 3 = 13, 14 + 3 = 17, 14 - 3 = 11, 64 + 3 = 67, 64 - 3 = 61). *Prime Curios

In base 10, 164 is the smallest number that can be expressed as a concatenation of two squares in two different ways: as 1 + 64 or 16 + 4

A scrabble board has 225 squares on the board, many are special squares with double letter or double word notation, but 164 have nothing.

164 is CLXIV in Roman Numerals, using every symbol 100 or below once each.

There are 164 ways to place 5 nonattacking queens on a 5 by 8 board. */derektionary.webs.com/april-june

164 is a palindrome in base 3 (20002) or 2*3^4 + 2

Speaking of Pythagorean triangles, T(164) (the 164th triangular number) is the hypotenuse of a right 

triangle with all triangular numbers for its side lengths.  The legs of the triangle are T(132) and T (143).  \(8778^2 + 10296^2 = 13530^2\)

EVENTS

1611 a publication on the newly discovered phenomenon of sunspots was dedicated. Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione. ("Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun"). This first publication on such observations, was the work of Johannes Fabricius, a Dutch  astronomer who was among the first ever to observe sunspots through a telescope. On 9 Mar 1611, at dawn, Johannes had used his telescope to view the rising sun and had seen several dark spots on it. He called his father to investigate this new phenomenon with him. The brightness of the Sun's center was very painful, and the two quickly switched to a projection method by means of a camera obscura.


1676 Newton sent Oldenburg the “Epistola prior” for transmission to Leibniz. Among other things it contained the first statement of the binomial theorem for negative and fractional exponents. *VFR This may be the first use of fractional and negative exponents in the modern sense (cajori, 308 pgs 370-371)
The idea and limited use had been mentioned by Viete, but in a rhetorical manner. Wallis, twenty years earlier, had mentioned both negative and fractional "indices" and gives an example using 1/sqrt(2) has index (-1/2). On October 24 of the same year, Newton would use irrational exponents in a letter to Oldenburg. 

Michael Stifel introduced the term exponent in 1544 in Arithmetica integra. His work with exponents only included numbers that had a base of 2. He also used negative exponents. Therefore he discovered the geometric sequence: ...-1/8, -1/4, -1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8 ...

Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) used exponents but without raised numbers, and he used fractional exponent idea in study of chords.   



1699 John Wallis writes a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury suggesting that switching from the Julian to Gregorian calendar might be a mistake and expressing his fear that, "..if we go to alter that, it will be attended with a greater mischief than the present inconvenience. "
In a postscript he comments that Lock's suggestion of omitting the Feb 29 from eleven consecutive leap years would lead to ".. a confusion for four and forty years together, wherein we should agree neither with the old nor with the new account." *Philosophical Transactions, 1699 21, 343-354
In accordance with a 1750 act of Parliament, England and its colonies changed calendars in 1752. *Wik

In 1755, William Hogarth's painting, "An Election Entertainment", refers to the 1754 election and shows protesters out the window, and a stolen Tory campaign banner "Give us back our eleven days".  This led many historians to write about mass protests against the act.  Most historians now dismiss the whole event as urban legend. 

*Historic U K




1771 Lagrange presented, to the Berlin Academy, the first proof of Wilson’s theorem (n is prime iff n divides (n − 1)! + 1). Edward Waring published the theorem in 1770, but Leibniz knew it previously . *VFR  

This theorem was stated by Ibn al-Haytham around 1000 CE.  The Wilson of the name was John Wilson (1741-1793),  an English mathematician and judge.   He was a  student of Edward Waring and the Senior Wrangler in 1761. This means that he was the best of all the First Class students to graduate after taking the Mathematical Tripos. Wilson was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse and he taught mathematics at Cambridge with great skill, quickly gaining an outstanding reputation for himself. However, he was not to continue in the world of university teaching, for in 1766 he was called to the bar having begun a legal career on 22 January 1763 when he was admitted to the Middle Temple. It was a highly successful career, too.

