Pat'sBlog

Monday, 16 March 2026

Billion, Centilion, Decillion, Million Math Terms History

Billion,Centilion, Decillion, Billion seems to have been a French creation, and was originally bi-million. The term originally meant 10^12 or one million millions, and still has this meaning in many countries today. In the US and some other countries it is used for 10^9 or one thousand million. The table below compares the names as used in the US and in Germany:
Value -----German name--------US name
10^6 ----- Million ---------- Million
10^9 ------ Millard------------Billion
10^12 ----- Billion -----------Trillion
10^15------ Billiarde -------- Quadrillion
Cajori attributes the first publication of the words above million to Nicholas Chuquet (1445-1488). Here is a quote from his A History of Elementary Mathematics with Hints on Methods of Teaching:
Their origin dates back almost to the time when the word million was first used. So far as known, they first occur in a manuscript work on arithmetic by that gifted French physician of Lyons, Nicolas Chuquet (1445- He employs the words byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, octyllion, nonyllion, "et ainsi des aultres se plus oultre on voulait proceder" to denote the second, third, etc. powers of a million, i.e. (1,000,000)², (1,000,OO0)³, etc. Evidently Chuquet had solved the difficult question of numeration. The new words used by him appear in 1520 in the printed work of La Roche. Thus the great honor of having simplified numeration of large numbers appears to belong to the French. In England and Germany the new nomenclature was not introduced until about a century and a half later. In England the words billion, trillion, etc., were new when Locke wrote, about 1687. In Germany these new terms appear for the first time in 1681 in a work by Heckenberg of Hanover, but they did not come into general use before the eighteenth century. About the middle of the seventeenth century it became the custom in France to divide numbers into periods of three digits, instead of six, and to assign to the word billion, in place of the old meaning, (1000,000)² or 10¹², the new meaning of 10⁹
In The Book of Numbers by John Conway and Richard Guy (pp. 14-15) they write
These arithmeticians [Chuquet and de la Roche] used "illion" after the prefixes
b, tr, quadr, quint, sext, sept, oct and non to denote the
2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th powers of a million. But around the middle of the 17th century, some other French arithmeticians used them instead for the
3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th powers of a thousand. Although condemned by the greatest lexicographers as "erroneous" (Litr'e) and "an entire perversion of the original nomenclature of Chuquet and de la Roche" (Murray), the newer usage is now standard in the U.S., although the older one survives in Britain and is still standard in the continental countries (but the French spelling is nowadays "llon" rather than "llion".
Because of continued conflict with England for the first fifty years of the new United States existence, it was much more willing to base the foundation for its numeration system on the method of the French, who had supported them in their revolution. In spite of this, "In many textbooks prior to the War of 1812 (eg. those by Consider and John Stery 1790, John Vinall 1792, and Johann Ritter 1807) if any numbers higher than 999,999,999 were discussed, the British system was used." [for example 1,000,000,000 was one-thousand million rather than one-billion ] {from Karen D. Michalowicz and Arthur C Howard in "Pedagogy in Text", from the NCTM's A History of School Mathemaitics}

Million first appeared in a printed work in the Treviso arithmetic of 1478. Thereafter it found place in the works of most of the important popular Italian writers, such as Borghi (1484), Pellos (1492), and Pacioli (1494), but outside of Italy and France it was for a long time used only sparingly. Thus, Gemma Frisius (1540) used "thousand thousand" in his Latin editions, which were published in the North, while in the Italian translation (1567) the word millioni appears. Similarly, Clavius carried his German ideas along with him when he went to Rome, and when (1583) he wished to speak of a thousand thousand he almost apologized for using "million," referring to it as an Italian form which needed some explanation.

In Spain the word cuento was early used for 10^6, the word million being reserved for 10^12. When the latter word was adopted by mathematicians, it was slow in coming into general use.

France early took the word "million" from Italy, as when Chuquet (1484) used it, being followed by De la Roche (1520), after which it became fairly common.

England adopted the Italian word more readily than the other countries, probably owing to the influence of Recorde (c. 1542). It is interesting to see that Poland was also among the first to recognize its value, the word appearing in the arithmetic of Klos in 1538.

The French use of milliard, for 10^9, with billion as an alternative, is relatively late. The word appears at least as early as the beginning of the 16th century as the equivalent both of 10^9 and of 10^12, the latter being the billion of England today. By the 17th century, however, it was used in Holland to mean 10^9, and no doubt it was about this time that the usage began to change in France.

As to the American usage, taking a billion to mean a thousand million and running the subsequent names by thousands, it should be said that this is due in part to French influence after the Revolutionary War, although our earliest native American arithmetic, the Greenwood book of 1729, gave the billion as 10^9, the trillion as 10^12, and so on. Names for large numbers were the fashion in early days, Pike’s well-known arithmetic (1788), for example, proceeding to duodecillions before taking up addition.

Decillion occurs in English in 1847.

Centillionen is found in German in 1740 in Biblischer Geographus by Johann J. Schmidt: “Was wirds nun helfen, die Zahlen so zu häufen, daß man sie mit Centillionen aussprechen könnte; wer wird denn einen Verstand hergeben, der sie begreift?”

Centilion (spelled this way) is found in English in 1754 in The Gentleman’s Magazine.

Centillion is found in English in 1863 in The Normal: or, Methods of Teaching the Common Branches, Orthoepy, Orthography, Grammar, Geography, Arithmetic and Elocution by Alfred Holbrook

In Many South Asian numbering system, 10^9 is known as 100 crore or 1 arab. in Japanese 10,000 is a common base, and above this they normally use

10,000: ichi-man 「1万」

100,000: juu-man 「10万」

1,000,000: hyaku-man (one million) 「100万」

10,000,000: issen-man 「1000万」.

*(Wikipedia, Jeff Miller, PB notes)

On This Day in Math - March 16


Memorial for Ohm		,

Whenever I meet in Laplace with the words 'Thus it plainly appears', I am sure that hours and perhaps days, of hard study will alone enable me to discover how it plainly appears.
~Nathaniel Bowditch

The 75th day of the year; the aliquot divisors of 75 are 1,3,5,15, and 25. Their sum is a perfect square, 49. Their product is also a perfect square, 5625. (Can you find other numbers with this property?)

75 is also the larger of the smallest pair of betrothed (quasi-amicable) numbers. 48 and 75 are a betrothed pair since the sum of the proper divisors of 48 is 76 and 75+1 = 76 and the sum of the proper divisors of 75 is 49, with 48+1=49. (There is only a single other pair of betrothed numbers that can be a year day)

75 and 76 form the first pair of adjacent numbers in base ten which are NOT a palindrome in any base $ 2 \leq b \leq 10 $

2⁷⁵ + 75 is prime

75 is a Keith # or repfigit (75 appears in a Fibonacci-like sequence created by its digits) 7, 5, 12, 17, 29, 46, 75 ... (75 is the sixth of seven year days which are repfigits. Can you find the others?)

