On This Day in Math - May 5

  

The man ignorant of mathematics will be increasingly limited in his graspof the main forces of civilization. ~John Kemeny,

The 125th day of the year; 125 is a cube, and the sum of distinct squares. There is no smaller value for which this is true. 125 = 5³ = 11² + 2² What's the next?   It can also be 10^2 + 5^2 .

125 can also be written as a curious sort of palindrome, 125 = 5⁽²⁺¹⁾ *Jim Wilder, @wilderlab

Like every perfect cube n^3 can be written as a sequence of consecutive odd numbers. for 5^3 the string of five is the odd numbers in the 20's, 21+23+25+27+29

Another way to find the sum is to form n^3 by adding the nth triangular number, T(n) and then the nextn-1 terms with a difference of n.  For 25 you get T(5) + (T(5)+5) + (T(5)+10) + (T(5)+15) + (T(5)+20).  

5^3 = 15 + 20 + 25 + 30 + 35

Conjectured by Zhi-Wei Sun to be the largest power (5³) for which there is no prime between it and the previous power (11²). The other prime gaps between powers are in (2³, 3²), (2⁵, 6²) and (5², 3³). 

125 and 126 are a Ruth Aaron pair of the second kind.  In the first kind prime factors are only counted once, in the second kind they are counted as often as they appear, so 5+5+5 =  2+3+3+7.  Some Ruth-Aaron pairs only have one of each factor, so they qualify under either method. The original kind were discovered for 714 Ruth's career record, and 715, the number on the day Aaron passed his record (he went on to get more).  

Several More math facts for this date at https://mathdaypballew.blogspot.com/

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EVENTS 

840 A total solar eclipse was recorded over France. Known as Emperor Louis' Eclipse. NASA Eclipse map here. *David Dickinson ‏ @Astroguyz  

Emperor Louis was so scared of the eclipse that he fell very ill, which eventually led to his death. His kingdom broke into civil war as his sons all tried to gain control. The Treaty of Verdun brought the end of this civil war by splitting up the empire into large areas that would become Germany, Italy, and France.

Louis the Pious

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1642 Théodore Deschamps, a physician from Bergerac, writes to Marin Mersenne that he remembered that in 1609, during his stay at Leiden University, he had not only witnessed a demonstration of a telescope by the mathematics professor, Rudolph Snellius, but had also met a Delft spectacle maker, who in his telescopes had covered up ‘the parts of the convex glass on which the rays coming from the object intersect each other too soon.’ (suggesting an early invention of a diaphragm that would allow a better image from poorer quality lenses) *Huib J. Zuidervaart, The ‘true inventor’ of the telescope. A survey of 400 years of debate,

Rudolph Snel van Royen (5 October 1546 – 2 March 1613), Latinized as Rudolphus Snellius, was a Dutch linguist and mathematician who held appointments at the University of Marburg and the University of Leiden. Snellius was an influence on some of the leading political and intellectual forces of the Dutch Golden Age. His son Willebrord was the astronomer and mathematician who gave his name to Snell's law.

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1777 First use of i for imaginary constant: On May 5, 1777, Euler addressed to the 'Academiae' the paper "De Formulis Differentialibus Angularibus maxime irrationalibus quas tamen per logarithmos et arcus circulares integrare licet," which was published posthumously in his "Institutionum calculi integralis," second ed., vol. 4, pp. 183-194, Impensis Academiae Imperialis Scientiarum, Petropoli, 1794.

Quoniam mihi quidem alia adhuc via non patet istud praestandi nisi per imaginaria procedendo, formulam \( \sqrt{-1}\) ilittera i in posterum designabo, ita ut sit ii = -1 ideoque 1/i = -i.

According to Cajori, the next appearance of i in print is by Gauss in 1801 in the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae. Carl Boyer believes that Gauss' adoption of i made it the standard. By 1821, when Cauchy published Cours d'Analyse, the use of i was rather standard, and Cauchy defines i as "as if \( \sqrt{-1}\) was a real quantity whose square is equal to -1."
*Jeff Miller

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1809 Mary Dixon Kies patent is approved and signed by President James Madison. Her patent was for a new technique for weaving straw with silk and thread to make ladies hats. This was the first US patent granted to a woman. *HistoryTime

(Other sources cite Hannah Slater in 1793, or Hazel Irwin, who received a patent for a cheese press in 1808, as the first.)

In 1793, Samuel Slater showed Hannah some very smooth yarn he had spun from long staple Surinam cotton. While Samuel intended to use this yarn to produce cloth, Hannah and her sister saw a different potential. Using a hand spinning wheel, they spun the yarn into thread, which turned out to be stronger than traditional linen thread. The same year, Hannah applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent for an invention - a new method of producing sewing thread from cotton. The patent was issued in the name of "Mrs Samuel Slater" causing Hazel to be overlooked as the first woman to receive a patent.  

Hazel Irwin from Boston, Massachusetts was awarded a patent on Dec. 28, 1808 for a cheese press. Hazel’s patent number was U1.8081. 

The first patent issued to an African-American woman, Sarah E. Goode, (born 1850 died 1905) was on July 14, 1885 US Pat. No. 322,177), for a cabinet design which held a fold out bed. During the day it was a desk and at night could be made into a bed.

Mary Dixon Kees

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1833 Ada Lovelace first met Charles Babbage at the home of Mary Somerville. *SAU  

 Later that month, Babbage invited Lovelace to see the prototype for his difference engine. She became fascinated with the machine and used her relationship with Somerville to visit Babbage as often as she could.

Babbage was impressed by Lovelace's intellect and analytic skills. He called her "The Enchantress of Number"  *Wik 

Lovelace was the only legitimate child of poet Lord Byron and reformer Anne Isabella Milbanke. All her half-siblings, Lord Byron's other children, were born out of wedlock to other women. Lord Byron separated from his wife a month after Ada was born and left England forever. He died in Greece when she was eight. Lady Byron was anxious about her daughter's upbringing and promoted Lovelace's interest in mathematics and logic in an effort to prevent her from developing her father's perceived insanity. Despite this, Lovelace remained interested in her father, naming her two sons Byron and Gordon. Upon her death, she was buried next to her father at her request. Although often ill in her childhood, Lovelace pursued her studies assiduously. She married William King in 1835. King was made Earl of Lovelace in 1838, Ada thereby becoming Countess of Lovelace.

Portrait of Ada by British painter Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1836)

*Wik

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1834, William Whewell wrote a letter to Michael Faraday concerning names to describe the process of electrolysis which he was investigating. Whewell suggest the names Anode and Cathode. The terms are based on the Greek prefixes "ana-" meaning "up" and "kata-" meaning "down." The chosen prefixes referred to the idea that (as was then applied) that electric current flowed from a battery's positive to a negative pole, in the manner that water would flow down from a hillside to a valley. He suggested a term - ion - for the two together instead of Zetodes or Stechions. Faraday replied that he was "delighted with the facility of expression which the new terms give me and I shall ever be your debtor for the kind assistance you have given me." *TIS Whewell had written on April 25th to Faraday suggesting these terms, but Faraday had been reluctant at first to use them. (PB)

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1883 George Cantor writes to Mitag-Leffler that Kronecker had called his work on transfinite set theory "Humbug" in a letter to Hermite. Kronecker reserved his attacks for personal correspondence and student lectures, but said little or nothing publicly against Cantor. *From the Calculus to Set Theory, 1630-1910: An Introductory History
By I. Grattan-Guinness

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1905 The trial in the Stratton Brothers case begins in London, England; it marks the first time that fingerprint evidence is used to gain a conviction for murder. *The Painter Flynn