John Wilson




1865 Only three months before his death, Sir William Rowan Hamilton received a letter from the American astronomer, Benjamin Gould, informing him that the newly created U.S. National Academy of Sciences had elected him first on its list of Foreign Associates, thereby signifying that the academy considered him the greatest living scientist. [T. L. Hawkins, Hamilton, p. xv] *VFR




1878  Arthur Cayley addresses the London Mathematical Society brings the four color theorem to a wider audience when printed in the Society’s proceedings (Dave Richeson, Euler’s Gem, pg 132) 

The conjecture was first proposed in 1852 when Francis Guthrie, while trying to color the map of counties of England, noticed that only four different colors were needed. At the time, Guthrie's brother, Fredrick, was a student of Augustus De Morgan at University College. Francis inquired with Fredrick regarding it, who then took it to De Morgan (Francis Guthrie graduated later in 1852, and later became a professor of mathematics in South Africa). According to De Morgan:"A student of mine [Guthrie] asked me to day to give him a reason for a fact which I did not know was a fact — and do not yet. He says that if a figure be any how divided and the compartments differently coloured so that figures with any portion of common boundary line are differently coloured — four colours may be wanted but not more — the following is his case in which four colours are wanted. Query cannot a necessity for five or more be invented…   *Wik

Others have suggested that Mobius presented the challenge of drawing a map requiring five colors as early as 1840.

It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. Initially, this proof was not accepted by all mathematicians because the computer-assisted proof was infeasible for a human to check by hand.The proof has gained wide acceptance since then, although some doubters remain. The four color theorem was proved in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken.


Letter of De Morgan to William Rowan Hamilton, 23 Oct. 1852 *Wik



1878 Thomas Craig received his Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University under the direction of J. J. Sylvester for a dissertation on “The representation of one surface upon another; and on some points in the theory of the curvature of surfaces.” He was one of the four to receive his degree there (the philosopher Josiah Royce was another). These were the first Ph.D.s offered by Johns Hopkins, a university founded in 1876 to advance graduate education. *VFR

Craig and George Bruce Halsted were the first Hopkins Fellows in mathematics. James Joseph Sylvester had been invited to lead a graduate program in mathematics but would only be doing that. Craig was needed to teach differential calculus and integral calculus. Craig received his Ph.D. in 1878.  




1893, Bertha (Lamme) Feicht earned a degree in mechanical engineering with a specialty in electrical engineering from Ohio State University. Many refer to her as the first Woman Engineering graduate outside of civil engineering in the US.
During her 12 years at Westinghouse, she worked with the company’s best and brightest, including her pioneering brother, Benjamin, and eventual husband, Russell Feicht.
Benjamin put himself on the map by helping to design the electrical system for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He later worked on the hydroelectric dam on the Niagara River, helping to solve the practical problems of using electric power to light the city of Buffalo.
A highlight for Russell Feicht was designing the then huge 2,000-horsepower motor Westinghouse displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Both men both served as the company’s chief engineer.
But little record survives about Bertha’s own work, which “Women in Science” says is normal, if not good. *Springfield News-Sun



1959 France issued a stamp picturing Jean Le Rond d’Alembert.
D'ALEMBERT (1717 1783) was abandoned by his parents on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond, which was the baptistery of Notre-Dame. Foster parents were found and he was christened with the name of the saint of the church. When he became famous, his mother attempted to reclaim him, but he rejected her.




1983 Pioneer 10, launched 3 March 1972, leaves the solar system, being the first man-made object to do so. It has traveled over three billion miles. (Students, estimate uts current distance?)




1994 Lynchburg College Professor Thomas Nicely, discovers a flaw in the Pentium chip from Intel while trying to calculate Brun's constant,(The sum of the reciprocals of all the twin primes, 1/3+1/5+1/7+1/11+1/13.... which converges to about 1.902.)
The Pentium chip occasionally gave wrong answers to a floating-point (decimal) division calculations due to errors in five entries in a lookup table on the chip. Intel spent millions of dollars replacing the faulty chips.
Nicely first noticed some inconsistencies in the calculations on June 13, 1994 shortly after adding a Pentium system to his group of computers, but was unable to eliminate other factors until October 19, 1994. On October 24, 1994 he reported the issue to Intel. According to Nicely, his contact person at Intel later admitted that Intel had been aware of the problem since May 1994, when the flaw was discovered during testing of the FPU for its new P6 core, first used in the Pentium Pro. *Wik

Nicely died Sept. 11, 2019. 




