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

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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).

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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

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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

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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"

 

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*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

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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

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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.)

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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*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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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."

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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

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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

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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

(Hint for the Lewis Carroll puzzle, think of diamonds.) 

On This Day in Math - March 14

  

Two of my favorite guys celebrate Pi-Day

"It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry."
~Albert Einstein

The 73rd day of the year; 73 is the alphanumeric value of the word NUMBER: 14 + 21 + 13 + 2 + 5 + 18 = 73 *Tanya Khovanova, Number Gossip;

73 is the largest prime day of the year so that you can append another digit and make another prime six times, 73,739, 7393, 73939, 739391, 7393913,  73939133.

The 73rd day is Pi day in non-leap years, the string 73 appears at the 299th and 300th digits after the decimal point of Pi.

Fans of the Big Bang Theory on TV know that Leonard refers to 73 as the "Chuck Norris of Numbers"  After Sheldon points out that : 73 is the 21st prime, and it's mirror image 37 is the 12th prime. And 21 is the product of 7 and 3.  This enigma is the only known such combination.


Sheldon failed to mention that 73 is also the 37th odd number.

And 73 is the smallest prime factor of a googol + 1 *Prime Curios

A good time to introduce your student's to a nice way to find many digits of pi, pick ) pick a relatively close apppx of pi (I'll use 2.5) and call it x, then x+ sin(x) is a better approximation, and repeating continues to give more and more digits of pi up to limits of calculator For 2.5 we get 3.098 -> 3.14157 -> 3.141592654 .  (student's might be challenged for why (and when) this works).

And of course, for Pi Day, we need the world's most accurate Pi Chart

One of my new favorite expression of pi, \( \sqrt{\frac{6}{1^2}+\frac{6}{2^2}+\frac{6}{3^2}+...} \) *@MathType
More math facts for every year day here

EVENTS

1663   According to his own account, Otto von Guericke completes his book Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio, detailing his experiments on vacuum and his discovery of electrostatic repulsion. *The Painter Flynn

Curious and inspired by the Copernican cosmology and hardly understanding new ideas of vast, endless, empty space where light would propagate, bodies of matter could move about unhindered, and sound cannot be detected, von Guericke set about replicating this nothing phenomenon on Earth. He built a vacuum pump, pumped air out of a two joined magdeburg hemispheres, attached a team of horses to each side, and had them pull. He demonstrated this again to the King of Prussia in 1663 and was awarded a lifetime pension. One of these dignitaries, the Archbishop Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn, bought von Guericke's apparatus from him and had it sent to his Jesuit College at Würzburg. One of the professors at the College, Fr. Gaspar Schott, entered into friendly correspondence with von Guericke and thus it was that, at the age of 55, von Guericke's work was first published as an Appendix to a book by Fr. Schott – Mechanica Hydraulico-pneumatica – published in 1657.[12] This book came to the attention of Robert Boyle who, stimulated by it, embarked on his own experiments on air pressure and the vacuum, and in 1660 published New Experiments Physico-Mechanical touching the Spring of Air and its Effects. The following year this was translated into Latin and, made aware of it in correspondence with Fr. Schott, von Guericke acquired a copy.

 He embarked upon his Magnum Opus, which as well as a detailed account of his experiments on the vacuum, contains his pioneering electrostatic experiments in which electrostatic repulsion was demonstrated for the first time and he sets out his theologically based view of the nature of space.*Wik 

*Wik

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1664 Isaac Barrow delivered his “Prefatory Oration” as the first Lucasion Professor at Cambridge. It lasted two hours, and contained the following plea for students to come to his office: “If it be then your Pleasure, ye Lovers of Study, come always; be not restrained through any Fear, or retarded too much by Modesty, what you may do by your Right, you shall make me do willingly, nay gladly and joyfully. Ask your Questions, make your Enquiries, bid and command; you shall neither find me adverse nor refractory to your Commands, but officious and obedient. If you meet with any Obstacles or Difficulties, or are retarded with any Doubts while you are walking in the cumbersome Road of this Study of Mathematics, I beg you to impart them, and I shall endeavor to remove every Hindrance out of your Way to the best of my Knowledge and Ability.” In closing and referring to himself he states that “An accomplished mathematician, is a most wretched orator.” * The Prefactory Oration' (address to the University of Cambridge upon being elected Lucasian Professor of Mathematics, 14 Mar 1664)

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1667/8 Pepys records in his diary that he saw Sir. Samuel Morland’s adding machine for pounds, shillings and pence. Samuel Pepys also wrote in his diary, that the machine of Morland is very pretty, but not very useful, while the famous scientist Robert Hooke, for example, found the machines very silly. One reason for the calculators poor reception was likely due to the lack of a carry.