EVENTS

1713 Saunderson to Jones (Nicholas Saunderson to William Jones): “There has been nothing published here since my last to you, excepting a treatise, which is not worth mentioning, by one Mr. Green, fellow of Clare Hall of this university. If there had been anything in it instructive or diverting I should have sent it to you; but I can ﬁnd nothing in it but ill manners and elaborate nonsense from one end to the other. The gentleman has been reputed mad for these two years last past, but never gave the world such ample testimony of it before.” [Rigaud, Correspondence of Scientiﬁc Men of the Seventeenth Century, I, *263] *VFR

Jones who coined Pi, by Hogarth

1763 Jerome Lalande writes in his diary about a visit to England, and "I went to see the Tower, and from there by water to Surrey Street to see Mr Short (James Short FRS was an optician who had been called to London to teach mathematics to William, Duke of Cumberland)
who spoke to me about the difficulty in giving his mirrors a parabolic figure. It is done only by guess-work." *Richard Watkins

Lalande was a French astronomer, freemason and writer. On 8 May and again on 10 May 1795 a star was observed and recorded at his observatory with uncertainty noted on its position with a colon, this notation could also indicate an observing error so it was not until the original records of the observatory were reviewed that it was established with certainty that the object was Neptune and the position error between the two nights was due to the planet's motion across the sky.

1802 The United States Military Academy at West Point established by act of congress. This school was the ﬁrst engineering school in the U.S. Charles Davies, a noted math textbook writer, taught there.*VFR (The academy opened on July 4, 1802. Before 1812 it was conducted as an apprentice school for military engineers and, in effect, as the first U.S. school of engineering.)

Nininger Hall, part of the original Cadet Barracks

1830 The New York Stock Exchange had its slowest trading day, only 31 shares trading hands. *VFR

1867 First publication of an article by Joseph Lister outlining the discovery of antiseptic surgery, in "The Lancet". The second appeared in July of the same year.

At the Dublin meeting of the British Medical Association in August 1867, Lister stated “previous to its introduction, the 2 large wards in which most of my cases of accident and of operation are treated were amongst the unhealthiest in the whole of surgical division at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary (…) but since the antiseptic treatment has been brought into full operation, (…) my wards (…) have completely changed their character; so that during the last 9 months not a single instance of pyaemia, hospital gangrene or erysipelas has occurred in them.” *Natl Lib of Medicine

1916 On his seventieth birthday in 1916, Mittag-Leffler and his wife signed their last will and testament. They gave their entire fortune to found a Mathematical Institute which now bears their names. It is in their villa in Djursholm, near Stockholm, Sweden. A sumptuous volume giving a complete catalog of Mittag-Leffler’s library was also published at this time, and this library is now housed in the Institute. Naturally it is a favorite haunt of historians of mathematics. *VFR (See Births,1846 below)

1916 Srinivasa Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts by Research (the degree was called a Ph.D. from 1920). He had been allowed to enroll in June 1914 despite not having the proper qualifications. Ramanujan's dissertation was on Highly composite numbers and consisted of seven of his papers published in England.

This paper, as it appeared originally, is not complete. Since the London Mathematical Society was in

some financial difficulty at that time, Ramanujan had to suppress part of what he had written in order

to save expense.

Highly composite numbers are sometimes used to search for primes, since the proof that primes are infinite uses a product of all "known" primes.

1926 Clark University Physics Professor, Robert H. Goddard, conducted the ﬁrst successful open-air test of a liquid-fuel rocket. “The rocket soared only forty-one feet, hardly the ‘extreme altitudes’ Goddard had envisioned, yet the occasion was anologous to the ﬁrst ﬂight of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk nearly a quarter of a century earlier.” *William A. Koelsch, Clark University, 1887–1987
He thought stable flight could be obtained by mounting the rocket ahead of the fuel tank. The tank was shielded from the flame by a metal cone and was pulled behind the rocket by the lines for gasoline fuel and oxygen. The design worked, but did not produce the hoped-for stability. The rocket burned about 20 seconds before reaching sufficient thrust (or sufficiently lightening the fuel tank) for taking off. During that time it melted part of the nozzle. It took off to a height of 41-ft, leveled off and within 2.5 seconds hit the ground 184 feet away, averaging about 60 mph. The camera ran out of film, so no photographic record of that flight remains. *TIS

1928 Chandrasekhara Raman presented the results from his Feb 28 ground breaking experiments in light scattering at a meeting of scientists in Bangalore on 16 March 1928. The results would lead to his wining the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930. *Wik

1962 The first Titan II was launched on this day and the entire missile system met all of its test objectives. The Titan II was declared operational in 1963 under the numerical designation LGM-25C. A total of 54 Titan II missiles were deployed in six separate squadrons each responsible for nine missiles.

1966 Gemini 8 launched with Neil Armstrong and David R. Scott aboard, conducts the 1st docking of two spacecraft in orbit, flight aborted after critical system failure with the crew returned safely to Earth. Gemini 8 was the sixth crewed spaceflight in NASA's Gemini program, and was the 14th crewed American flight.

1986 The Manchester Guardian Weekly announces that Colin Rourke of Warwick and his student Eduardo Rego of Oporto University in Portugal have solved the 82 year old Poincare conjecture which states that loops on spheres in n-dimensions can be shrunk to points. Obviously, Mr. Rego will get his Ph.D. *VFR The article in the Guardian was by Ian Stewart. In November 1986, Rourke was at the University of California, Berkeley, conducting a seminar to explain and defend his proof. By the end of the week, Rourke's audience, which included some of the world's top topologists, had pointed out a gap in his proof, one that Rourke could not fill. In the end, there was no valid proof. The problem was solved by the reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman in November of 2002

1990 Internet Extends Beyond U.S. to Europe: The National Science Foundation announces it will extend its network with a high-speed data link to Europe. Five years earlier, the Internet in its modern form had started to develop rapidly thanks to the formation of the NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers in the United States. Later in 1990, Europe contributed to the growth of the Internet when CERN's Tim Berners-Lee developed HTML, the language used for the World Wide Web.*CHM

BIRTHS

1750 Caroline Lucretia Herschel (16 Mar 1750, 9 Jan 1848) German-born British astronomer, sister of Sir William Herschel, who assisted in his astronomical researches making calculations associated with his studies. In her own telescope observations, she found three nebulae (1783) and eight comets (1786-97). In 1787, King George III gave Caroline a salary of 50 pounds per year as assistant to William. She published the Index to Flamsteed's Observations of the Fixed Stars and a list of his mistakes in 1797. At the age of 10 she had been struck with typhus, which subsequently stunted her growth. She never grew taller than 4' 3" and remained frail throughout her life. *TIS
[The following inscription is engraved on Miss Herschel's tomb. It begins: "Hier ruhet die irdische Hülle von CAROLINA HERSCHEL, Geboren zu Hannover den 16ten Marz 1750, Gestorben, den 9ten Januar 1848." But, for the convenience of our young readers, we give it in English:—

HERE RESTS THE EARTHLY CASE OF

CAROLINE HERSCHEL.