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In 1925, a meeting of local leaders was held in Dayton, Tennessee, to plan a challenge to that state's new law, the Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in a public school. George W. Rappelyea and other local leaders of the small mining town met at Robinson's drug store. The American Civil Liberties Union in New York, concerned by the law's infringement on constitutional rights, had advertised an offer to give legal support to any teacher who would challenge the law. Rappelyea saw the publicity that would accompany such a trial as an opportunity to promote his town. He approached John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old teacher and football coach, who was hesitant at first, to test the legality of the law in court. The infamous “Scopes Monkey Trial” began on 10 Jul 1925.*TIS

Scopes Grave in Paducah Ky

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1952 Dummer Proposes Integrated Circuit Concept: G. W. A. Dummer, an English electrical engineer, foresees the fabrication of all electronic components of a circuit or system in a single block of semiconductor material. Several special-function devices were developed at Bell Labs and RCA before Jack Kilby at TI demonstrated a general-purpose concept "integrated circuit" in 1958.*CHM

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1961 Alan B. Shepard is the first U.S. astronaut to make a flight into space. His fifteen minute flight in Freedom 7 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, reached an altitude of 115 (116?) miles and ended 302 miles down the Atlantic missile range. [Kane, p. 373; Navy Facts, 204] *VFR

Shepard and Mercury capsule recovered.

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1980 Greece issued a stamp honoring the 2300th anniversary of Aristarchus of Samos, discoverer of the heliocentric theory. [Scott #1350] *VFR

There is little existing evidence concerning the origin of Aristarchus's belief in a heliocentric system. We know of no earlier hypothesis of this type but in fact the theory was not accepted by the Greeks so apparently never had any popularity. We only know of Aristarchus's theory because of a summary statement made in Archimedes' The Sand-Reckoner and a similar reference by Plutarch. 

"You King Gelon are aware the 'universe' is the name given by most astronomers to the sphere the centre of which is the centre of the earth, while its radius is equal to the straight line between the centre of the sun and the centre of the earth. This is the common account as you have heard from astronomers. But Aristarchus has brought out a book consisting of certain hypotheses, wherein it appears, as a consequence of the assumptions made, that the universe is many times greater than the 'universe' just mentioned. His hypotheses are that the fixed stars and the sun remain unmoved, that the earth revolves about the sun on the circumference of a circle, the sun lying in the middle of the orbit, and that the sphere of fixed stars, situated about the same centre as the sun, is so great that the circle in which he supposes the earth to revolve bears such a proportion to the distance of the fixed stars as the centre of the sphere bears to its surface." *Wik

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1981 The German Democratic Republic issued a stamp honoring Richard Dedekind. [Scott #2181] *VFR

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In 2000, a conjunction of the five bright planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - formed a rough line across the sky with the Sun and Moon. Unfortunately, nothing was visible from the earth, because the the line of planets was behind the Sun and hidden in its brilliance. Such a conjunction last happened in Feb 1962 and will not happen again until Apr 2438. Throughout former history, a conjunction event was regarded with foreboding. However, now science can be dismissive. Donald Olson, an expert on tides at Southwest Texas State University, working with the assistance of a graduate student, Thomas Lytle, calculated the stress on the Earth caused by the Moon and eight planets has often been routinely greater, most recently on 6 Jan 1990. *TIS

*NASA

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2012 The biggest full moon of the year, a so-called "supermoon," will take center stage when it rises this weekend (Saturday, May 5, at 11:35 p.m. EDT ). A supermoon occurs when the moon hits its full phase at the same time it makes closest approach to Earth for the month, a lunar milestone known as perigee. May's full moon timed with the moon's perigee could appear 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than other full moons of 2012. *Huffington Post Science  A supermoon will occur on Mon, Aug 19, 2024, at 1:26 PM.

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2016 Meteor Shower from Halley's Comet at it's most active-but meteors will be visible for another few weeks as the Earth passes through the debris trail of Halley's Comet. The eta Aquarid display is one of two meteor showers created by dust from Halley's comet (the Orionid shower in October is the other). It occurs every April and May when the Earth passes through a stream of debris cast off by comet Halley during its 76-year trip around the sun. *PB  

It will peak between midnight and dawn on 6 May 2024

BIRTHS

1580 Johann Faulhaber (5 May 1580; Ulm, Germany – 10 September 1635; Ulm, Germany) was a German mathematician.
Born in Ulm, Faulhaber was trained as a weaver. However he was taught mathematics in Ulm and showed such promise that the City appointed him city mathematician and surveyor. He opened his own school in Ulm in 1600 but he was in great demand because of his skill in fortification work. He collaborated with Johannes Kepler and Ludolph van Ceulen. Besides his work on the fortifications of cities (notably Basel and Frankfurt), Faulhaber built water wheels in his home town and geometrical instruments for the military. Faulhaber made the first publication of Henry Briggs's Logarithm in Germany.
Faulhaber's major contribution was in calculating the sums of powers of integers, what is now called Faulhaber's formula. Jacob Bernoulli makes references to Faulhaber in his Ars Conjectandi and the Bernouli numbers arise in solving coefficients of Faulhaber's formula.
In Academia Algebra Faulhaber gives ∑ n^k as a polynomial in N, for k = 1, 3, 5, ... ,17. He also gives the corresponding polynomials in n. Faulhaber states that such polynomials in N exist for all k, but gave no proof. This was first proved by Jacobi in 1834. It is not known how much Jacobi was influenced by Faulhaber's work, but we do know that Jacobi owned Academia Algebra since his copy of it is now in the University of Cambridge.
At the end of Academia Algebra Faulhaber states that he has calculated polynomials for ∑ n^k as far as k = 25. He gives the formulae in the form of a secret code, which was common practice at the time. Donald Knuth suggests he is the first to crack the code: (the task [of cracking the code] is relatively easy with modern computers) and shows that Faulhaber had the correct formulae up to k = 23, but his formulae for k = 24 and k = 25 appear to be wrong.
A nice example of how to calculate sum of powers using Pascal's arithmetic triangle is given at Theorem of the Day.
*SAU *Wik

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1785 Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar (May 5, 1785 – March 12, 1870) was a French inventor and entrepreneur best known for designing, patenting, and manufacturing the first commercially successful mechanical calculator, known as the Arithmometer. Additionally, he founded the insurance companies Le Soleil and L'aigle, which, under his leadership, became the number one insurance group in France during the early years of the Second Empire.

The first model of the Arithmometer was introduced in 1820, and as a result Thomas was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor in 1821. Despite this, Thomas spent all of his time and energy on his insurance business, therefore there is a hiatus of more than thirty years in before the Arithmometer's commercialization in 1852. Because of the Arithmometer, he was raised to the level of Officier of the Légion d'honneur in 1857. By the time of his death in 1870, his manufacturing facility had built around 1,000 Arithmometers, making it the first mass-produced mechanical calculator in the world, and at the time, the only mechanical calculator reliable and dependable enough to be used in places like government agencies, banks, insurance companies and observatories. The manufacturing of the Arithmometer went on for another 40 years until around 1914.*Wik

The “next big-selling” mechanical calculating machine was essentially the Odhner Arithmometer — a pinwheel-type calculator — which became wildly popular and eventually replaced the older stepped-drum style for wide use. The Odhner design used a pinwheel mechanism for number-entry instead of the heavier “stepped drum” used in the Arithmometer — allowing calculators to be smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and easier to mass-produce. 