Morland was well regarded in his own time as a hydraulic engineer, a precursor to James Watt.  His Steam Theory was not well known because it was published in French.  Morland had bee hired by Louis XIV to advise on the giant waterworks at Versaille.He was also reported to have had an interest in flight, and possessed a set of feathered wings to fly with.  He had also made a geared trigonometric machine a few years earlier.

*http://history-computer.com

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1671 (OS)- 1672 John Collins writes to James Gregory telling him that Collins had informed Wallis of Sluse's intention to write up his methods for maxima and minima and that Wallis responded by stating his intent to write up his own notions on the subject. *PB notes

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1818 John Adams writes to Thomas Jefferson about David Rittenhouse and his Orrery, he says:
"Rittenhouse was a virtuous and amiable man, an exquisite mechanician, master of the astronomy known in his time, an expert mathematician, a patient calculator of numbers." U Penn Library website

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In 1839, Sir John Herschel referred to "photography" in a lecture to the Royal Society—possibly the first use of the word. Following Fox Talbot's publication of his invention of what became known as the Calotype process, a number of scientific men made their own investigations, including not only Herschel but also Berard, Robert Hunt and Draper. Herschel used the name Chrysotype (from the Greek word for gold) for his process. It used paper washed in a solution of ammonio-citrate of iron and brought out the image with a solution of soda or chloride of gold, or with nitrate of silver, and fixing it in the first case by washing it with iodide of potassium and in the second, with hyposulphite of soda. It had technical difficulties in controlling the contrast, colour and fogging of the image. *TIS
Appropriately, it was an astronomer who coined the term photography, but the question is, which one. Some credit Johann Heinrich von Madler for combining “photo” (from the Greek word for “light”) and “graphy” (“to write”). *APS.org  Madler's claim rests on a paper supposedly written on 25 February 1839 in the German newspaper Vossische Zeitung. Many still credit Sir John Herschel both for coining the word and for introducing it to the public. His uses of it in private correspondence prior to 25 February 1839 and at his Royal Society lecture on the subject in London on 14 March 1839 have long been amply documented and accepted as settled facts.

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1926 Erwin Schrödinger's "Quantisierung als Eigenwertproblem," the first of six remarkable papers laying out his wave formulation of quantum

mechanics, was published in Annalen der Physik *Robert McNees@mcnees The equation is on his grave marker.  You may be surprised, as I was, by the little dot over the Psi symbol.  That is Newton's dot or "little pricks" as he called them to mark the fluxion, his word for derivative.  Since this stone was probably done near or after his death in 1961 (both he and his wife died that year), it made me wonder if he still used that in 1926 when he wrote the paper.

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1909  Robert Serber, the Manhattan Project physicist who gave FatMan & LittleBoy their codenames & introduced new arrivals to nuclear fission in a series of lectures (The LosAlamos Primer), 

*B H Gross 

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1930 At breakfast in the family home in Oxford, 11-year-old Venetia Burney suggested a name for a newly discovered planet that her grandfather read about in his Times of London edition. Venetia’s grandfather, the retired head of the historic Bodleian Library at Oxford University, passed the idea along to an astronomer friend of his, who telegraphed his colleagues at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. They voted unanimously in favor of the name. Pluto, the solar system’s ninth planet, was born. Read more at *Washington Post.   In 1877, Venetia's grandfather's brother, Henry, a housemaster at Eton, had successfully proposed that the two dwarf moons of Mars be named Phobos and Deimos, two attendants of the Roman war god, whose names mean fear and terror.