BORN AT HANOVER, MARCH 10, 1750.

DIED JANUARY 9, 1848.

"The eyes of her now glorified were, while here below, directed towards the starry heavens. Her own discoveries of comets, and her share in the immortal labours of her brother, William Herschel, bear witness of this to succeeding ages.

"The Royal Irish Academy of Dublin, and the Royal Astronomical Society of London, enrolled her name among their members.

"At the age of 97 years 10 months, she fell asleep in calm rest, and in the full possession of her faculties; following into a better life her father, Isaac Herschel, who lived to the age of 60 years, 2 months, 17 days, and has lain buried not far off since the 29th of March 1767."

This epitaph was mainly written by Miss Herschel herself, and the allusion to her brother is characteristic.]
*from The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of the Herschels, by Anonymous

1789 Georg Simon Ohm (16 Mar 1789; 6 Jul 1854 at age 65) German physicist (high school teacher) who showed by experiment (1825) that there are no “perfect” electrical conductors. All conductors have some resistance. He stated the famous Ohm's law (1826): “If the given temperature remains constant, the current flowing through certain conductors is proportional to the potential difference (voltage) across it.” or V=iR. *TIS

1821 Heinrich Eduard Heine (16 March 1821 in Berlin, Germany - 21 Oct 1881 in Halle, Germany) Heine is best remembered for the Heine-Borel theorem. He was responsible for the introduction of the idea of uniform continuity.*SAU

Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics and Legendre functions (Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen). He also investigated basic hypergeometric series. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula.*Wik

1846 Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler (16 Mar 1846; 7 Jul 1927 at age 81) Swedish mathematician who founded the international mathematical journal Acta Mathematica and whose contributions to mathematical research helped advance the Scandinavian school of mathematics. Mittag-Leffler made numerous contributions to mathematical analysis (concerned with limits and including calculus, analytic geometry and probability theory). He worked on the general theory of functions, concerning relationships between independent and dependent variables. His best known work concerned the analytic representation of a one-valued function, this work culminated in the Mittag-Leffler theorem. *TIS One of the stories that circulates from time to time about Mittag-Leffler and the fact that there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics is that Nobel disliked Mittag-Leffler for having an affair with Nobel's wife and so he did not create a prize in Mathematics. Only problem; Nobel never married, and there is little if any evidence that Mittag-Leffler ever met Nobel's mistress, Sophie Hess.

1853 Heinrich (Gustav Johannes) Kayser (16 Mar 1853, 14 Oct 1940) was a German physicist who discovered the presence of helium in the Earth's atmosphere. Prior to that scientists had detected helium only in the sun and in some minerals. Kayser's early research work was on the properties of sound. In collaboration with the physicist and mathematician Carl D.T. Runge, Kayser carefully mapped the spectra of a large number of elements. He wrote a handbook of spectroscopy (1901–12) and a treatise on the electron theory (1905).*TIS

1915 Kunihiko Kodaira(16 Mar 1915; 26 Jul 1997 at age 82) Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1954 for his work in algebraic geometry and complex analysis. Kodaira's work includes applications of Hilbert space methods to differential equations which was an important topic in his early work and was largely the result of influence by Weyl. Through the influence of Hodge, he also worked on harmonic integrals and later he applied this work to problem in algebraic geometry. Another important area of Kodaira's work was to apply sheaves to algebraic geometry. In around 1960 he became involved in the classification of compact, complex analytic spaces. One of the themes running through much of his work is the Riemann-Roch theorem. He won the 1985 Wolf Prize. *TIS

*Wik

1916 Frederick Reines (/ˈraɪnəs/ RY-nəs;[1] March 16, 1918 – August 26, 1998) was an American physicist. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-detection of the neutrino with Clyde Cowan in the neutrino experiment. He may be the only scientist in history "so intimately associated with the discovery of an elementary particle and the subsequent thorough investigation of its fundamental properties."

A graduate of Stevens Institute of Technology and New York University, Reines joined the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory in 1944, working in the Theoretical Division in Richard Feynman's group. He became a group leader there in 1946. He participated in a number of nuclear tests, culminating in his becoming the director of the Operation Greenhouse test series in the Pacific in 1951.

In the early 1950s, working in Hanford and Savannah River Sites, Reines and Cowan developed the equipment and procedures with which they first detected the supposedly undetectable neutrinos in June 1956. Reines dedicated the major part of his career to the study of the neutrino's properties and interactions, which work would influence study of the neutrino for many researchers to come. This included the detection of neutrinos created in the atmosphere by cosmic rays, and the 1987 detection of neutrinos emitted from Supernova SN1987A, which inaugurated the field of neutrino astronomy. *Wik

1926 Magdalena Araceli Mouján Otaño (16 March 1926, 16 July 2005) Mouján was born in Pehuajó (Buenos Aires Province), the granddaughter of Basque writer Pedro Mari Otaño [eu]. After studying mathematics at the National University of La Plata, she completed a doctorate in 1950.

In 1957, Mouján became one of four founding members of an operations research group funded by the Argentine Army and led by mathematician Agustín Durañona y Vedia. In the 1960s, she joined the National Atomic Energy Commission and began using the Clementina computer [es], the first scientific computer in Argentina, at the University of Buenos Aires. Her calculations were used to help build the RA-1 Enrico Fermi nuclear reactor.

Mouján began writing science fiction in the early 1960s under a pseudonym, "Inge Matquim". A science fiction story by Mouján, "Los Huáqueros", won joint first prize at Mardelcon, the 1968 Argentine science fiction convention.