Its industrial production began around 1890 in St. Petersburg (Russia), and soon manufacturers across Europe and beyond began producing “Odhner-style calculators” (sometimes under different brand names) — leading to millions of units sold worldwide over decades. *PB

Arithmometre

Ohdner Arithmometer

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1811 John William Draper (May 5, 1811 – January 4, 1882) was an American (English-born) scientist, philosopher, physician, chemist, historian and photographer. He is credited with producing the first clear photograph of a female face (1839–40) and the first detailed photograph of the Moon (1840). He was also the first president of the American Chemical Society (1876–77) and a founder of the New York University School of Medicine. One of Draper's books, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, received worldwide recognition and was translated into several languages, but was banned by the Catholic Church. His son, Henry Draper, and his granddaughter, Antonia Maury, were astronomers, and his eldest son, John Christopher Draper, was a chemist. *Wik

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1833 Lazarus Immanuel Fuchs (5 May 1833 – 26 April 1902) was a gifted analyst whose works form a bridge between the fundamental researches of Cauchy, Riemann, Abel, and Gauss and the modern theory of differential equations discovered by Poincaré, Painlevé, and Émile Picard. *SAU

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1842 Heinrich Martin Weber (5 May 1842, Heidelberg, Germany – 17 May 1913, Strassburg, Germany, now Strasbourg, France) Weber's main work was in algebra, number theory, analysis and applications of analysis to mathematical physics. This seems a contradiction in terms, for we have now almost said that Weber's main work spans the whole spectrum of mathematics. In fact this is not far from the truth for Weber work was characterised by its breadth across a wide range of topics.*SAU
Weber was born in Heidelberg, Baden, and entered the University of Heidelberg in 1860. In 1866 he became a privatdozent, and in 1869 he was appointed as extraordinary professor at that school. Weber also taught in Zurich at the Federal Polytechnic Institute, today the ETH Zurich, at the University of Königsberg, and at the Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg. His final post was at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, where he died.*Wik

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1860 Charles Chree (5 May 1860 – 12 August 1928) studied in Aberdeen and Cambridge. He became Superintendent of Kew Observatory and worked on terrestrial magnetism. *SAU

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1861 Peter Cooper Hewitt (May 5, 1861 – August 25, 1921) was an American electrical engineer and inventor, who invented the first mercury-vapor lamp in 1901. Hewitt was issued U.S. patent #682692 on September 17, 1901.
In 1902 Hewitt developed the mercury arc rectifier, the first rectifier which could convert alternating current power to direct current without mechanical means. It was widely used in electric railways, industry, electroplating, and high-voltage direct current (HVDC) power transmission. Although it was largely replaced by power semiconductor devices in the 1970s and 80s, it is still used in some high power applications.
In 1907 he developed and tested an early hydrofoil. In 1916, Hewitt joined Elmer Sperry to develop the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane, one of the first successful precursors of the UAV. *wik

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1877 Alexander Brown (5 May 1877 in Dalkeith, near Edinburgh, Scotland - 27 Jan 1947 in Cape Town, South Africa) In 1903 Brown was appointed as Professor of Applied Mathematics in the South African College. In 1911 he married Mary Graham; they had a son and a daughter. He remained in Cape Town until his death in 1947, but his status changed in 1918 when the South African College became the University of Cape Town.
He was a member of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, joining the Society in December 1898. He contributed papers to meetings of the Society such as On the Ratio of Incommensurables in Geometry to the meeting on Friday 9 June 1905 and Relation between the distances of a point from three vertices of a regular polygon, at the meeting on Friday 11 June 1909, communicated by D C McIntosh.
Brown was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa in 1918, was on its Council from 1931 to 1935 and again in 1941, was its Honorary Treasurer from 1936 to 1940, and President from 1942 to 1945. Alexander Brown was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on 20 May 1907. *SAU

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1883 Anna Johnson Pell Wheeler (5 May 1883 in Calliope (now Hawarden), Iowa, USA - 26 March 1966 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA) In 1899 she entered the University of South Dakota where she showed great promise in mathematics. The professor of mathematics, Alexander Pell, recognised her talents and helped persuade Anna Johnson that she should follow a career in mathematics. She received an A.B. degree in 1903.
After winning a scholarship to study for her master's degrees at the University of Iowa, she was awarded the degree for a thesis The extension of Galois theory to linear differential equations in 1904. A second master's degree from Radcliffe was awarded in 1905 and she remained there to study under Bôcher and Osgood.
Anna Johnson was awarded the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship from Wellesley College to study for a year at Göttingen University. There she attended lectures by Hilbert, Klein, Minkowski, Herglotz and Schwarzschild. She worked for her doctorate at Göttingen. While there Alexander Pell, her former mathematics professor came to Göttingen so that they could marry.
After returning to the United States, where her husband was by now Dean of Engineering, she taught courses in the theory of functions and differential equations. In 1908 Anna Pell returned to Göttingen where she completed the work for her doctorate but, after a disagreement with Hilbert, she returned to Chicago, where her husband was now on the university staff, without the degree being awarded.
At Chicago she became a student of Eliakim Moore and received her Ph.D. in 1909, her thesis Biorthogonal Systems of Functions with Applications to the Theory of Integral Equations being the one written originally at Göttingen. From 1911 Anna Pell taught at Mount Holyoke College and then at Bryn Mawr from 1918. Anna Pell's husband Alexander, who was 25 years older than she was, died in 1920. In 1924 Anna Pell became head of mathematics when Scott retired, becoming a full professor in 1925.
After a short second marriage to Arthur Wheeler, during which time they lived at Princeton and she taught only part-time, her second husband died in 1932. After this Anna Wheeler returned to full time work at Bryn Mawr where Emmy Noether joined her in 1933. However Emmy Noether died in 1935. The period from 1920 until 1935 certainly must have been one with much unhappiness for Anna Wheeler since during those years her father, mother, two husbands and close friend and colleague Emmy Noether died. Anna Wheeler remained at Bryn Mawr until her retirement in 1948.
The direction of Anna Wheeler's work was much influenced by Hilbert. Under his guidance she worked on integral equations studying infinite dimensional linear spaces. This work was done in the days when functional analysis was in its infancy and much of her work has lessened in importance as it became part of the more general theory.
Perhaps the most important honour she received was becoming the first woman to give the Colloquium Lectures at the American Mathematical Society meetings in 1927.
*SAU

*SAU

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1897 Francesco Giacomo Tricomi (5 May 1897 – 21 November 1978)  studied differential equations which became very important in the theory of supersonic flight. *SAU

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1908 John Frank Allen, FRS FRSE (May 5, 1908 – April 22, 2001) was a Canadian-born physicist. codiscovered the superfluidity of liquid helium near absolute zero temperature. Working at the Royal Society Mond Laboratory in Cambridge, with Don Misener he discovered (1930's) that below 2.17 kelvin temperature, liquid helium could flow through very small capillaries with practically zero viscosity. Independently, P. L. Kapitza in Moscow produced similar results at about the same time. Their two articles were published together in the 8 Jan 1938 issue of the journal Nature. Superfluidity is a visible manifestation resulting from the quantum mechanics of Bose- Einstein condensation. By 1945, research in Moscow delved into the microscopic aspect, which Allen did not pursue.*TIS

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1921 Arthur Leonard Schawlow (May 5, 1921 – April 28, 1999) was an American physicist. He is best remembered for his work on lasers, for which he shared the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nicolaas Bloembergen and Kai Siegbahn.
In 1991 the NEC Corporation and the American Physical Society established a prize: the Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science. The prize is awarded annually to "candidates who have made outstanding contributions to basic research using lasers."
In 1951, he married Aurelia Townes, younger sister to physicist Charles Hard Townes, and together they had three children; Arthur Jr., Helen, and Edith. Arthur Jr. was autistic, with very little speech ability.
Schawlow and Professor Robert Hofstadter at Stanford, who also had an autistic child, teamed up to help each other find solutions to the condition. Arthur Jr. was put in a special center for autistic individuals, and later Schawlow put together an institution to care for people with autism in Paradise, California. It was later named the Arthur Schawlow Center in 1999, shortly before his death on the 29th of April 1999.
Schawlow died of leukemia in Palo Alto, California. *Wik