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1934 France issued a stamp for the centenary of the death of Joseph Jacquard (1752–1834), inventor of an improved loom for figured weaving. The punched cards that he invented provided the model for computer cards. [Scott #295] *VFR

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1951 Kurt G¨odel shared the first Einstein award with Julian Schwinger. *VFR

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1955 Bell Labs Announces TRADIC "Giant Brain":
AT&T Bell Laboratories announces the completion of the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC. TRADIC contained nearly 800 transistors, which replaced the standard vacuum tube and allowed the machine to operate on fewer than 100 watts -- or one-twentieth the power required by a comparable vacuum tube computer.*CHM

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1962 Norway issued a pair of stamps commemorating the centenary of the birth of Vilhelm Bjerknes (1862–1951), physicist, meterologist, and mathematician. [Scott #403–4] *VFR

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1988 The earliest known official or large-scale celebration of Pi Day was organized by Larry Shaw in 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium, where Shaw worked as a physicist, with staff and public marching around one of its circular spaces, then consuming fruit pies. March 14 was selected because the numerical date (3.14) represents the first three digits of pi, and it also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.

The Exploratorium continues to hold Pi Day celebrations.

On March 12, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution (HRES 224), recognizing March 14, 2009, as National Pi Day *Wik

In 2019, International Mathematics Day was recognized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) during its general conference.

The theme for International Day of Mathematics 2024 is "Playing with Mathematics."  

Larry Shaw leading Pi Day Parade

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1995 On Tuesday, March 14, Speaking at the string theory conference at University of Southern California , Edward Witten made the surprising suggestion that the five existing string theories were in fact not distinct theories, but different limits of a single theory which he called M-theory. Witten's proposal was based on the observation that the five string theories can be mapped to one another by certain rules called dualities and are identified by these dualities. "E. Witten: Some problems of strong and weak coupling" *Wik

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2012 Judge rules you can't copyright Pi... The story stripped from Devlin's Angle by Keith Devlin:

The story begins on Pi Day (March 14, or 3.14) 2011, when New Scientist posted a video by a musician called Michael John Blake, in which he played a piano rendering of the first 31 decimal places of pi, played at a tempo of 157 beats per minute (314 divided by two).

The video immediately went viral, but a few hours later, YouTube was contacted by a lawyer representing jazz musician Lars Erickson, who claimed that Blake's work sounded very similar to his 1992 composition "Pi Symphony", which he had registered with the US copyright office. With a claim of copyright infringement, YouTube removed the video. But Blake decided to lodge an appeal.
...
One year later, on March 14 of this year, US district court judge Michael H. Simon, deliberately choosing to announce his decision on Pi Day, dismissed Erickson’s claim of copyright infringement. "Pi is a non-copyrightable fact, and the transcription of pi to music is a non-copyrightable idea," Simon wrote in his legal opinion.

So Sing it People "3 . 1 4 1 5 9 2 6 5 3 5 8 9 7 9 3 2 3 8 4 6 2 6 4 3 3 8 3 2 7 9"  

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2015 Pi day on this day will have a special moment (or two such moments for folks with 12 hour clocks), at 9:26:53 of 3/14/15. Approximating \( \pi \approx 3.14159265 \)

The string 2024 occurs at position 14590. This string occurs 19859 times in the first 200M digits of Pi.

counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted. 

The string 24 occurs at position 292.

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2015 This day is the planned first day issue of a Danish stamp showing the popular Hanson writing ball from 1878. The writing ball was invented in 1865 by the reverend Rasmus Malling-Hansen (1835–1890) principal of the Royal Institute for the Deaf-Mutes in Copenhagen. The machine included an electromagnetic escapement for the Ball, thus making Malling-Hansen's machine the first electric typewriter. It was exhibited at a great industrial exhibition in Copenhagen in 1873, at the world exhibition in Vienna in 1873, and at the Paris exhibition or Exposition Universelle. All through the 1870s it won several awards. It was sold in many countries in Europe, and it is known that it was still in use in offices in London as late as 1909. *Wik

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2016 Sphere packing for eight dimensions is solved by Maryna Viazovska. In 1611, Kepler conjectured that here was no way to pack spheres more densly than the way we would normally stack oranges or cannonballs, with every triangle of three supporting another nestled above (and below) tangent to all of the first three. By 1831 Gauss had managed to prove the conjecture for 3d. In her paper Viazovska proved no packing of unit balls in Euclidean space R⁸ has density greater than that of the E8-lattice packing. One week later, (March 21) building on her work, with collaboration of four others, they were able to prove that the Leech lattice is the densest packing of congruent spheres in twenty-four dimensions, and that it is the unique optimal periodic packing. *arxiv.