BIRTHS

1555 Giovanni Antonio Magini (in Latin, Maginus) (June 13, 1555; Padua, Italy – February 11, 1617; Bologna, Italy) was an Italian astronomer, astrologer, cartographer, and mathematician.
Dedicating himself to astronomy, in 1582 he wrote Ephemerides coelestium motuum, translated into Italian the following year.
In 1588 he was chosen over Galileo Galilei to occupy the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna after the death of Egnatio Danti. He died in .
Magini supported a geocentric system of the world, in preference to Copernicus's heliocentric system. Magini devised his own planetary theory, in preference to other existing ones. The Maginian System consisted of eleven rotating spheres, which he described in his Novæ cœlestium orbium theoricæ congruentes cum observationibus N. Copernici (Venice, 1589).
In his De Planis Triangulis (1592), he described the use of quadrants in surveying and astronomy. In 1592 Magini published Tabula tetragonica, and in 1606 devised extremely accurate trigonometric tables. He also worked on the geometry of the sphere and applications of trigonometry, for which he invented calculating devices. He also worked on the problem of mirrors and published on the theory of concave spherical mirrors.
He also published a commentary on Ptolemy’s Geographia (Cologne, 1596).
As a cartographer, his life's work was the preparation of Italia or the Atlante geografico d'Italia (Geographic Atlas of Italy), printed posthumously by Magini's son in 1620. This was intended to include maps of every Italian region with exact nomenclature and historical notes. A major project, its production (begun in 1594) proved expensive and Magini assumed various additional posts in order to fund it, including becoming tutor in mathematics to the sons of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a major patron of the arts and sciences. He also served as court astrologer. The Duke of Mantua, to whom the atlas is dedicated, assisted him with this project and allowed for maps of the various states of Italy to be brought to Magini. The governments of Messina and Genoa also assisted Magini financially in this project. Magini did not do any of the mapping himself.
He was also interested in pursuits which today would be considered pseudoscientific. A strong supporter of astrology, he defended its use in medicine in his De astrologica ratione (Venice, 1607). Magini collaborated closely with Valentine Naibod, and in this book he published De annui temporis mensura in Directionibus and De Directionibus from Naibod's unfinished manuscript Claudii Ptolemaei Quadripartitae Constructionis Apotelesmata Commentarius novus et Eiusdem Conversio nova. He was also interested in metoposcopy.
He corresponded with Tycho Brahe, Clavius, Abraham Ortelius, and Johann Kepler.
*Wik





1580 Willebrord Snellius (Willebrord Snel van Royen) (13 June 1580; Leiden, Netherlands – 30 October 1626, Leiden) was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician, known in the English-speaking world as Snell. In the west, especially the English speaking countries, his name has been attached to the law of refraction of light for several centuries, but it is now known that this law was first discovered by Ibn Sahl in 984. The same law was also investigated by Ptolemy and in the Middle Ages by Witelo, but due to lack of adequate mathematical instruments (trigonometric functions) their results were saved as tables, not functions.
Snell also improved the classical method of calculating approximate values of π by polygons which he published in Cyclometricus (1621). Using his method 96 sided polygons gives π correct to 7 places while the classical method yields only 2 places. Van Ceulen's 35 places could be found with polygons of 230 sides rather than 262. In fact Van Ceulen's 35 places of π appear in print for the first time in this book by Snell.
*Wik *SAU




1773 Thomas Young (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs (specifically the Rosetta Stone) before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work. He was admired by, among others, Herschel and Einstein.
Young made notable scientific contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony and Egyptology.*Wik .. For someone as talented as Young, he received relatively few honours. The one which pleased him most was election as a foreign member of the Institute in Paris in 1827. When Young died two years later, Arago gave the eulogy at the Institute saying:-
The death of Young in his own country attracted but little regard. *SAU

I recently learned that Young was also the first Secretary of the Board of Longitude, and also served as Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac" thanks to * Sophie Waring @atinybitwaring

Experiments with light and color, hand-colored engraving in A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, vol. 1, plate 30, 1807, by Thomas Young (Linda Hall Library)