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1923 Cathleen Synge Morawetz (May 5, 1923; Toronto, Canada - August 8, 2017 ) is a mathematician. Morawetz's research was mainly in the study of the partial differential equations governing fluid flow, particularly those of mixed type occurring in transonic flow. She is Professor Emerita at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at the New York University, where she has also served as director from 1984 to 1988.
Morawetz's father, John Lighton Synge was an Irish mathematician, specializing in the geometry of general relativity and her mother also studied mathematics for a time. Her childhood was split between Ireland and Canada. Both her parents were supportive of her interest in mathematics and science, and it was a woman mathematician, Cecilia Krieger, who had been a family friend for many years who later encouraged Morawetz to pursue a PhD in mathematics. Morawetz says her father was influential in stimulating her interest in mathematics, but he wondered whether her studying mathematics would be wise (suggesting they might fight like the Bernoulli brothers)
In 1981, she became the first woman to deliver the Gibbs Lecture of The American Mathematical Society, and in 1982 presented an Invited Address at a meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. She was named Outstanding Woman Scientist for 1993 by the Association for Women in Science. In 1995, she became the second woman elected to the office of president of the American Mathematical Society. In 1998 she was awarded the National Medal of Science; she was the first woman to receive the medal for work in mathematics. In 2004 she received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement. In 2006 she won the George David Birkhoff Prize in Applied Mathematics. In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.*Wik

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1961 G. L. Honaker, Jr., (May 5, 1961- ) born in the strobogrammatic year 1961 and lives in Bristol, Virginia. Number art and design has interested him since an early age. He became fascinated when an elementary school teacher (J. N. Ely, Jr.) in his nearby birthplace of Pennington Gap drew a factor tree on the blackboard. "I saw great beauty in this 'numerical fingerprint' and was hooked." After a tour in the US Navy he became a K-12 math/science educator and created 'Prime Curios!' (primes.utm.edu/curios/) with the assistance of Chris K. Caldwell, a well-known mathematics professor and technical editor of the site at the University of Tennessee at Martin. Here, people from all over the world submit facts, curiosities, oddities, etc., about anything related to prime numbers.

BookAuthority (https://bookauthority.org/books/best-prime-numbers-books) includes it in their list of 53 Best Prime Numbers Books of All Time. 

*Amazon

 

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DEATHS

1859 Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet  (13 Feb 1805, 5 May 1859 )   is credited with the modern formal definition of a function. At age twenty he proved that Fermat's last theorem had no solution in fifth powers.  After his death, Dirichlet's lectures and other results in number theory were collected, edited and published by his friend and fellow mathematician Richard Dedekind under the title Vorlesungen über Zahlentheorie (Lectures on Number Theory).  Dirichlet's brain is preserved in the department of physiology at the University of Göttingen, along with the brain of Gauss.(Wikipedia) (Dirichlet proved in 1826 that in any arithmetic progression with first term coprime to the difference there are infinitely many primes.) *SAU [Dirichlet is buried in Bartholomaus cemetery in Gottingen]

Dirichlet almost never wrote letters, and family members who received one would consider it a rare and unusual document.  It is said that he failed to write to his father-in-law, Abraham Mendelssohn, whose son was the composer Felix, after Dirichlet's first child was born.  Hisw wife's father commented theat he assumed that even Dirichlet could find time to write "2 + 1 = 3." 

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1957 Leopold Löwenheim (26 June 1878 in Krefeld, Germany  – 5 May 1957 in Berlin) was a German mathematician who worked on mathematical logic and is best-known for the Löwenheim-Skolem paradox. *SAU  [Skolem's paradox is that every countable axiomatisation of set theory in first-order logic, if it is consistent, has a model that is countable. This appears contradictory because it is possible to prove, from those same axioms, a sentence which intuitively says (or which precisely says in the standard model of the theory) that there exist sets that are not countable. Thus the seeming contradiction is that a model which is itself countable, and which contains only countable sets, satisfies the first order sentence that intuitively states "there are uncountable sets".] *Wik

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1957  Joseph William Kennedy (May 30, 1916 – May 5, 1957) was an American chemist who was a co-discoverer of plutonium, along with Glenn T. Seaborg, Edwin McMillan and Arthur Wahl. During World War II he was head of the CM (Chemistry and Metallurgy) Division at the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where he oversaw research onto the chemistry and metallurgy of uranium and plutonium. After the war, he was recruited as a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, where he is credited with transforming a university primarily concerned with undergraduate teaching into one that also boasts strong graduate and research programs. He died of cancer of the stomach at the age of 40.

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1989 Stefan E Warschawski (April 18, 1904 – May 5, 1989) With careful scholarship, he made lasting contributions to the theory of complex analysis, particularly to the theory of conformal mappings. With keen judgment, he guided two mathematics departments to eminence. With modest gratitude, he cemented many friendships along the way.*SAU  [He is buried in El Camino Memorial Park, San Diego, California.]

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2007 Theodore Harold "Ted" Maiman (July 11, 1927 – May 5, 2007) was an American Engineer and physicist credited with the invention of the first working laser.[ Maiman’s laser led to the subsequent development of many other types of lasers. The laser was successfully fired on May 16, 1960. In a July 7, 1960 press conference in Manhattan, Maiman and his employer, Hughes Aircraft Company, announced the laser to the world. Maiman was granted a patent for his invention, and he received many awards and honors for his work. Maiman's experiences in developing the first laser and subsequent related events are described in his book, The Laser Odyssey. *Wik

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2020 Sergei Ivanovich Adian, also Adyan (Armenian: Սերգեյ Իվանովիչ Ադյան; Russian: Серге́й Ива́нович Адя́н; 1 January 1931 – 5 May 2020),[1] was a Soviet and Armenian mathematician. He was a professor at the Moscow State University and was known for his work in group theory, especially on the Burnside problem.  

Adian was born near Elizavetpol. He grew up there in an Armenian family. He studied at Yerevan and Moscow pedagogical institutes. His advisor was Pyotr Novikov. He worked at Moscow State University (MSU) since 1965. Alexander Razborov was one of his students.In his first work as a student in 1950, Adian proved that the graph of a function {\displaystyle f(x)} of a real variable satisfying the functional equation {\displaystyle f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y)} and having discontinuities is dense in the plane. (Clearly, all continuous solutions of the equation are linear functions.) This result was not published at the time. About 25 years later the American mathematician Edwin Hewitt from the University of Washington gave preprints of some of his papers to Adian during a visit to MSU, one of which was devoted to exactly the same result, which was published by Hewitt much later.

By the beginning of 1955, Adian had managed to prove the undecidability of practically all non-trivial invariant group properties, including the undecidability of being isomorphic to a fixed group {\displaystyle G}, for any group {\displaystyle G}. These results constituted his Ph.D. thesis and his first published work. This is one of the most remarkable, beautiful, and general results in algorithmic group theory and is now known as the Adian–Rabin theorem. What distinguishes the first published work by Adian, is its completeness. In spite of numerous attempts, nobody has added anything fundamentally new to the results during the past 50 years. Adian's result was immediately used by Andrey Markov Jr. in his proof of the algorithmic unsolvability of the classical problem of deciding when topological manifolds are homeomorphic.