Another of her stories, "Gu ta Gutarrak" (Basque for "we and ours"), was written in homage to her grandfather's 1899 poem of the same title, and as "a satire of the Basque nationalist myth of the antiquity and purity of the Basque race". It describes the adventures of a time-traveling Basque family who return to their homeland in the time of their ancestors. The story was accepted for a 1970 issue of the Spanish science fiction magazine Nueva Dimensión, but its publication was blocked by the Franco regime as being contrary to the ideals of Spanish unity. The story was translated into multiple languages, and finally republished by Nueva Dimensión in 1979, after Franco's death. *Wik

1947 Dr. Keith Devlin (March 16, 1947, Kingston upon Hull, UK; ) is a co-founder and Executive Director of Stanford University's H-STAR institute, a co-founder of the Stanford Media X research network, and a Senior Researcher at CSLI. He is a World Economic Forum Fellow and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His current research is focused on the use of different media to teach and communicate mathematics to diverse audiences. He also works on the design of information/reasoning systems for intelligence analysis. Other research interests include: theory of information, models of reasoning, applications of mathematical techniques in the study of communication, and mathematical cognition. He has written 32 books and over 80 published research articles. Recipient of the Pythagoras Prize, the Peano Prize, the Carl Sagan Award, and the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics Communications Award. In 2003, he was recognized by the California State Assembly for his "innovative work and longtime service in the field of mathematics and its relation to logic and linguistics." He is "the Math Guy" on National Public Radio. *Stanford Edu

1947 Uriel George "Uri" Rothblum (Hebrew: אוריאל ג'ורג' "אורי" רוטבלום; Tel Aviv, March 16, 1947 – Haifa, March 26, 2012) was an Israeli mathematician and operations researcher. From 1984 until 2012 he held the Alexander Goldberg Chair in Management Science at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel.[

Rothblum was born in Tel Aviv to a family of Jewish immigrants from Austria. He went to Tel Aviv University, where Robert Aumann became his mentor; he earned a bachelor's degree there in 1969 and a master's in 1971. He completed his doctorate in 1974 from Stanford University, in operations research, under the supervision of Arthur F. Veinott. After postdoctoral research at New York University, he joined the Yale University faculty in 1975, and moved to the Technion in 1984.

Rothblum became president of the Israeli Operational Research Society (ORSIS) for 2006–2008, and editor-in-chief of Mathematics of Operations Research from 2010 until his death. He was elected to the 2003 class of Fellows of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences *Wik

1954 John E. Laird (March 16, 1954 Ann Arbor, Michigan - ) is a computer scientist who, with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan. He was the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there from 1994 to 1999. *Wik

"As of June 1, 2022, I’ve retired from the University of Michigan, and the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan.

I continue my research on cognitive architecture at the Center for Integrated Cognition. It is a non-profit basic research center. Our website is still under development." Laird webpage U of Mich

1968 Sir David William Cross MacMillan FRS FRSE (born 16 March 1968) is a Scottish chemist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University, where he was also the chair of the Department of Chemistry from 2010 to 2015. He shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Benjamin List "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis". MacMillan used his share of the $1.14 million prize to establish the May and Billy MacMillan Foundation.

He is considered to be one of the founders of organocatalysis. organic chemistry, organocatalysis is a form of catalysis in which the rate of a chemical reaction is increased by an organic catalyst. This "organocatalyst" consists of carbon, hydrogen, sulfur and other nonmetal elements found in organic compounds. Because of their similarity in composition and description, they are often mistaken as a misnomer for enzymes due to their comparable effects on reaction rates and forms of catalysis involved.

DEATHS


Bowditch gravestone,Mount Auburn Cemetery Cambridge Middlesex County Massachusetts, USA

1838 Nathaniel Bowditch (26 Mar 1773, 16 Mar 1838 at age 65) Self-educated American mathematician and astronomer. He learned Latin to study Newton's Principia and later other languages to study mathematics in these languages. Between 1795 and 1799 he made four sea voyages and in 1802 he was in command of a merchant ship. He was author of the best book on navigation of his time, New American Practical Navigator (1802), and his translation (assisted by Benjamin Peirce) of Laplace's Mécanique céleste gave him an international reputation. Bowditch was the discoverer of the Bowditch curves (more often called Lisajous figures for their co-discoverer), which have important applications in astronomy and physics.*TIS Bowditch was a navigator on the Wilkes Expedition and an island in the Stork Archipelago in the South Pacific is named for him (and sometimes called Fakaofu)(I can give no explanation for the discrepancy in the date of death on his tombstone.)

1841 Félix Savart (30 Jun 1791, 16 Mar 1841 at age 49)French physicist who researched various manifestations of vibration. With Jean-Baptiste Biot, he developed the Biot-Savart Law (1820) concerning the magnetic field intensity around a current-carrying wire. After earning a degree in medicine (1816), he took an interest in physics, beginning with a study of the violin to explain the contributions from its components to the sound from the strings. He presented a memoir on the subject to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1819. He conducted extensive research in acoustics, the nodal patterns of vibrating systems (including air columns), and related enquiries into the elasticity of substances. He also investigated the voice and hearing. He devised a rotating toothed wheel to produce a sound of any frequency by a reed held against it, to measure high frequency hearing limits. *TIS

1914 Edward Singleton Holden (November 5, 1846 – March 16, 1914) was an American astronomer. Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1846 to Jeremiah and Sarah Holden. From 1862-66, he attended Washington University in St. Louis, where he obtained a B.S. degree. He later trained at West Point in the class of 1870.In 1873 he became professor of mathematics at the US Naval Observatory, where he made a favorable impression on Simon Newcomb. He was director of Washburn Observatory at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1881 to 1885. He was elected a member of the American National Academy of Sciences in 1885.
On August 28, 1877, a few days after Asaph Hall discovered the moons of Mars Deimos and Phobos, he claimed to have found a third satellite of Mars. Further analysis showed large mistakes in his observations.
He was president of the University of California from 1885 until 1888, and the first director of the Lick Observatory from 1888 until the end of 1897. Meanhwile in 1893 while at the observatory he published a book on Mughal Emperors, The Mogul emperors of Hindustan, A.D. 1398- A.D. 1707. He resigned as a result of internal dissent over his management among his subordinates. While at the Lick Observatory, he was the founder of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific and its first President (1889–1891).
In 1901 he became the librarian of the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he remained until his death.
His cousin, George Phillips Bond, was director of Harvard College Observatory.
He discovered a total of 22 NGC objects during his work at Washburn Observatory.
He wrote many books on popular science (and on other subjects, such as flags and heraldry), including science books intended for children. For example the book Real Things In Nature. A Reading Book of Science for American Boys and Girls published in 1916.*Wik