1779   Joseph Clement, an English machinist, was born June 13, 1779.  Clement was one of a remarkable group of precision tool makers who developed their craft in the first few decades of the 19th century .  Joseph Bramah was one of those, as well as Henry Maudslay, and Clement trained with both of them before setting out on his own in 1817.  He specialized in designing and building lathes, and he won several awards from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for improved precision lathes and chucks.  He was one of the first to lobby for standards in screw threads and pitch, so that machine screws from one workshop would work in machinery manufactured by other firms.  One of his screw-cutting lathes survives in the Science Museum in London .  Clement was also renowned for a massive metal planing machine that he invented, which would prune metal from objects no matter their shape, and which could handle material of great size.  He published some of the details of the "Great Planer" in the Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts in 1833 , a journal that we have in our serials collection.

Because of Clement's skill at precision manufacture, Charles Babbage sought him out in the early 1820s when he was designing a calculating machine, the first Difference Engine.  Clement worked on the project for a number of years and produced thousands of meticulously-made parts, some of which were assembled in 1833 into the working fragment of Difference Engine no. 1 that is still on display in the Science Museum in London .  The detail photos reveal just how good Clement was at his craft.  But Babbage and Clement had a falling out soon thereafter – Babbage thought Clement was enriching his workshop with tools made at Babbage's expense – and the two parted ways.  Difference Engine no. 1 was not completed in the lifetime of either man, although Babbage’s son assembled a more complete model in the 1870s, from Clement’s unused parts. *Linda Hall Org


*Science Museum, London



1806 George Parker Bidder (13 June 1806 – 20 September 1878) was an English engineer and calculating prodigy. Born in the town of Moretonhampstead, Devon, England, he displayed a natural skill at calculation from an early age. In childhood, his father, William Bidder, a stonemason, exhibited him as a "calculating boy", first in local fairs up to the age of six, and later around the country. In this way his talent was turned to profitable account, but his general education was in danger of being completely neglected.

Still many of those who saw him developed an interest in his education, a notable example being Sir John Herschel. His interest led him to arrange it so George could be sent to school in Camberwell. There he did not remain long, being removed by his father, who wished to exhibit him again, but he was saved from this misfortune and enabled to attend classes at the University of Edinburgh, largely through the kindness of Sir Henry Jardine,
On leaving college in 1824 he received a post in the ordnance survey, but gradually drifted into engineering work.
Bidder died at Dartmouth, Devon and was buried at Stoke Fleming.
His son, George Parker Bidder, Jr. (1836–1896), who inherited much of his father's calculating power, was a successful parliamentary counsel and an authority on cryptography. His grandson, also named George Parker Bidder, became a marine biologist and president of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1945. *Wik




1831 James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879)  Scottish physicist and mathematician. Maxwell's researches united electricity and magnetism into the concept of the electro-magnetic field. In London, around 1862, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He proposed that the phenomenon of light is therefore an electromagnetic phenomenon. The four partial differential equations, now known as Maxwell's equations, first appeared in fully developed form in Electricity and Magnetism (1873). He died relatively young; some of the theories he advanced in physics were only conclusively proved long after his death. Maxwell's ideas also paved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity and the quantum theory. *TIS  My favorite anecdote about Maxwell:  It is said that on his arrival at Cambridge University he was informed that there would be a compulsory 6 a.m. church service.  After a moment of thought he replied, "Aye, I suppose I could stay up that late. "

Statue of James Clerk Maxwell by Alexander Stoddart, unveiled in Edinburgh Square, 2008 (*Wikimedia commons)





1871 Ernst Steinitz (13 June 1871 – 29 September 1928) In 1910 he gave a general abstract definition of a field. He is responsible for introducing a number of concepts into the Theory of Fields, including prime subfields, separable elements, and perfect fields. *VFR

In 1910 Steinitz published the very influential paper Algebraische Theorie der Körper (German: Algebraic Theory of Fields, Crelle's Journal). In this paper he axiomatically studies the properties of fields and defines important concepts like prime field, perfect field and the transcendence degree of a field extension, and also normal and separable extensions (the latter he called algebraic extensions of the first kind). Besides numerous, today standard, results in field theory, he proved that every field has an (essentially unique) algebraic closure and a theorem, which characterizes the existence of primitive elements of a field extension in terms of its intermediate fields. Bourbaki called this article "a basic paper which may be considered as having given rise to the current conception of Algebra".