Burnside problem :

The Burnside problem asks whether a finitely generated group in which every element has finite order must necessarily be a finite group. It was posed by William Burnside in 1902, making it one of the oldest questions in group theory, and was influential in the development of combinatorial group theory. It is known to have a negative answer in general, as Evgeny Golod and Igor Shafarevich provided a counter-example in 1964. The problem has many refinements and variants that differ in the additional conditions imposed on the orders of the group elements . *Wik

*SAU

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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

On This Day in Math - May 4

I had a feeling once about Mathematics - that I saw it all.
Depth beyond depth was revealed to me - the Byss and Abyss.
I saw - as one might see the transit of Venus or even the Lord Mayor's Show
- a quantity passing through infinity and changing its sign from plus to minus.
I saw exactly why it happened and why the tergiversation
was inevitable but it was after dinner
and I let it go.

~Winston Churchill

The 124th day of the year;124 =σ( 1! * 2! * 4!) *Prime Curios (The sigma function of a positive integer n is the sum of the positive divisors of n)

124 is also an Odious number: a number with an odd number of 1's in its binary expansion.(just recently, it occurred to me that it would be more appropriate if an Odious  number, had an odd number of "0's")

124 in base two is expressed as 1111100.

124 in base five is a repdigit, 444, which means it's one less than 5^3 (students new to studying bases should observe that a repdigit of (n-1) which is  k units long in base n, will always be (n^k)-1. [like 99 in base 10 is 10^2-1]

and ±1 ± 2 ± 3 ± 4 ± 5 ± 6 ± 7 ± 8 ± 9 ± 10 ± 11 ± 12 = 0 has 124 solutions (collect the whole set) *Math Year-Round ‏@MathYearRound

And for Algebra students, 124  is divisible by four so it is the difference of two squares of numbers that differ by 2, and since  124 / 4 = 31, the numbers must straddle 31, 32² - 30² = 124. 

Several More math facts for this date at https://mathdaypballew.blogspot.com/

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EVENTS

1612 Galileo writing to Mark Welser, “The spots seen at sunset are observed to change place from one evening to the next, descending from the part of the sun then uppermost, and the morning spots ascend from the part then below …”, *Galileo's Sunspot Letters at http://mintaka.sdsu.edu
The Letters were written to the wealthy Augsburg Magistrate Mark Welser (1558-1614), a well-known patron of the new sciences, in responses to Christoph Scheiner's own Letters on Sunspots, published through Wesler in 1612.
Galileo and Scheiner were later to quarrel bitterly over priority of discovery of sunspots; in fact the first recorded sunspot observation is on 8 December 1610 by the Englishman Thomas Harriott (1560-1621), and the first publication by Johann Fabricius.
The title page of Galileo's letters, published by Wesler, is shown below. The lynx depicted on the Title page indicates Galileo's membership in the Lincean academy (Accademia dei Lincei, for the "sharp-eyed")

*

Groupe d\'astrophysique de l\'Université de Montréal

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1675 Charles II orders Royal Greenwich Observatory be built to solve Longitude problem. * Nat. Maritime Museum@NMMGreenwich 

It was Christopher Wren who suggested using the ruined Greenwich Castle as the site for the new observatory. This location had the advantages of having solid foundations in place from the old castle, as well as being located on high ground in a royal park. Wren also oversaw the design of the building.

Flamsteed House was the first part of the Observatory to be built. It was intended as a home for the Astronomer Royal and for entertaining guests.

The first public time signal in the country was broadcast from the roof of Flamsteed House in 1833, by dropping a ball at a predetermined time.

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1694 David Gregory and Newton disagree on "kissing numbers" during Gregory's visit to Newton in Cambridge. Newton asserted that 12 was the maximum number of spheres that could be placed touching around a central sphere. Gregory held out that a 13th was possible. Kepler had shown a completely rigid arrangement of 12 spheres around one in his Six-cornered Snow Flakes. His method is called a hexagonal packing. But Newton and Gregory both knew that placing the surrounding 12 spheres at the vertices of an icosahedron around the central sphere, there was enough space to move the balls around, In fact, any two balls could be moved around and interchanged while all twelve balls were still in contact with the central one. The maximum "kissing number" is known for the first four dimensions, but beyond that only the eighth (240) and twenty-fourth(196,560) are exactly known. *Plus Math, *Wik  (Newton was right, but it wasn't proven until 1953.)  If you want to take up the challenge, in the fifth dimension the "kissing number" is known to be 40 <= k <=44.  

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1697 John Wallis sends a letter to the Royal Society "Concerning the Cycloid Known to Cardinal Cusanus, about the Year 1450." (modern scholars can not find any evidence to support his statement.) *Wik

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1756 A letter from John Elliot, a young naval officer, to his father.
"There is no News here worth troubling you with, only the discovery of the longitude by a Hanovarien, it is perform’d by an Observation of the Moon & any fix’d Star by knowing there distance at a given place & observing there difference at Sea given the difference of time[. T]he obs[ervatio]n is simple & easey but the Calculation is extreamly perplexd. I had this from a Man that is making the Instrument."
The Hanovarien mentioned is Tobias Mayer. *Richard Dunn, Board of Longitude Project, Royal Museums Greenwich

In my poorly organized notes I have a reference without a source listed, maybe the same Richard Dunn above, that this quote came from  Nicholas Rodger's The Wooden World, 1996.  I also have recorded , " Given the historical run of events, this suggests that news of what the Board of Longitude was doing about Mayer's scheme got out pretty quickly, particularly when we remember that sea trials of Mayer's lunar tables and observing instrument didn't take place for another fourteen months (under John Campbell - but that's another story). The last line particularly intrigues and rather delights me. I think the instrument maker in question is the very important but rather elusive John Bird (another of my obsessions). This would make sense, since Mayer's tables and repeating circle were discussed at a meeting of the Board of Longitude on 6 March 1756, when James Bradley was instructed to have three instruments made for the future tests. Bradley naturally went to Bird, already well known to him from his work at the Royal Observatory. So it seems  that within a few weeks Bird was shooting his mouth to a young naval officer. Bird had precious hands but a big mouth, I'd say. I'd love to know more about how his chat with Elliot came about."

The John Bird above, "was a British mathematical instrument maker who was notable for inventing the sextant. He came to London in 1740 where he worked for Jonathan Sisson and George Graham. By 1745, he had his own business in the Strand." *Wik  (Mayer left, Bird right)

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1780 The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the first national arts and sciences society in the U.S., was founded on this date in Boston “to cultivate every art and science which may tend to advance the interest, dignity, honor and happiness of a free, independent and virtuous people.” James Bowdoin was the first president. *VFR [The original incorporaters were later joined by Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Bulfinch, Alexander Hamilton, and John Quincy]*TIS

House of the Academy, located in Norton’s Woods, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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1885  On September 5, 1885, Scientific American published a photograph depicting a “streak of real ‘Jersey lightning,’” taken by William Nicholson Jennings (1860-1946) at 10:30 p.m. on the first of August that same year. Captured on the roof of Jennings’ house in North Philadelphia and later reproduced as a lantern slide, the photograph reveals a flash of lightning traveling diagonally from the upper left corner of the frame to the horizon, illuminating the tops of trees and a line of row house roofs in the foreground. Regional and national newspapers soon proclaimed Jennings as the first to successfully photograph lightning with a camera.

The Today in Science claims an earlier occurrence on May 4 of the previous year. " In 1884, the first photograph of a lightning flash made in the U.S. was made by W. C. Gurley of the Marietta Observatory, Ohio. The flash was about 3 miles away."  I don't have a picture of that one (but am willing to post one if someone can find it) so Jennings gets the plug. The observatory in Marietta is named for William Chamberlain Gurley, its first director.