1922 George Bruce Halsted (23 Nov 1853 in Newark, New Jersey, USA - 16 March 1922 in New York, USA) His main interests were the foundations of geometry and he introduced non-euclidean geometry into the United States, both through his own research and writings as well as by his many important translations. Halsted gave commentaries on the work of Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Saccheri and Poincaré and made translations of their works into English. His work on the foundations of geometry led him to publish Demonstration of Descartes's theorem and Euler's theorem in the Annals of Mathematics in 1885. His other main interest was in mathematical education and, as a mathematics educator, he criticised the careless way that mathematics was presented in the textbooks of the time. He contributed over ninety article to the American Mathematical Monthly and wrote many biographies of mathematicians such as Lambert, Farkas Bolyai, Lobachevsky, De Morgan, Sylvester, Chebyshev, Cayley, Hoüel and Klein. *SAU

1933 Alfréd Haar (11 Oct 1885 in Budapest, Hungary - 16 March 1933 in Szeged, Hungary) was a Hungarian mathematician who is best remembered for his work on analysis on groups, introducing a measure on groups, now called the Haar measure. *SAU

In 1904 he began to study at the University of Göttingen. His doctorate was supervised by David Hilbert. The Haar measure, Haar wavelet, and Haar transform are named in his honor. Between 1912 and 1919 he taught at Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Together with Frigyes Riesz, he made the University of Szeged a centre of mathematics. He also founded the Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum journal together with Riesz. *Wik

1940 Sir Thomas Little Heath (5 October 1861 – 16 March 1940) was a British civil servant, mathematician, classical scholar, historian of ancient Greek mathematics, translator, and mountaineer. Heath translated works of Euclid of Alexandria, Apollonius of Perga, Aristarchus of Samos, and Archimedes of Syracuse into English.
He was distinguished for his work in Greek Mathematics and author several books on Greek mathematicians. It is primarily through Heath's translations that modern English-speaking readers are aware of what Archimedes did.
He died in Ashtead, Surrey. *Wik

1941 Edward Lindsay Ince (30 Nov 1891 in Amblecote, Staffordshire, England
- 16 March 1941 in Edinburgh, Scotland) Ince graduated from Edinburgh and researched at Edinburgh and Cambridge. He worked at universities in Leeds, Liverpool, Cairo, Edinburgh and Imperial College London before moving back to Edinburgh as Head of Technical Mathematics. He worked on Special Functions. *SAU

1980 William Prager (May 23, 1903, Karlsruhe - 16 March 1980 in Zurich, Switzerland) was a German-born US applied mathematician. He was a lecturer at Darmstadt, a deputy director at University of Göttingen, professor at Karlsruhe, University of Istanbul, the University of California, San Diego and Brown University, where he advised Bernard Budiansky.
The Society of Engineering Science has awarded the Wiliam Prager Medal in Solid Mechanics since 1983 in his honor.*Wik

1992 Yves-André Rocard (22 May 1903 in Vannes, France - 16 March 1992 in Paris, France) French mathematician and physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb for France.

After obtaining a double doctorate in mathematics (1927) and physics (1928) he was awarded a professorship in electronic physics at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

As a member of a Resistance group during the Second World War he flew to the UK in a small plane as part of a dangerous mission and was able to provide British intelligence with invaluable information. There he met up with Charles de Gaulle who named him Director of Research in the Forces navales françaises libres (the Navy of Free France). He became particularly interested in the detection of solar radio emissions by British Radar, which were causing military problems by jamming detection during periods of high emission, and was able to create a new radio navigational beam station.*Wik

1998 Sir Derek Harold Richard Barton FRS FRSE (8 September 1918 – 16 March 1998) was an English organic chemist and Nobel Prize laureate for 1969.

Barton was an English chemist, a joint recipient (with Norwegian Odd Hassel) of the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for research that helped establish conformational analysis (the study of the 3-D geometric structure of complex molecules). In a brief paper in Experienta entitled “The Conformation of the Steroid Nucleus” (1950), Barton showed that organic molecules in general and steroid molecules in particular could be assigned a preferred conformation based on work of chemical physicists, in particular by Odd Hassel. Conformational analysis is useful in the elucidation of configuration, in the planning of organic synthesis, and in the analysis of reaction mechanisms. It is fundamental to a complete understanding of enzymatic processes. *TiS

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

Sunday, 15 March 2026

On This Day in Math - March 15

1659 title page of one of Argoli's books.*Wik

...there is no study in the world which brings into more harmonious action all the faculties of the mind than [mathematics], ... or, like this, seems to raise them, by successive steps of initiation, to higher and higher states of conscious intellectual being ...
~James J Sylvester

The 74th day of the year.
74 is related to an open question in mathematics since 74² + 1 is prime. Hardy and Littlewood conjectured that asymptotic number of elements in this sequence, primes = n² + 1, not exceeding n is approximately $c \frac {\sqrt{n}} {log(n)}$ for some constant c. There was a $1000 prize for best solution to an open sequence during 2015 and submitting it to OEIS, details here

74 is the sum of the squares of two consecutive prime numbers.
A hungry number is number in the form 2ⁿ that eats as much pi as possible, for example 2⁵ is the smallest power of two that contains a 3. The smallest power that contains the first three digits of pi, 314 is 2^{7 4}
(eating e seems much harder for powers of 2) Teachers might have students try "eating pi" with other bases

22796996699 is the 999799787th prime. Note that the sum of digits of the nth prime equals the sum of digits of n. The number 74 is the largest known digit sum with this property (as of August 2004). *Prime Curios

One of my new favorite expression of pi, $ \sqrt{\frac{6}{1^2}+\frac{6}{2^2}+\frac{6}{3^2}+...} $ *@MathType

EVENTS

44 B.C. Julius Caesar assassinated on the Ides of March, a phrase which came to denote an ill omen. The word “ides” is from the Etruscan for one-half (it is the middle of the lunar month).

1590 On this day in 1590, François Viète cracked the code of a message from Philip II of Spain and sent it to Henry IV of France.

... when Philip, assuming that the cipher could not be broken, discovered that the French were aware of his military plans, he complained to the Pope that black magic was being employed against his country. *MacTutor

1689 Christiaan Huygens writes to his brother Constantijn, secretary to the Prince of Orange who is about to be crowned William III: ‘It is a shame that the Prince has so little fondness for studies and the sciences, otherwise I would have greater hope [of royal patronage].’ * @Hoooaw, Hugh Aldersey-Williams

1758 March 15th was the earliest date in the prediction of the return of Halley's comet by the team of Clairaut, La Lande and Lepaute. After incremental computations of the gravitational influences and motion of Jupiter and Saturn on the predicted return of Halley's comet, Alexis-Claude Clairaut presents the results to the Academies de Sciences. The computational work of the team of Clairaut, with La Lande and Nicole-Reine Lepaute, (having removed Saturn from the last few months calculations to speed the results) had predicted a window of arrival between March 15 and May 15 (1758).
The unruly comet reached perihelion on the 13th of March, 1759 *David A Grier, When Computers Were Human.