1868  Wallace Clement Ware Sabine (June 13, 1868, Richwood, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan 10, 1919, Cambridge, Mass.) was a U.S. physicist who founded the science of architectural acoustics. After experimenting in the Fogg lecture room at Harvard, to investigate the effect of absorption on the reverberation time, on 29 of October 1898 he discovered the type of relation between these quantities. The duration T of the residual sound to decay below the audible intensity, starting from a 1,000,000 times higher initial intensity is given by: T = 0.161 V/A (V=room volume in m3, A=total absorption in m2). The first auditorium Sabine designed applying his new insight in acoustics, was the new Boston Music Hall, formally opened on 15 Oct 1900. Now known as the Symphony Hall, and still considered one of the world's three finest concert halls.*TIS




1872 Jessie Chrystal MacMillan (13 June 1872 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 21 September 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was the first female science graduate at Edinburgh University and the first female honors graduate in Mathematics. She went on to study at Berlin. She was the first woman to plead a case before the House of Lords. She became active in the Women's Suffrage Movement and went on to become a lawyer.
A Millennial plaque is at Kings Buildings (West Mains Road), in Edinburgh. It reads:

In honour of
JESSIE CHRYSTAL MACMILLAN
1872-1937
Suffragist, founder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,
first woman science graduate of the University (1896).

*SAU




1876 William Sealy Gosset(13 June 1876; Canterbury, England- 16 October 1937 in Beaconsfield, England)
Gosset was the eldest son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset who came from Watlington in Oxfordshire. William was educated at Winchester, where his favourite hobby was shooting, then entered New College Oxford where he studied chemistry and mathematics. While there he studied under Airy. He obtained a First Class degree in both subjects, being awarded his mathematics degree in 1897 and his chemistry degree two years later.
Gosset obtained a post as a chemist with Arthur Guinness Son and Company in 1899. Working in the Guinness brewery in Dublin he did important work on statistics. In 1905 he contacted Karl Pearson and arranged to go to London to study at Pearson's laboratory, the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, at University College in session 1906-07. At this time he worked on the Poisson limit to the binomial and the sampling distribution of the mean, standard deviation, and correlation coefficient. He later published three important papers on the work he had undertaken during this year working in Pearson's laboratory.
Many people are familiar with the name "Student" but not with the name Gosset. In fact Gosset wrote under the name "Student" which explains why his name may be less well known than his important results in statistics. He invented the t-test to handle small samples for quality control in brewing. Gosset discovered the form of the t distribution by a combination of mathematical and empirical work with random numbers, an early application of the Monte-Carlo method.

McMullen says:-
To many in the statistical world "Student" was regarded as a statistical advisor to Guinness's brewery, to others he appeared to be a brewer devoting his spare time to statistics. ... though there is some truth in both these ideas they miss the central point, which was the intimate connection between his statistical research and the practical problems on which he was engaged. ... "Student" did a very large quantity of ordinary routine as well as his statistical work in the brewery, and all that in addition to consultative statistical work and to preparing his various published papers.

From 1922 he acquired a statistical assistant at the brewery, and he slowly built up a small statistics department which he ran until 1934.
Gosset certainly did not work in isolation. He corresponded with a large number of statisticians and he often visited his father in Watlington in England and on these occasions he would visit University College, London, and the Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station. He would discuss statistical problems with Fisher, Neyman and Pearson. *SAU




1902 Carolyn Eisele (June 13, 1902 – January 15, 2000) was an American mathematician and historian of mathematics known as an expert on the works of Charles Sanders Peirce.
Eisele was born on June 13, 1902, in The Bronx, New York City. She studied at Hunter College High School and then Hunter College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1923. She earned a master's degree in mathematics and education from Columbia University in 1925. At that time, Columbia did not offer Ph.D.s in mathematics to women, but Eisele continued her graduate studies at the University of Chicago (where she studied differential geometry) and the University of Southern California before returning home to New York, without a doctorate, to care for her heavily injured father. Her studies also included opera singing, with Jeanne Fourestier in Paris in 1931 and later with Los Angeles-based voice coach Morris Halpern, whom she married in 1943.