*Panaroma

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1925 The ACLU found John Scopes by running a newspaper ad seeking a teacher willing to test the law about teaching human evolution in the classrooms of Tennessee. From the May 4, 1925, edition of the Chattanooga Times:

"We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test case can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job. Distinguished counsel have volunteered their services. All we need now is a willing client."  

Scopes wasn't a biology teacher but had filled in for one using a textbook that accepted evolution, and that was enough to set the "monkey trial" moving forward.  *Greg Ross, Futility Closet

The Tennessee State Museum on-line sight includes:  

Leaders in Dayton saw the ACLU ad in the paper and knew a trial about evolution would attract lots of attention. Dayton was a small town and the city and businesses struggled to make enough money. They thought the tourism the trial would bring could be a great way to make money. A few leaders asked John Scopes if they could charge him with teaching evolution in order to bring the case to Dayton. It was just as much about the spectacle as anything else. There were six blocks of booths where people sold stuffed monkeys, food, and played music.

*Wik

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In 1933, the discovery of radio waves from the centre of the Milky Way galaxy was described by Karl Jansky in a paper he read to the International Radio Union in Washington. The galactic radio waves were very low intensity, short wavelength (14.6 m, frequency about 20 MHz) and required sensitive apparatus for their detection. Their intensity varied regularly with the time of day, and with the seasons. They came from an unchanging direction in space, independent of terrestrial sources. He had conducted his research on static hiss at the radio research department of Bell Telephone Labs, Holmdel, N.J. The New York Times carried a front page report the next day.*TIS

NEW RADIO WAVES TRACED TO CENTRE OF THE MILKY WAY; Mysterious Static, Reported by K.G. Jansky, Held to Differ From Cosmic Ray. DIRECTION IS UNCHANGING Recorded and Tested for More Than Year to Identify It as From Earth's Galaxy. ITS INTENSITY IS LOW Only Delicate Receiver Is Able to Register -- No Evidence of Interstellar Signaling.

First Radio Telescope

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1935 Albert Einstein, in a letter to the New York Times, writes, "In the judgement of the most competent living mathematicians, Fraulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began". *Dwight E. Neuenschwander, Emmy Noether's Wonderful Theorem   

She had died on April 14th, 1935.(PB)

*Wik

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1989, the space probe Magellan was carried in the cargo bay by the STS-30 Space Shuttle Atlantis mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space probe was named after the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. This was the first planetary spacecraft to be released from a shuttle in Earth orbit. It arrived at its planned polar orbit around Venus on 10 Aug 1990, which it circled once every 3-hr 15-min. As the planet rotated slowly beneath it, Magellan collected radar images of the surface in strips about 17-28 km (10-17 mi) wide and radioed back the information. Its mission included taking other measurements. On 11 Oct 1994, it was directed towards the surface, collecting data until it burned up in the atmosphere.*TIS

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1995 Commodore Bought By German Company:
German electronics company Escom AG paid $10 million for the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. A pioneer in the personal computer industry, Commodore halted production in 1994 and declared bankruptcy. Escom AG planned to resume production of Commodore personal computers, including its most recent model, the Amiga. The company later sold its Amiga rights. *CHM

The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International (first shown at the Consumer Electronics Show, January 7–10, 1982, in Las Vegas). It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time.

*Wik

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2000 A rare conjunction occurs on the New Moon including all seven of the traditional celestial bodies known from ancient times up until 1781 with the discovery of Uranus. The May 2000 conjunction consisted of: the Sun and Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. *Wik

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2011 Star Wars Day, as told to me by a student..."May the Fourth be with you."

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BIRTHS

1733 Jean-Charles Borda, (4 May 1733; died 20 Feb 1799 at age 65.) a major figure in the French navy who participated in sev­eral scientific voyages and the American revolution. Besides his contributions to navigational instruments he did important work on fluid mechanics, even showing that Newton’s theory of fluid resistance was untenable. He is best known for the voting system he created in 1770.*VFR [He was one of the main driving forces in the introduction of the decimal system. Borda made good use of calculus and experiment to unify areas of physics. For his surveying, he also developed a series of trigonometric tables. In 1782, while in command of a flotilla of six French ships, he was captured by the British. Borda's health declined after his release. He is one of 72 scientists commemorated by plaques on the Eiffel tower.]*TIS

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1806  Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) English inventor who worked with Charles Wheatstone in developing electric telegraphy. Of the pair, Cooke contributed a superior business ability, whereas Wheatstone is generally considered the more important of the two in the history of the telegraph. After Cooke attended a demonstration of the use of wire in transmitting messages, he began his own experiments with telegraphy (1836) and formed a partnership with Wheatstone. Their first patent (1837) was impractical because of cost. They demonstrated their five-needle telegraph on 24 July 1837 when they ran a telegraph line along the railway track from Euston to Camden Town able to transmit and successfully receive a message. In 1845, they patented a single-needle electric telegraph. *TIS

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1821 Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev (May 16 [O.S. May 4] 1821 – December 8 [O.S. November 26] 1894)Russian mathematician who founded the St. Petersburg mathematical school (sometimes called the Chebyshev school), who is remembered primarily for his work on the theory of prime numbers, including the determination of the number of primes not exceeding a given number. He wrote about many subjects, including the theory of congruences in 1849, probability theory, quadratic forms, orthogonal functions, the theory of integrals, the construction of maps, and the calculation of geometric volumes. Chebyshev was also interested in mechanics and studied the problems involved in converting rotary motion into rectilinear motion by mechanical coupling. The Chebyshev parallel motion is three linked bars approximating rectilinear motion. *Wik [I remember a poem about the Chebyshev's theorem first conjectured by Bertrand but proved by Chebyshev.... Chebyshev said it, so I'll say it again, there's always a prime, between N and 2N {there are many variants} PB]

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1825 T(homas) H(enry) Huxley (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist , known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his promotion of Darwinism which led him to an advocacy of agnosticism (a word he coined). At the age of 12 he was reading advanced works on geology, and by early adolescence he recorded the results of simple self-conducted experiments. As a ship's assistant surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake he studied marine specimens by microscope. During the 1850's he published papers on animal individuality, the cephalous mollusks (ex. squids), the methods of paleontology, and the methods and principles of science and science education. *TIS

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1845William Kingdon Clifford (4 May 1845 – 3 March 1879 ) He played an important role in introducing the ideas of Riemann and other writers on non-Euclidean geometry to English mathematicians. “Clifford was a first-class gymnast, whose repertory apparently included hanging by his toes from the crossbar of a weather cock on a church tower, a feat befitting a High Churchman, as he then was.” *VFR

English mathematician and philosopher. Building on the work of Hermann Grassmann, he introduced what is now termed geometric algebra, a special case of the Clifford algebra named in his honor, with interesting applications in contemporary mathematical physics and geometry. He was the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry. In his philosophical writings he coined the expression "mind-stuff". *Wikipedia {He enjoyed children and wrote children's stories including "The Little People."} "An atom must be at least as complex as a grand piano. "
Though Clifford never constructed a full theory of spacetime and relativity, there are some remarkable observations he made in print that foreshadowed these modern concepts: In his book Elements of Dynamic (1878), he introduced "quasi-harmonic motion in a hyperbola". He wrote an expression for a parametrized unit hyperbola, which other authors later used as a model for relativistic velocity. Elsewhere he states,

The geometry of rotors and motors ... forms the basis of the whole modern theory of the relative rest (Static) and the relative motion (Kinematic and Kinetic) of invariable systems.