Addendum: The Renaissance Mathematicus writes about La Landes support for female astronomers, "As a young man he {La Lande} assisted Alexis-Claude Clairaut in the recalculation of the orbit of Comet Halley. Lalande was ably assisted in this tedious but complex mathematical work by Nicole-Reine Lepaute (Births)(1723–1788). In his publication Clairaut did not acknowledge Lepaute’s contribution, which angered Lalande, who honored her work so"

*David Darling

In 1806, a 6-kg chondritemeteorite - carrying carbon-based, organic chemicals - was unequivocally identified for the first time. Its arrival on earth was noted at 5:30 pm, outside Alais, France. The organic chemicals it carried suggested the possibility of life on whatever body was the source, somewhere in the universe. According to the observations of Berzelius and a commission appointed by the French Academy it "emits a faint bituminous substance" when heated. Berzelius reported his analysis of the Alais meteorite in 1833 that destructive distillation yielded a blackish substance, indigenous water, carbon dioxide gas, a soluble salt containing ammonia, and a blackish-brown sublimate, which Berzelius confessed was unknown to him. *TIS

1871 James Clerk Maxwell in a letter to C. J. Monro comments on the fourth dimension, "The peculiarity of our space is that of its three dimensions, none is before or after another. As is x, so is y, and so is z."
Later in the same message he adds, "I am quite sure that the kind of continuity which has four dimensions all co-equal is not to be discovered by merely generalizing Cartesian space equations." Alfred M. Bork, The Fourth Dimensions in Nineteenth-Century Physics, Isis, Sept. 1964, pg 326-338

And yet, within two decades, the fourth power will be widely discussed.The fourth dimension in geometric thought became more popular after the publication of Flatland and more directly following the publication of work by Charles Hinton in 1888. According to OED, he first used the word tesseract in 1888 in his book A New Era of Thought. He also invented the words "kata" (from the Greek "down from") and "ana" (from the Greek "up toward") to describe the two opposing fourth-dimensional directions—the 4-D equivalents of left and right, forwards and backwards, and up and down.

Matt Parker's fun book on the Fourth Dimension

1873 Lewis Carroll in a letter to fourteen year old Helen Fielden offers a tempting geometric problem,

I don’t know if you’re fond of puzzles, or not. If you are, try this. If not, never mind. A gentlemen (a nobleman let us say, to make it more interesting) had a sitting-room with only one window in it — a square window, 3 feet high and 3 feet wide. Now, he had weak eyes, and the window gave too much light, so (don’t you like “so” in a story?) he sent for the builder, and told him to alter it, so as to give half the light. Only, he was to keep it square — he was to keep it 3 feet high — and he was to keep it 3 feet wide. How did he do it? Remember, he wasn’t allowed to use curtains, or shutters, or colored glass, or anything of that sort.

I must tell you an awful story of my trying to set a puzzle to a little girl the other day. It was at a dinner party, at dessert. I had never seen her before, but, as she was sitting next me, I rashly proposed to her to try the puzzle (I daresay you know of it) of “the fox, the goose, and bag of corn.” And I got some biscuits to represent the fox and the other things. Her mother was sitting on the other side, and said, “Now you take pains, my dear, and do it right!” The consequences were awful! She shrieked out, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it! Oh, Mamma! Mamma!” threw herself into her mother’s lap, and went off into a fit of sobbing which lasted several minutes! That was a lesson to me about trying children with puzzles. I do hope the square window won’t produce any awful effect on you! I am.

*Robin Wilson, Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life (If the puzzle stumps you, I put a helpful hint at the bottom after credits.)

1892 The earliest working type of escalator was patented in 1892 by Jesse W. Reno, and was actually introduced in 1896 as a novelty ride at Coney Island, a theme park in New York. Also during that decade George H. Wheeler patented a moving stairway with a moving handrail and flat steps that had to be boarded and exited from the side. Charles D. Seeberger bought Wheeler’s patent in 1898 and went to work at the Otis Elevator Company developing the first step-type moving stairway. It was Seeberger who created the name “escalator”, from the word scala (Latin for steps), and the word elevator, which was already in general use in the US by this time, and registered it as a trademark for a moving stairway.

The first escalator-like machine appeared in the mid 19th century, two years after the first passenger elevator. In 1859, Nathan Ames of the state of Michigan in the United States invented something he called Revolving Stairs, enshrined in history as US patent number 25,076, and generally acknowledged as the world’s first escalator. But Ames was unable to put the invention into practical use; he died in 1860, and in fact the thing was never built. The installation design formed an equilateral triangle that required passengers to jump on the stairway at the base and jump off at the top. *Mitsubishi

1933 Carl Anderson's discovery of the positron was published. Anderson had observed a new kind of particle, which he named the positron. It was soon to be identified as the first antiparticle, the antielectron. Anderson’s detailed findings were published #OTD. Although the scientific community expressed skepticism, the positron fitted with Paul Dirac's prediction in 1931 of the antielectron.

@NobelPrize

"Cloud chamber photograph by Anderson, the first positron ever observed. The deflection and direction of the particle's ion trail indicate it is a positron." *@NobelPrize

1933 Winston Churchill was very interested in science and wrote often and popularly on the subject. He chaired a conference in on the atomic discoveries in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. On this date his scientific friend, Frederick Lindemann said of him, "All the qualities … of the scientist are manifest in him. The readiness to face realities, even though they contradict a favourite hypothesis; the recognition that theories are made to ﬁt facts, not facts to ﬁt the theories; the interest in phenomena and the desire to explore them, and above all the underlying conviction that the world is not just a jumble of events but that there must be some higher unity." *Graham Farmelo, Churchill's Bomb

1955 John von Neumann sworn in as one of the ﬁrst Atomic Energy Commissioners. In August he learned that he had bone cancer. *Goldstein, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann

1994 Aldus Corporation and Adobe Systems Inc. Merge:
Aldus Corporation and Adobe Systems Inc. announce they will merge. Aldus revolutionized desktop publishing (DTP) when founder Paul Brainerd released the PageMaker program in 1985. Computer Scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke applied knowledge learned in their graduate work to similar products and founded Adobe in 1982.CHM

2023 Every year on the Sunday on, or following March 15 since 1957, the city of Hinckley, Ohio has eagerly awaited the return of the buzzards at "Buzzards' Roost" at the Hinckley Reservation, part of the Cleveland Metroparks. *about.com Just as the swallows return to the Mission of Capistrano every year on March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, the buzzards return to Hinckley, Ohio, every year on March 15. Historical records dating to 1820 speak of the return of the buzzards.