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2018 NASA twin study finds that Scott Kelly is no longer identical to his twin brother after one year in space, 7% of his genes altered.  

*OnThisDay.com

BIRTHS

1692 Pieter van Musschenbroek (14 Mar 1692; 19 Sep 1761 at age 69) Dutch mathematician and physicist who invented the Leyden jar, the first effective device for storing static electricity. He grew up in a family that manufactured scientific instruments such as telescopes, microscopes and air pumps. Before Musschenbroek's invention, static electricity had been produced by Guericke using a sulphur ball, with minor effects. In Jan 1746, Musschenbroek placed water in a metal container suspended on silk cords, and led a brass wire through a cork into the water. He built up a charge in the water. When an unwary assistant touched the metal container and the brass wire, the discharge from this apparatus delivered a substantial shock of static electricity. The Leyden name is linked to the discovery having being made at the University of Leiden. *TIS

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1811  Andrew Hart (14 March 1811  , 13 Apr 1890)  was an Irish mathematician and Vice-Provost of Trinity College Dublin who wrote on geometry.  

Hart obtained much reputation as a mathematician, and published useful treatises on hydrostatics and mechanics. Between 1849 and 1861 he contributed valuable papers to the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal, to the 'Proceedings of the Irish Academy,' and to the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics, chiefly on the subject of geodesic lines and on curves.

Hart's most important contribution was contained in his paper Extension of Terquem's theorem respecting the circle which bisects three sides of a triangle (1861). Hart wrote this paper after carrying out an investigation suggested by William Rowan Hamilton in a letter to Hart. In addition, Hart corresponded with George Salmon on the same topic. This paper contains the result which became known as Hart's Theorem, which is a generalization of Feuerbach's Theorem. Hart's Theorem states:

Taking any three of the eight circles which touch three others, a circle can be described to touch these three, and to touch a fourth circle of the eight touching circles.

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1835 Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli (14 Mar 1835; 4 Jul 1910 at age 75) Italian astronomer who is remembered for his observations of Mars over seven oppositions and named the "seas" and "continents". In 1877, he saw on the surface of the planet Mars the markings that he called canali (channels), later misinterpreted as "canals." He made extensive studies, both observational and theoretical, of comets, determining from the shapes of their tails that there was a repulsive force from the sun. He showed that meteor swarms travel through space in cometary orbits. He explained the regular meteor showers as the result of the dissolution of comets and proved it for the Perseids. He suggested that Mercury and Venus rotate on their axes, discovered the asteroid Hesperia (1861) and was a major observer of double stars. *TIS

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1838 Rev U Jessee Kniseley (March 14, 1838 - May 19, 1881) was born in New Philadelphia, Ohio March 14 1838 He was a self made man and in a very great measure self educated. The degree of MA was conferred on him by Marietta College and that of PhD by Wittenberg College in which latter institution he had formerly been a classical and theological student. He also attended Jefferson College Pa but was not a graduate of any college. He was chosen President and Professor of Mathematics of Luther College, an institution of ephemeral existence. Rev Dr Knisely was a Lutheran preacher of marked ability and great eloquence and for fourteen years previous to his death he was the loved pastor of the church of that denomination at Newcomerstown. He was a very fine mathematician and excelled especially in the solution of algebraic and geometrical problems The elegant solution of a Diophantine problem on pp 105 and 106 of the Mathematical Visitor Vol I No 4 and of the celebrated Malfatti's Problem pp 189 and 190 of No 6 are admirable samples of his superior skill in these departments of analysis. Rev Dr Knisely was also a master of language and the author of several works. Copies of his Parser's Manual and Arithmetical Questions for the Recreation of the Teacher and the Discipline of the Pupil are possessed by the writer. It is stated in the Tuscarawas Chronicle from which the substance of a portion of this notice is taken that he was also author of Kniseley's Arithmetic and Mrs Knisely states that he had in preparation a work on the Calculus, but of these works the writer knows nothing. His last work was the revision of Ray's Higher Arithmetic and the Key which he completed but a short time before his death. He died May 19, 1881 at the age of 43 years 2 months and 5 days The disease that caused his death was a general prostration of the nervous system. *Artemas Martin, Mathematical Visitor January 1882

For those interested, his grave is at Fair Street Cemetery in  New Philadelphia, Tuscarawas County, Ohio, USA.