This passage makes reference to biquaternions, though Clifford made these into split-biquaternions as his independent development. The book continues with a chapter "On the bending of space", the substance of general relativity. Clifford also discussed his views in On the Space-Theory of Matter in 1876.

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1862 Alice Liddell (4 May 1852 – 16 November 1934), subject of the Alice in wonderland stories. 4 May is also probably the date on which the mad hatter's tea party took place. Charles Wells suggested to me that perhaps that was the date on which young Alice and Charles Dodgson went for a row with her dad and Dodgson first told the tale. There are, Charles points out, two references to the date being the fourth (the white rabbit for instance has a watch that tells the date, not the time and asks Alice the date) and two referring to the month of May . It turns out that that boat ride was on July 4 of 1862. There is however evidence in the book that Dodgson intended to make the story on Alice's date of birth. In that year, for example, the date of her birth there was exactly two days difference between solar and lunar time. Thus the Hatter's response to the date, "Two days wrong" perhaps. Anyway, a novel idea (bad pun) Charles, and thanks for the comment.

When Alice Liddell was a young woman, she set out on a Grand Tour of Europe with Lorina and Edith. One story has it that she became a romantic interest of Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria, during the four years he spent at Christ Church, but the evidence for this is sparse. It is true that years later, Leopold named his first child Alice, and acted as godfather to Alice's second son Leopold. However, it is possible Alice was named in honour of Leopold's deceased elder sister instead, the Grand Duchess of Hesse. A recent biographer of Leopold suggests it is far more likely that Alice's sister Edith was the true recipient of Leopold's attention. Edith died on 26 June 1876 possibly of measles or peritonitis (accounts differ), shortly before she was to be married to Aubrey Harcourt, a cricket player. Prince Leopold served as a pall-bearer at her funeral on 30 June 1876.

After her husband’s death in 1926, the cost of maintaining their home, Cuffnells, was such that she deemed it necessary to sell her copy of Alice's Adventures under Ground (Lewis Carroll's earlier title for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland). The manuscript fetched £15,400 (equivalent to £1,000,000 in 2021), nearly four times the reserve price given to it by Sotheby's auction house. It later became the possession of Eldridge R. Johnson and was displayed at Columbia University on the centennial of Carroll's birth. Alice was present, aged 80, and it was on this visit to the United States that she met Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the brothers who inspired J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Upon Johnson's death, the book was purchased by a consortium of American bibliophiles and presented to the British people "in recognition of Britain's courage in facing Hitler". The manuscript is held by the British Library.

Alice Liddell as a child, Carroll's first photograph of her, and  at the age of 20, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron.

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1876 Heinrich Jung (4 May 1876 in Essen, Germany - 1953 in Halle, Germany) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic functions. *SAU

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1918  George Francis Carrier (May 4, 1918 – March 8, 2002) was an engineer and physicist, and the T. Jefferson Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics Emeritus of Harvard University. He was particularly noted for his ability to intuitively model a physical system and then deduce an analytical solution. He worked especially in the modeling of fluid mechanics, combustion, and tsunamis.

Born in Millinocket, Maine, he received a master's in engineering degree in 1939 and a Ph.D. in 1944 from Cornell University with a dissertation in applied mechanics entitled Investigations in the Field of Aeolotropic Elasticity and the Bending of the Sectorial-Plate under the supervision of J. Norman Goodier. He was co-author of a number of mathematical textbooks and over 100 journal papers.

Carrier was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1953, the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1967, and the American Philosophical Society in 1976. In 1990, he received the National Medal of Science, the United States' highest scientific award, presented by President Bush, for his contributions to the natural sciences.

He died from esophageal cancer on March 8, 2002.  *Wik

George Carrier was considered to be one of the best applied mathematicians the United States ever produced. He loved applied mathematical problems developing complex mathematical models, which he solved with ingenious approximations and asymptotic results.*SAU

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1926 David Allan Bromley (4 May 1926; 10 Feb 2005 at age 78) was a Canadian-American physicist who was considered the “father of modern heavy ion science” for his pioneering experiments on both the structure and dynamics of atomic nuclei. He was a leader in developing particle accelerators detection systems and computer-based data acquisition and analysis systems. While at Atomic Energy of Canada (1955-60) he installed the first tandem Van Der Graaff accelerator. He was founder and director (1963-89) of the A.W. Wright Nuclear Structure Laboratory at Yale University, which has produced more experimental nuclear physicists than any other facility. During this time he became active on numerous national and international science policy boards. From 1980-89, he was a member of the White House Science Council.*TIS

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1932  Edward Nelson (May 4, 1932 – September 10, 2014) was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical logic, he was noted especially for his internal set theory, and views on ultrafinitism and the consistency of arithmetic. In philosophy of mathematics he advocated the view of formalism rather than platonism or intuitionism. He also wrote on the relationship between religion and mathematics.

Edward Nelson was born in Decatur, Georgia, in 1932. He spent his early childhood in Rome where his father worked for the Italian YMCA. At the advent of World War II, Nelson moved with his mother to New York City, where he attended high school at the Bronx High School of Science. His father, who spoke fluent Russian, stayed in St. Petersburg in connection with issues related to prisoners of war. After the war, his family returned to Italy and he attended the Liceo Scientifico Giovanni Verga in Rome.

He received his Ph.D. in 1955 from the University of Chicago, where he worked with Irving Segal. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1956 to 1959. He held a position at Princeton University starting in 1959, attaining the rank of professor there in 1964 and retiring in 2013.

In 1950, Nelson formulated a popular variant of the four color problem: What is the chromatic number, denoted 𝜒{\displaystyle \chi }, of the plane? In more detail, what is the smallest number of colors sufficient for coloring the points of the Euclidean plane such that no two points of the same color are unit distance apart? We know by simple arguments that 4 ≤ χ ≤ 7. The problem was introduced to a wide mathematical audience by Martin Gardner in his October 1960 Mathematical Games column. The chromatic number problem, also now known as the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, was a favorite of Paul Erdős, who mentioned it frequently in his problems lectures. In 2018, Aubrey de Grey showed that χ ≥ 5.

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1935  Shirley Ann Mathis McBay (May 4, 1935 – November 27, 2021) was an American mathematician who was the founder and president of the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network, a nonprofit dedicated to improving minority education. She was the dean for student affairs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1980 to 1990. She was the first African American to receive a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia (UGA) (1966, mathematics). McBay was also the first woman of any race to receive a Ph.D. in mathematics from UGA. McBay was recognized by Mathematically Gifted & Black as a Black History Month 2017 Honoree.

Shirley Ann Mathis was born in Bainbridge, Georgia. She received a B.A. in chemistry from Paine College in 1954, graduating summa cum laude. While also teaching chemistry at Spelman College, McBay earned an M.S. in chemistry (1957) and M.S. in mathematics (1958) from Atlanta University. In 1964, she earned a United Negro College Fund Fellowship, sponsored by the IBM Corporation, that allowed her to study at the University of Georgia and earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1966. Her Ph.D. was advised by Thomas Roy Brahana with a dissertation on The Homology Theory of Metabelian Lie Algebras.

McBay spent 15 years at Spelman College as a faculty member and administrator. McBay's leadership at Spelman led to the creation of the division of natural sciences and an increase in an emphasis on the sciences at the institution. She served as chairman of the division until 1975 and as associate academic dean at Spelman from 1973 to 1975. During this time, she created pre-freshman summer programs to increase interest in science majors, which led to the creation of a chemistry department and the renovations of existing science buildings.