If you are planning on going, don't miss the pancake breakfast/lunch at the elementary school.

BIRTHS

1570 Andrea Argoli a versatile Italian scholar. He was a jurist, mathematician, astronomer and astrologer, and medical writer.
He was professor of mathematics at the University of Rome La Sapienza, from 1622 to 1627, and then the University of Padua 1632 to 1657. His astrology pupils may have included Placido Titi, and Giambattista Zenno, astrologer to Wallenstein.*Wik
From 1622 to 1627 he held a chair of mathematics in Rome, but lost it because of his enthusiasm for astrology. *VFR

Argoli's extensive astronomical ephemerides, based first on the Prutenic Tables (1620-1640) and later on his own tables (1630-1700), which were based on the observations of Tycho Brahe, gave permanence to his reputation. Delambre has bestowed three pages upon Argoli, who, it appears, was well informed about new scientific discoveries, and is aptly described as “one of those laborious men who wrote long works for the use of astronomers, and particularly of those who were also astrologers.” Argoli's ephemerides were used as the basis of Ferdinand Verbiest's calendars. *Wik

1713 Abbé Nicolas Louis de La Caille (15 Mar 1713; 21 Mar 1762 at age 48) was a French astronomer who named 15 of the 88 constellations in the sky. He spent 1750-1754 mapping the constellations visible from the Southern Hemisphere, as observed from the Cape of Good Hope, the southernmost part of Africa. In his years there, he was said to have observed over 10,000 stars using just his 1/2-inch refractor. He established the first southern star catalogue containing 9776 stars (Caelum Australe Stelliferum, published partly in 1763 and completely in 1847), and a catalogue of 42 nebulae in 1755 containing 33 true deep sky objects (26 his own discoveries).*TIS

*Wik

1813 John Snow (15 March 1813 – 16 June 1858) was an English physician and a leader in the development of anesthesia and medical hygiene. He is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology, in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, in 1854, which he curtailed by removing the handle of a water pump. Snow's findings inspired the adoption of anesthesia as well as fundamental changes in the water and waste systems of London, which led to similar changes in other cities, and a significant improvement in general public health around the world.

Image, John Snow memorial and public house on Broadwick Street, Soho

The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World is a book by Steven Berlin Johnson. Highly Recommended

1837 Esprit Jouffret (15 March 1837 – 6 November 1904) was a French artillery officer, insurance actuary and mathematician, author of Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions (Elementary Treatise on the Geometry of Four Dimensions, 1903), a popularization of Henri Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis in which Jouffret described hypercubes and other complex polyhedra in four dimensions and projected them onto the two-dimensional page.

An illustration from Jouffret's Traité élémentaire de géométrie à quatre dimensions. The book, which influenced Picasso, was given to him by Princet.

Maurice Princet brought Traite to artist Pablo Picasso's attention. Picasso's sketchbooks for his 1907 painting Les Demoiselles d'Avignon illustrate Jouffret's influence on the artist's work. *Wik

*Linda Hall Org

1855 Sir Charles Vernon Boys, FRS (15 Mar 1855; 30 Mar 1944 at age 88) English physicist and inventor of sensitive instruments. He graduated in mining and metallurgy, self-taught in a wide knowledge of geometrical methods. In 1881, he invented the integraph, a machine for drawing the antiderivative of a function. Boys is known particularly for his utilization of the torsion of quartz fibres in the measurement of minute forces, enabling him to elaborate (1895) on Henry Cavendish's experiment to improve the values obtained for the Newtonian gravitational constant. He also invented an improved automatic recording calorimeter for testing manufactured gas (1905) and high-speed cameras to photograph rapidly moving objects, such as bullets and lightning discharges. Upon retirement in 1939, he grew weeds.*TIS

A reproduction of his wonderful book, Soap-Bubbles: Their Colours and the Forces Which Mould Them : Being the Substance of Many Lectures Delivered to Juvenile and Popular Audiences with the Addition of Several New and Original Sections

1860 Walter Frank Raphael Weldon DSc FRS (Highgate, London, 15 March 1860 – Oxford, 13 April 1906) generally called Raphael Weldon, was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.*Wik Pearson said of him, "He was by nature a poet, and these give the best to science, for they give ideas." *SAU

1868 Grace Chisholm Young (née Chisholm; 15 March 1868 – 29 March 1944) was an English mathematician. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, England and continued her studies at Göttingen University in Germany, where in 1895 she became the first woman to receive a doctorate in any field in that country. Her early writings were published under the name of her husband, William Henry Young, and they collaborated on mathematical work throughout their lives. For her work on calculus (1914–16), she was awarded the Gamble Prize.
Her son, Laurence Chisholm Young, was also a prominent mathematician. One of her living granddaughters, Sylvia Wiegand (daughter of Laurence), is also a mathematician (and a past president of the Association for Women in Mathematics.)*Wik

1940 Jacob Palis Jr. (15 March 1940 – 7 May 2025) was a Brazilian mathematician and academic. Palis's research interests were mainly dynamical systems and differential equations. Some themes are global stability and hyperbolicity, bifurcations, attractors and chaotic systems. He proposed the Palis' conjectures (which form the Palis' program), which influenced the development of the theory of dynamical systems, and also of its applications to other sciences.[6] He was a world leader in chaos theory research. Palis was an influential figure in the development of mathematics in Brazil.

Palis was born in Uberaba, Minas Gerais. His father was a Syrian immigrant, and his mother was of Lebanese ancestry. The couple had eight children (five men and three women), and Jacob was the youngest. His father was a merchant, owner of a large store, and supported and funded the studies of his children. Palis said that he already enjoyed mathematics in his childhood.

At 16, Palis moved to Rio de Janeiro to study engineering at the University of Brazil – now UFRJ. He was approved in first place in the entrance exam, but was not old enough to be accepted; he then had to take the university's entry exam again a year later, at which again he obtained first place. He completed the course in 1962 with honors and receiving the award for the best student.

In 1964, he moved to the United States. In 1966, he obtained his master's degree in mathematics under the guidance of Stephen Smale at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1968 his PhD, with the thesis On Morse-Smale Diffeomorphisms, again with Smale as advisor.

In 1968, he returned to Brazil and became a researcher at the Instituto Nacional de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Beginning in 1973 he held a permanent position as professor at IMPA, where he was director from 1993 until 2003. He was Secretary-General of the Third World Academy of Sciences from 2004 to 2006, and elected its president in 2006[13] and remained on position till December 2012. He was also president of the International Mathematical Union from 1999 to 2002. He was president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences from 2007 to 2016.[15] Palis advised more than forty PhD students so far from more than ten countries, including Artur Oscar Lopes, Ricardo Mañé, Welington de Melo, Carlos Gustavo Moreira, Enrique Pujals and Marcelo Viana

Palis died at a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, on 7 May 2025, at the age of 85. He had been hospitalized since March.