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1862 Vilhelm F(riman) K(oren) Bjerknes (14 Mar 1862; 9 Apr 1951 at age 89) was a Norwegian meteorologist and physicist, one of the founders of the modern science of weather forecasting. As a young boy, Bjerknes assisted his father, Carl Bjerknes (a professor of mathematics) in carrying out experiments to verify the theoretical predictions that resulted from his father's hydrodynamic research. After graduating from university, Bjerknes moved on to his own work applying hydrodynamic and thermodynamic theories to atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions in order to predict future weather conditions. His work in meteorology and on electric waves was important in the early development of wireless telegraphy. He evolved a theory of cyclones known as the polar front theory with his son Jakob. *TIS

Vilhelm Bjerknes with his brother Ernst Wilhelm Bjerknes (left) and his sister-in-law, Norway's first female professor, Kristine Bonnevie at her cabin Snefugl (snowbird?) at Mysuseter circa 1946, 

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1864 József Kürschák (14 March 1864 – 26 March 1933) was a Hungarian mathematician noted for his work on trigonometry and for his creation of the theory of valuations. He proved that every valued field can be embedded into a complete valued field which is algebraically closed. In 1918 he proved that the sum of reciprocals of consecutive natural numbers is never an integer. Extending Hilbert's argument, he proved that everything that can be constructed using a ruler and a compass, can be constructed by using a ruler and the ability of copying a fixed segment. He was elected a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1897. *Wik

Kurschak's Theorem shows that the dodecahedron has area that is 3/4 or the square containing it.

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1879 Albert Einstein (14 Mar 1879; 18 Apr 1955 at age 76) German-American physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity and won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921 for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. Recognized in his own time as one of the most creative intellects in human history, in the first 15 years of the 20th century Einstein advanced a series of theories that proposed entirely new ways of thinking about space, time, and gravitation. His theories of relativity and gravitation were a profound advance over the old Newtonian physics and revolutionized scientific and philosophic inquiry.*TIS

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1882 WacLlaw Sierpinski (14 March 1882 in Warsaw, - 21 Oct 1969 in Warsaw) His grave carries—according to his wish—the inscription: Investigator of infinity. [Kuratowski, A Half Century of Polish Mathematics, p. 173; Works, p. 14] *VFR Sierpinski's most important work is in the area of set theory, point set topology and number theory. In set theory he made important contributions to the axiom of choice and to the continuum hypothesis. *SAU He is also remembered for his Sierpinski gasket or Triangle

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1889 Oscar Chisini (March 14, 1889 – April 10, 1967) was an Italian mathematician. He introduced the Chisini mean in 1929. In 1929 he founded the Institute of Mathematics (Istituto di Matematica) at the University of Milan, along with Gian Antonio Maggi and Giulio Vivanti. He then held the position of chairman of the Institute from the early 1930s until 1959.The Chisini conjecture in algebraic geometry is a uniqueness question for morphisms of generic smooth projective surfaces, branched on a cuspidal curve. A special case is the question of the uniqueness of the covering of the projective plane, branched over a generic curve of degree at least five. *Wik

In mathematics, a function f of n variables x1, ..., xn leads to a Chisini mean M if, for every vector ⟨x1, ..., xn⟩, there exists a unique M such that

f(M,M, ..., M) = f(x1,x2, ..., xn).

The arithmetic, harmonic, geometric, generalised, Heronian and quadratic means are all Chisini means, as are their weighted variants.

While Oscar Chisini was arguably the first to deal with "substitution means" in some depth in 1929, the idea of defining a mean as above is quite old, appearing (for example) in early works of Augustus De Morgan.