She left Spelman in 1975 and took a position at the National Science Foundation for five years. While at the National Science Foundation, she became program director of the Minority Institutions Science Improvement Program. She then worked for ten years at MIT as the dean for student affairs. Thirty months of this time included being the director of the QEM Project, a study of minority education problems. The QEM Project was the impetus for the Quality Education for Minorities (QEM) Network that McBay founded and was president of from 1990 to 2016.

In December 2021, the University of Georgia's Science Library was renamed the Shirley Mathis McBay Science Library in her honor. 

Her husband, chemistry professor Henry C. McBay, died in 1995. The couple had married in 1954. McBay died from complications of diabetes on November 27, 2021, in Los Angeles, at the age of 86. *Wik

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DEATHS

1615 Adriaan van Roomen (29 September 1561 – 4 May 1615) One of Roomen's most impressive results was finding π to 16 decimal places. He did this in 1593 using 230 sided polygons. Roomen's interest in π was almost certainly as a result of his friendship with Ludolph van Ceulen.*SAU [van Roomen posed a problem to solve a 45th degree polynomial set equal to a complex square root with another square root inside it (here). Viete solved the equation establishing the use of trigonometry as a tool in algebraic solutions. ] {van Roomen also found a new solution to the classic Problem of Apollonius but it was not a "classic" construction in that it could not be done with only a straightedge and compass. Gergone (see below) found a proof that was constructable with the classic tools.}

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1677 Isaac Barrow (Oct 1630, 4 May 1677) died of an overdose of drugs probably opium. Neil Middlemiss ‏pointed out that the original source of this information may be Aubrey's "Brief Lives" wherein he claims, "his pill (an opiate)...he took it excessively at Mr. Wilson's...and 'twas the cause of his death."
 Barrow had taken opiates with fasting previously in Constantinople when suffering from fever. Over dosing on opiates may have been somewhat common in the period, a tweet from @HookesLondon  casually mentions another in 1672:" Colwall at Garways. Mr Chamberlain told of Lady Viners death kild by opium."

 Isaac Barrow was an English Christian theologian, and mathematician who is generally given credit for his early role in the development of infinitesimal calculus; in particular, for the discovery of the fundamental theorem of calculus. His work centered on the properties of the tangent; Barrow was the first to calculate the tangents of the kappa curve. Isaac Newton was a student of Barrow's, and Newton went on to develop calculus in a modern form. In 1662 he was made professor of geometry at Gresham College, and in 1663 was selected as the first occupier of the Lucasian chair at Cambridge. During his tenure of this chair he published two mathematical works of great learning and elegance, the first on geometry and the second on optics. In 1669 he resigned his professorship in favor of Isaac Newton . *Wik
I just learned from a tweet from @mathshistory that Barrow was the "first to recognize that integration and differentiation are inverse operations" He is buried in the Chapel at Trinity College.

In geometry, the kappa curve or Gutschoven's curve is a two-dimensional algebraic curve resembling the Greek letter ϰ (kappa). The kappa curve was first studied by Gérard van Gutschoven around 1662. In the history of mathematics, it is remembered as one of the first examples of Isaac Barrow's application of rudimentary calculus methods to determine the tangent of a curve. Isaac Newton and Johann Bernoulli continued the studies of this curve subsequently.

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1750 William Morgan, FRS (?26 May 1750– ?4 May 1833: several history sites give different dates for his birth and death, both in old style snd new style.  I picked one pair.) was a Welsh physician, physicist and statistician, who is considered the father of modern actuarial science. He is also credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube".

He won the Copley Medal in 1789, for his two papers on the values of Reversions and Survivorships, printed in the last two volumes of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, in the field of actuarial science:

"On the Probabilities of Survivorships Between Two Persons of Any Given Ages, and the Method of Determining the Values of Reversions Depending on those Survivorships", 1788–1794

"On the Method of Determining, from the Real Probabilities of Life, the Value of a Contingent Reversion in Which Three Lives are Involved in the Survivorship". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, vol. 79 (1789) pp. 40–54

He was elected a Fellow of the Society, in May of the following year.

Advised by Joseph Priestley, a family friend, he developed an interest in scientific experimentation and is credited with being the first to record the "invisible light" produced when a current is passed through a partly evacuated glass tube: "the first x-ray tube"*Wik

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1859 Joseph Diaz Gergonne (19 June 1771 Nancy, France—4 May 1859 Montpellier, France)... Finding problems getting his mathematics papers published, Gergonne established his own mathematics journal, the first part appearing in 1810. The Journal was officially called the Annales de mathématiques pures et appliquées but became known as Annales de Gergonne . Gergonne's mathematical interests were in geometry so it is not surprising that it was this topic which figured most prominently in his journal. In fact many famous mathematicians published in the twenty-one volumes of the Annales de Gergonne which appeared during a period of twenty-two years. In addition to Gergonne himself (who published around 200 articles), Poncelet, Servois, Bobillier, Steiner, Plücker, Chasles, Brianchon, Dupin, Lamé, Galois and many others had papers appear in the Journal. Gergonne provided an elegant solution to the Problem of Apollonius in 1816. This problem is to find a circle which touches three given circles. Gergonne introduced the word polar and the principle of duality in projective geometry was one of his main contributions. *SAU

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1880 Milan (Rastislav) Stefánik (July 21, 1880 – May 4, 1919) Slovakian astronomer and general who, with Tomás Masaryk and Edvard Benes, from abroad, helped found the new nation of Czechoslovakia by winning much-needed support from the Allied powers for its creation as a post-WWI republic, (1918-19). Before the war, the famous observatory in Meudon near Paris sent a scientific expedition to the 4810m high Mont Blanc. He joined the expedition, which was paid for by the French government to go to the roof of Europe.*TIS

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1936 Alfred Cardew Dixon (22 May 1865 in Northallerton, Yorkshire, England - 4 May 1936 in Northwood, Middlesex, England) Alfred Dixon graduated from London and Cambridge and then had professorial appointments in Galway and Belfast. He worked on ordinary and partial differential equations. *SAU

He did early work on Fredholm integrals independently of Fredholm. He worked both on ordinary differential equations and on partial differential equations studying Abelian integrals, automorphic functions, and functional equations.

In 1894 Dixon wrote The Elementary Properties of the Elliptic Functions.

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1974 Otton Marcin Nikodym (13 Aug 1887 in Zablotow, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Ukraine) - 4 May 1974 in Utica,New York, USA) On 2 April 1919, the Polish Mathematical Society was founded by sixteen mathematicians - among them Otton Nikodym. In 1924, under strong pressure from Sierpinski, Nikodym agreed to take his doctoral examination at Warsaw University. It seems he did not care much for the title or publication - his response to Sierpinski's persuasion was, "Am I going to be any wiser because of that?"
Nikodym's name is mostly known in measure theory (e. g. the Radon-Nikodym theorem and derivative, the Nikodym convergence theorem, the Nikodym-Grothendieck boundedness theorem), in functional analysis (the Radon-Nikodym property of a Banach space, the Frechet-Nikodym metric space, a Nikodym set), projections onto convex sets with applications to Dirichlet problem, generalized solutions of differential equations, descriptive set theory and the foundations of quantum mechanics. *SAU

Otto Nikodym and Stefan Banach Memorial Bench in Kraków, Poland

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2001 Anne Anastasi (19 Dec 1908, 4 May 2001 at age 92) American psychologist known as the "test guru," for her pioneering development of psychometrics, the measurement and understanding of psychological traits. Her seminal work, Psychological Testing (1954), remains a classic text in the subject. In it, she drew attention to the ways in which trait development is influenced by education and heredity. She explored how variables in the measurement of those traits include differences in training, culture, and language. In 1972, she became the first woman to be elected president of the American Psychological Association in half a century. For her accomplishments, she was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1987.*TIS

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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