Palis received numerous medals and decorations. He was a foreign member of several academies of sciences, including the United States National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences and German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2005 Palis received the Legion of Honor.

He was a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. In 2010, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for his fundamental contributions in the mathematical theory of dynamical systems that has been the basis for many applications in various scientific disciplines, such as in the study of oscillations. He was also a recipient of the 1988 TWAS Prize *Wik

DEATHS

1897 James Joseph,(Sylvester) (3 Sep 1814; 15 Mar 1897) youngest child of Abraham Joseph, born in London. The eldest son, an actuary, eventually migrated to the U.S. where, for unknown reasons, he took the surname Sylvester. The rest of the family soon followed suit, so that is how James Joseph Sylvester got his name. *VFR British mathematician who, with Arthur Cayley, founded the theory of algebraic invariants, algebraic-equation coefficients that are unaltered when the coordinate axes are translated or rotated. Beginning in 1833, he studied at St John's College, Cambridge. However, at this time signing a religious oath to the Church of England was required to graduate. Being Jewish, he refused and so he did not graduate. He taught physics at the University of London (1838-41), one of the few places which did not bar him because of his religion. Sylvester did important work on matrix theory, in particular, to study higher dimensional geometry. In 1851 he discovered the discriminant of a cubic equation. Earlier in his life, he tutored Florence Nightingale.*TIS (This idea of Sylvester tutoring Nightingale, to the best of my knowledge, originates from the Herbert Baker obituary. Karen Hunger Parshall, among others, has questioned the accuracy of this statement.)
James Joseph Sylvester died, at age 83, after earlier suffering a paralytic stroke while working at his mathematics. *VFR
I came across a nice story about Sylvester on the wonderful "Cut-the-Knot" blog of Alexander Bogomolny. He writes, "Sylvester was one the greatest British mathematicians of the 19th century. He was known for his absentmindedness and poor memory; on one occasion he even denied the truth of one of his own theorems."

1900 Elwin Bruno Christoffel (November 10, 1829 in Montjoie, now called Monschau – March 15, 1900 in Strasbourg) was a German mathematician and physicist. Christoffel worked on conformal maps, potential theory, invariant theory, tensor analysis, mathematical physics, geodesy, and shock waves. The Christoffel symbol, Riemann–Christoffel tensor, and Schwarz–Christoffel mapping are named after him. *Enotes.com

1960 Eduard Cech,(29 June 1893 in Stracov, Bohemia (now Czech Republic)- 15 March 1960 in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic)) Czech topologist. His research interests included projective differential geometry and topology. In 1921–1922 he collaborated with Guido Fubini in Turin. He died in Prague. *Wik

1955 Michele Angelo Besso (25 May 1873 Riesbach – 15 March 1955 Genoa) was a Swiss/Italian engineer of Jewish Italian (Sephardi) descent. He was a close friend of Albert Einstein during his years at the Federal Polytechnic Institute in Zurich, today the ETH Zurich, and then at the patent office in Bern. Besso is credited with introducing Einstein to the works of Ernst Mach, the sceptical critic of physics who influenced Einstein's approach to the discipline. Einstein called Besso "the best sounding board in Europe" for scientific ideas.
In a letter of condolence to the Besso family Albert Einstein wrote his now famous quote "Now Besso has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion" *Wik

1962 Arthur Holly Compton (10 Sep 1892; 15 Mar 1962) American physicist and engineer. He was a joint winner, with C.T.R. Wilson of England, of the Nobel Prize for Physics (1927) for his discovery and explanation of the change in the wavelength of X rays when they collide with electrons in metals. This so-called Compton effect is caused by the transfer of energy from a photon to a single electron, then a quantum of radiation is re-emitted in a definite direction by the electron, which in so doing must recoil in a direction forming an acute angle with that of the incident radiation. During WW II, in 1941, he was appointed Chairman of the National Academy of Sciences Committee to Evaluate Use of Atomic Energy in War, assisting in the development of the atomic bomb.*TIS

1992 Deane Montgomery (2 Sept 1909 - 15 March 1992 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA) was a mathematician specializing in topology who was one of the contributors to the final resolution of Hilbert's fifth problem in the 1950s. He served as President of the American Mathematical Society from 1961 to 1962.
Born in the small town of Weaver, Minnesota, he received his B.S. from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN and his Masters and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa in 1933; his dissertation advisor was Edward Chittenden.
In 1941 Montgomery was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1988, he was awarded the American Mathematical Society Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement.*Wik

2004 William Hayward Pickering (24 Dec 1910; 15 Mar 2004) Engineer and physicist, head of the team that developed Explorer 1, the first U.S. satellite. He collaborated with Neher and Robert Millikan on cosmic ray experiments in the 1930s, taught electronics in the 1930s, and was at Caltech during the war. He spent the rest of his career with the Jet Propusion Laboratory, becoming its Director (1954) with responsibility for the U.S. unmanned exploration of the planets and the solar system. Among these were the Mariner spacecraft to Venus and Mercury, and the Viking mission to Mars. The Voyager spacecraft yielded stunning photographs of the planets Jupiter and Saturn.*TIS

Photograph 11 of Mars surface, taken by Mariner 4, July 14, 1965, showing impact craters (Wikimedia commons)

2004 John A. Pople (31 Oct 1925; 15 Mar 2004) British mathematician and chemist who, (with Walter Kohn), received the 1998 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on computational methodology to study the quantum mechanics of molecules, their properties and how they act together in chemical reactions. Using Schrödinger's fundamental laws of quantum mechanics, he developed a computer program which, when provided with particulars of a molecule or a chemical reaction, outputs a description of the properties of that molecule or how a chemical reaction may take place - often used to illustrate or explain the results of different kinds of experiment. Pople provided his GAUSSIAN computer program to researchers (first published in 1970). Further developed, it is now used by thousands of chemists the world over. *TIS

2006 George Whitelaw Mackey (February 1, 1916 in St. Louis, Missouri – March 15, 2006 in Belmont, Massachusetts) was an American mathematician.
Mackey's main areas of research were in the areas of representation theory, ergodic theory, and related parts of functional analysis. Earlier in his career Mackey did significant work in the duality theory of locally convex spaces, which provided tools for subsequent work in this area, including Alexander Grothendieck's work on topological tensor products.
He has written numerous survey articles connecting his research interests with a large body of mathematics and physics, particularly quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. He was among the first five recipients of William Lowell Putnam fellowships in 1938.*Wik