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1909 Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. He gave lectures (5-14 Apr 1943) at Los Alamos, on the design and construction of atomic bombs as background for the Manhattan Project. Notes were typed and mimeographed as The Los Alamos Primer, technical report LA-1, given to scientists newly arriving at the top-secret laboratory. Serber coined the code-names of the three bomb designs: “Little Boy” (uranium gun), “Thin Man” (plutonium gun), and “Fat Man” (plutonium implosion). He helped assemble atomic bombs on Tinian Island that were dropped on Japan. He was part of the first American team visiting to assess their damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After WW II, he returned to academia, and by 1951 was a professor of physics at Columbia University. *TIS

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1911 Akira Yoshizawa (吉澤 章 Yoshizawa Akira; 14 March 1911 – 14 March 2005) was a Japanese origamist, considered to be the grandmaster of origami. He is credited with raising origami from a craft to a living art. According to his own estimation made in 1989, he created more than 50,000 models, of which only a few hundred designs were presented as diagrams in his 18 books. Yoshizawa acted as an international cultural ambassador for Japan throughout his career. In 1983, Emperor Hirohito awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, 5th class, one of the highest honors bestowed in Japan.
In March 1998, Yoshizawa was invited to exhibit his origami in the Louvre Museum. Although he had previously disliked his contemporaries, he was not opposed to having his photo taken with them. Many of his patterns had been diagrammed by his professional rivals, which angered Yoshizawa when he was younger.[citation needed] However, as he had aged, he found that he now enjoyed the company of his peers.
Yoshizawa died on 14 March 2005 in a hospital in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo due to complications of pneumonia on his 94th birthday *Wik Some of his work is shown in this video:

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1912  Pierre Lelong (14 March 1912 Paris – 12 October 2011) was a French mathematician who introduced the Poincaré–Lelong equation, the Lelong number and the concept of plurisubharmonic functions.

Lelong earned his doctorate in 1941 from the École Normale Supérieure, under the supervision of Paul Montel. On 5 June 1981 Lelong received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.

Lelong has made many pioneering contributions in mathematics. Especially of great impact is his work on the Poincaré-Lelong equation, closed positive currents and Lelong numbers. The best way to understand this very important part of his work is to look at it from the historic perspective of constructing meromorphic functions on abstractly defined complex manifolds and see how his contributions fit in a pivotal way into the global landscape in the theory of several complex variables.

The theory of several complex variables studies complex-analytic objects such as holomorphic and meromorphic functions and maps, complex-analytic subvarieties, holomorphic vector bundles, and coherent analytic sheaves. When a complex-analytic manifold or space is projective algebraic, by definition it is embedded inside a complex projective space and there are many complex- analytic objects on it which are constructed from those on the complex projective space. When a complex-analytic manifold is abstractly defined by piecing together local holomorphic charts, the construction of complex-analytic objects on it is a problem of fundamental importance

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DEATHS

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1855  Sir Edward Thomas ffrench Bromhead, 2nd Baronet FRS FRSE (26 March 1789 – 14 March 1855) was a British landowner and mathematician, best remembered as patron of the mathematician and physicist George Green and mentor of George Boole.

Born the son of Gonville Bromhead, 1st Baronet Bromhead and Lady Jane ffrench, Baroness ffrench, in Dublin. Bromhead was educated at the University of Glasgow and later at Caius College, Cambridge ( B.A. 1812, M.A. 1815) before taking up the study of law at the Inner Temple in London. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1817. Returning to Lincolnshire, he became High Steward of Lincoln. He became the 2nd Bromhead baronet, of Thurlby Hall in 1822.

While at Cambridge, Bromhead was a founder of the Analytical Society, a precursor of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, together with John Herschel, George Peacock and Charles Babbage, with whom he maintained a close and lifelong friendship. While he was, by all accounts, a gifted mathematician in his own right (although ill-health prevented him from pursuing his studies further), his greatest contribution to the subject is at second hand: having subscribed to the first publication of self-taught mathematician and physicist George Green, he encouraged Green to continue his research and to write further papers (which Bromhead sent on to be published in the Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society and those of the Royal Society of Edinburgh).

Bromhead repeated his success by encouraging the young George Boole from Lincoln. Bromhead was President of the Lincoln Mechanics Institute in the Lincoln Greyfriars, where George Boole's father was the curator. Boole first came to public notice when he gave a lecture on the work of Sir Isaac Newton on 5 February 1835. The young Boole's development was fed by books that Bromhead supplied.