Eisele taught mathematics at Hunter College for nearly 50 years. She began teaching as an instructor there after her college graduation in 1923, eventually reached the rank of full professor in 1965, and retired in 1972.

Eisele died on January 15, 2000 in Manhattan, New York City. *Wik




1911 Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century.
In 1940 Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects, from early improvements to Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system known as VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from realizing that they had been found by the new airborne microwave radars. The radar system for which Alvarez is best known and which has played a major role in aviation, most particularly in the post war Berlin airlift, was Ground Controlled Approach (GCA). Alvarez spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi before coming to Los Alamos to work for Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. Alvarez worked on the design of explosive lenses, and the development of exploding-bridgewire detonators. As a member of Project Alberta, he observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress, and later the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste.
After the war Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He was involved in a project to x-ray the Egyptian pyramids to search for unknown chambers. With his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis which proposes that the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs was the result of an asteroid impact. *Wik

Alvarez with a magnetic monopole detector in 1969




1911 Erwin Wilhelm Müller (or Mueller) (June 13, 1911 – May 17, 1977) was a German physicist who invented the Field Emission Electron Microscope (FEEM), the Field Ion Microscope (FIM), and the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. He and his student, Kanwar Bahadur, were the first people to experimentally observe atoms.

Images of the atomic structures of tungsten were first published in 1951 in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. In FIM, a voltage of about 10kV is applied to a sharp metal tip, cooled to below 50 kelvin in a low-pressure helium gas atmosphere. Gas atoms are ionized by the strong electric field in the vicinity of the tip and repelled perpendicular to the tip surface. A detector images the spatial distribution of these ions giving a magnification of the curvature of the surface. 



1906 Bruno de Finetti (13 June 1906 - 20 July 1985) De Finetti was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and was a big contributor to subjective/personal probability and Bayesian inference along with L.J. ("Jimmie") Savage (1917-1971), both of whom are discussed briefly in Chapter 13 ("The Bayesian Heresy") of David Salsburg's book The Lady Tasting Tea and in Salsburg's concluding Chapter 29.*David Bee


1928 John Forbes Nash, Jr ( June 13, 1928-May 23, 2015) is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in market economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University  during the later part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.
Nash is the subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind. The film, loosely based on the biography of the same name, focuses on Nash's mathematical genius and struggle with paranoid schizophrenia*Wik




2018 Bogdan Tadeusz Bojarski (born June 13, 1931 in Błaszki , died December 22, 2018  in Warsaw ) – Polish mathematician , professor of mathematical and physical sciences, full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

In 1951 he graduated in mathematics from the University of Lodz , in 1954 he defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Moscow , habilitated in 1959 at the VA Steklov Institute in Moscow , then worked at the University of Warsaw, including in the years 1968–1986 as a professor, in the years 1970–1981 he was director of the Institute of Mathematics of the University of Warsaw. In the years 1986–2002 he was director of the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences , and in the years 1993–2002 director of the International Mathematical Centre named after Stefan Banach .
From 1973 he was a corresponding member, from 1986 a full member of the Polish Academy of Sciences, from 2000 a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences .

He dealt with differential equations and mathematical analysis .

In 1963 he received the Stefan Banach Prize , was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1974), the Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1999) , in 2011 he received an honorary doctorate from the Tbilisi State University .

He was buried at the Powązki Military Cemetery (additional section G, urn row, grave 6)






1942 Homer Alfred Neal, (June 13, 1942 in Franklin, Kentucky; May 23, 2018 Ann Arbor, Michigan) was an African-American particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan. Neal was President of the American Physical Society in 2016. He was also a board member of Ford Motor Company, a council member of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a director of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. Neal was the interim President of the University of Michigan in 1996. Neal's research group works as part of the ATLAS experiment hosted at CERN in Geneva.

He received his B.S. in Physics from Indiana University in 1961, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966. From 1976 to 1981, Neal was Dean for Research and Graduate Development at Indiana University, and from 1981 to 1986 he was provost at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He held Honorary Doctorates from Indiana University, Michigan State University, and Notre Dame University.