Bromhead lost his sight when he was old and he died unmarried at his home of Thurlby Hall in Thurlby, North Kesteven on 14 March 1855. *Wik 

Local subscribers to the Essay would presumably have collected their copies from Bromley House or the bookseller's where they had placed their order. In the case of the nine or ten subscribers further afield and who in all probability were unknown to him, Green would have sent their copies with an accompanying note, curious perhaps as to who they were and how they would judge his work. Each was doubtless sent the formal letter which Green had enclosed with Bromhead's copy of the Essay. Apart from the Duke of Newcastle, Sir Edward Bromhead was the most prestigious of the subscribers. In the light of his mathematical interest at Cambridge and his enthusiasm for the French analysts, Bromhead's subscription to Green's Essay is not surprising. His patronage was ultimately of such support to Green, however, in terms of both his personality and his influence, that it is worth taking a closer look at him.*Siam

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1874 Johann Heinrich von Mädler (29 May 1794, 14 Mar 1874 at age 79) German astronomer who (with Wilhelm Beer) published the most complete map of the Moon of the time, Mappa Selenographica, 4 vol. (1834-36). It was the first lunar map to be divided into quadrants, and it remained unsurpassed in its detail until J.F. Julius Schmidt's map of 1878. Mädler and Beer also published the first systematic chart of the surface features of the planet Mars (1830). *TIS

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1934  Willie Hobbs Moore (May 23, 1934 – March 14, 1994) became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. 

Willie Hobbs Moore was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on May 23, 1934, to Bessie and William Hobbs. In 1954, the same year that the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, she boarded a train for Ann Arbor, where she studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan (UMich)—the only Black woman undergraduate in the program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in 1958 and her master’s in 1961. She worked as an engineer at several companies before she returned to the University of Michigan to pursue her PhD. In 1972, Dr. Hobbs Moore made history when she received her doctorate in physics.

For five years afterward, Dr. Hobbs Moore worked as a lecturer and research scientist at UMich. She published more than a dozen papers on protein spectroscopy in prestigious journals, including the Journal of Applied Physics, Journal of Chemical Physics, and Journal of Molecular Spectroscopy.

In 1977, Dr. Hobbs Moore joined Ford Motor Company as an assembly engineer. She went on to help the company expand its use of Japanese methods of quality engineering and manufacturing. This work proved critical to boosting Ford’s competitiveness during Japan’s domination of the automobile market. She eventually became an executive at the company.

But her passions extended far beyond work. Dr. Hobbs Moore was involved in community science and math programs and was a member of The Links, Inc., a service organization for Black women, and Delta Sigma Theta, a historically Black, service-oriented sorority founded in 1913. *APS Org

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1973 Howard Hathaway Aiken (9 Mar 1900; 14 Mar 1973 at age 72) American mathematician who invented the Harvard Mark I, forerunner of the modern electronic digital computer. While a graduate student and instructor Harvard University, Aiken's research had led to a system of differential equations which could only be solved using numerical techniques, for which he began planning large computer. His idea was to use an adaptation of Hollerith's punched card machine. When eventually built, (1943) it weighed 35 tons, had 500 miles of wire and could compute to 23 significant figures. There were 72 storage registers and central units to perform multiplication and division. It was controlled by a sequence of instructions on punched paper tapes, and used punched cards to enter data and give output from the machine. *TIS

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2005 Akira Yoshizawa (吉澤 章 Yoshizawa Akira; 14 March 1911 – 14 March 2005) (See birth in 1911 above)

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2018 Stephen W. Hawking (8 Jan 1942, 14 Mar 2018 )English theoretical physicist who was one of the world's leaders in his field. His principal areas of research were theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University (formerly held by Sir Isaac Newton). Afflicted with Lou Gehrig's disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; ALS), Hawking was confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak without the aid of a computer voice synthesizer. However, despite his challenges, he utilized his intelligence, knowledge and abilities to make remarkable contributions to the field of cosmology (the study of the universe as a whole). *TIS Hawking was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a vigorous supporter of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Born on the 300th anniversary of Galileo's death, and died on the birth anniversary of Albert Einstein.

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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