On 14 Nov 2009, Dr. Neal described the discoveries of spin at the University of Michigan (UM) with a presentation: History of Spin at Michigan *Wik




1966 Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (13 June 1966, - ) is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology.
In 1994, Perelman proved the soul conjecture. In 2003, he proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.
In August 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow." Perelman declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame, I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." On 22 December 2006, the journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.
On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he turned down the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considers his contribution to proving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than that of Richard Hamilton, who introduced the theory of Ricci flow with the aim of attacking the geometrization conjecture. *Wik





DEATHS


1882 William Shanks (25 Jan 1812; June ? ,1882) English mathematician who spent numerous years manually calculating the value of pi. Shanks kept a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring in a coal mining area near Durham. His calculation of pi reached 707 places by 1873, a feat unchallenged until the use of electronic computers. He used the formula:
pi/4 = 4 tan-1(1/5) - tan-1(1/239).
In 1944, Ferguson's new computation of pi showed Shanks had made a mistake in the 528th decimal place, invalidating the digits calculated beyond. Shanks had omitted two terms which caused his error. By the end of the twentieth century, computers could easily extend the results to over 2 billion places.*TIS
Shanks was born in 1812 in Corsenside. He may have been a student of William Rutherford as a young boy in the 1820s, and he dedicated a book on π published in 1853 to Rutherford. After his marriage in 1846, Shanks earned his living by owning a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring, which left him enough time to spend on his hobby of calculating mathematical constants.
 Shank calculated numerous reciprocals of primes and their repeating periods, and published two papers "On Periods in the Reciprocals of Primes" in 1873 and 1874. In 1874 he also published a table of primes, and the periods of their reciprocals, up to 20,000 (with help from and "communicated by the Rev. George Salmon"), and pointed out the errors in previous tables by three other authors.
[Rules for calculating the periods of repeating decimals from rational fractions were given by James Whitbread Lee Glaisher in 1878. For a prime p, the period of its reciprocal divides p − 1.[

The sequence of recurrence periods of the reciprocal primes (sequence A002371 in the OEIS) appears in the 1973 Handbook of Integer Sequences. *Wik

A sample of a page (with some errors)  from his tables.




*SAU



1916 Silvanus P. Thompson (19 June 1851 – 12 June 1916) In 1910 he published Calculus Made Easy, which was published anonymously until after his death in 1916. It is still in print. *VFR He was a noted physicist and engineer, and a celebrated teacher and writer on electricity and magnetism. He also wrote popular biographies of Faraday and Lord Kelvin. At his death he was professor at City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury (London)





1939 Hermann Wiener (15 May 1857 in Karlsruhe, Germany-13 June 1939 in Darmstadt, Germany)
was a German mathematician who worked on the foundations of geometry*SAU

Hermann, whose father was the mathematician Christian Wiener, graduated from the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. From 1876 to 1879 he studied mathematics and natural science at the Polytechnische Schule Karlsruhe (now the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). From 1879 to 1882 he studied at the Technical University of Munich under Felix Klein and Alexander von Brill and in 1881 at the University of Leipzig. In 1881 he received his Promotion (PhD) in Munich in mathematics with a thesis Über Involutionen auf ebenen Curven (On involutions on plane curves) under the supervision of Ludwig Seidel. In Karlsruhe in 1882 he passed the state examination for secondary school teachers. He was from 1882 to 1883 a Lehramtspraktikant (teaching trainee) at the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and from 1882 to 1883 his father's assistant at the Polytechnische Schule Karlsruhe. In 1885 Hermann Wiener habilitated at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg with a thesis Rein geometrische Theorie der Darstellung binärer Formen durch Punktgruppen auf der Geraden (Purely geometrical theory of the representation of binary forms by point groups on the line). From 1885 to 1894 he was a Privatdozent at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1894 he was appointed a professor ordinarius at Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), where he retired as professor emeritus in 1927. *Wik




1994 John Leslie Britton (November 18, 1927 – June 13, 1994) was an English mathematician from Yorkshire who worked in combinatorial group theory and was an expert on the word problem for groups. Britton was a member of the London Mathematical Society and was Secretary of Meetings and Membership with that organization from 1973-1976. Britton died in a climbing accident on the Isle of Skye. *Wik






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