First Wrangler and Wooden Spoon

  

Growing up in Texas we knew of the word wrangler as a ranch hand, someone who worked with cattle.  It would have seemed both strange and yet somehow appropriate if I had looked up the word in a dictionary and found, “a person engaging in a lengthy and complicated quarrel or dispute.“ 

In fact, on the North side of Fort Worth in the Stockyards area, there is a statue by artist Lisa Perry of Bill Pickett, a famous black wrangler who invented the idea of "bulldogging" a steer.  Now that's a "lengthy and complicated dispute.

Years later when I read about brilliant English mathematicians who had been “Senior Wranglers”, the top person in their year on the written mathematical examinations, the Mathematical Tripos, I had no idea what the relation was.   “ By way of example, in 1854, the Tripos consisted of 16 papers spread over eight days, totaling 44.5 hours. The total number of questions was 211. It was divided into two parts, with Part I (the first three days) covering more elementary topics.”  The successful graduates were divided into three groups, the Wranglers, 

The first known appearance of  “Wrangler” in print seems to have been in 1751, in a pamphlet (Friendly and Honest Advice of an Old Tory to the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge) circulated around Cambridge.  He addresses the term as if it might not be known to his readers outside Cambridge., “When the scholars take their first Degree in Arts, they are distinguished by their different improvements, by several marks of Honour and Disgrace.” The mark of the top performing students was “Wrangler”, the title derived from the original system of “oral disputations”.  The recognition of being the highest scorer led to the title “Senior Wrangler”, an event to be celebrated and feasted by the members of his (or her) College.

“Philippa Fawcett was educated at Bedford College, London (now Royal Holloway) and Newnham College, Cambridge which had been co-founded by her mother.   In 1890, she became the first woman to obtain the top score in the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos exams. The results were highly publicised, with the top scorers receiving great acclaim. Her score was 13% higher than the second highest, but she did not receive the title of Senior Wrangler (Geoffrey T. Bennett in 1890), as only men were then ranked and women were listed separately. Women had been allowed to take the Tripos since 1880, after Charlotte Angas Scott was unofficially ranked as eighth wrangler. When the women's list was announced, Fawcett was described as "above the senior wrangler". No woman was officially awarded the first position until Ruth Hendry in 1992.” *Wik

A description of the event is recorded in the North Hall Diary of Newnham College:-

"The great event of the year was Philippa Garrett Fawcet's achievement in the Mathematical Tripos. For the first time a woman has been placed above the Senior Wrangler. The excitement in the Senate House when the lists were read was unparalleled. The deafening cheers of the throng of undergraduates redoubled as Miss Fawcett left the Senate House by the side of the Principal. On her arrival at the College she was enthusiastically greeted by a crowd of fellow-students, and carried in triumph into Clough Hall. Flowers, letters, and telegrams poured in upon her throughout the day. The College was profusely decorated with flags. In the evening the whole College dined in Clough Hall. After dinner toasts were proposed: the healths drunk were those of the Principal, Miss Fawcett, her Coach (Mr Hobson) and Senior and Junior Optimes. At 9.30 p.m. the College gardens were illuminated, and a bonfire was lighted on the hockey-ground, round which Miss Fawcett was three times carried amid shouts of triumph and strains of "For she's a jolly good fellow." *SAU

Another term developed at the examinations went to the lowest scoring person who passed the exam,the last name before the line separating the successful from the “Gulph”, the unsuccessful examines.  To this lowest of the high, was awarded the title (and often an actual) Wooden Spoon.  The name appears somewhat widely in English speaking nations for an individual or team that has come last in a competition. "

The First written record of “Senior Wrangler” in print seems to be in 1791, and the “Wooden Spoon” in 1793.

The spoons themselves, actually made of wood, grew larger, (like the wooden spoon shown below) and in latter years measured up to five feet long. By tradition, they were dangled in a teasing way from the upstairs balcony in the Senate House, in front of the recipient as he came before the Vice-Chancellor to receive his degree, at least until 1875 when the practice was specifically banned by the university.

The Last Spoon

The last wooden spoon was awarded to Cuthbert Lempriere Holthouse, an oarsman of the Lady Margaret Boat Club of St John's College, Cambridge, in 1909 at the graduation ceremony in the university's Senate House. The handle is shaped like an oar and inscribed with an epigram in Greek which may be translated as follows:

In Honours Mathematical,

This is the very last of all

The Wooden Spoons which you see here;

O you who see it, shed a tear.

This spoon is now in the possession of St John's College, Cambridge, with an earlier version being kept at the Selwyn College Library. From 8 June 2009 to 26 June 2009, St John's College held an exhibition of the five surviving wooden spoons in College hands, from St John's (the last one, dating from 1909), Selwyn's (1906), Emmanuel's (1889) and Corpus Christi's (1895 and 1907) in its library to mark the centenary of the "awarding" of the last spoon of all. There are five known wooden spoons in private hands.

In Canada and the United States' men's Major League Soccer, the last place team in the overall standings is generally considered as the "wooden spoon champion". However, unlike other Wooden Spoon awards, there is a physical "trophy" for the award. Before the start of the 2016 MLS season, the Independent Supporters Council decided to create an actual official "trophy" for the lowest place team in the league, as a complement to the Supporters' Shield which the ISC also manages.

After her achievement, Philippa remained at Newnham as a lecturer in mathematics for over a decade. She also supervised students, becoming an influential figure for the next generation of women mathematicians.

In 1902 she left Cambridge to work in education administration. She joined the Transvaal Education Department in South Africa (soon after the end of the Second Boer War), where she helped reorganize the school system.

On returning to England in 1905, she joined the London County Council Education Department, eventually becoming Assistant Education Officer — the highest-ranking woman in the LCC at the time. Her work there focused on improving secondary education, teacher training, and girls’ access to advanced study.

During the WWI , she was involved in managing schooling under wartime conditions and in ensuring the continuation of teacher training.

She retired in 1934, having spent much of her professional life shaping education policy. She never married, and remained close to her mother, the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and her wider family.

Philippa retired from the LCC in the 1930s and Died on 10 June 1948 (age 80). Notably, this was just after Cambridge finally allowed women to be awarded full University degrees (women were first admitted to full membership / allowed to receive degrees in 1948). *PB notes

On This Day in Math - September 18

 

Lisez Euler, lisez Euler, c'est notre maître à tous.
(Read Euler, read Euler, he is our master in everything.)
—~Pierre-Simon Laplace

The 261st Day of the Year
261 = 15^2 + 6^2. It is also 45^2 - 42^2 and 131^2 - 130^2

261 is the number of possible unfolded tesseract patterns. (Charles Howard Hinton coined the term tesseract  (4-dimensional "cube").  He is also the inventor of the baseball  pitching gun.) (see Baseball and the Fourth Dimension)

If you draw diagonals in a 16 sided polygon, it is possible to dissect it into 7 quadrilaterals.  There are 261 unique  ways to  make this dissection. 

261 is the only three digit number n, for which 2^n - n is prime. *Prime Curios

261 is divisible by 9, the sum of its digits, so it is a Joy-Giver (Harshad) number.

261 Fearless, a non-profit organization started by Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967 wore bib number 261 when she became the first woman to run the Boston Marathon as a numbered entrant. *Wikipedia

[During her run, the race manager Jock Semple assaulted Switzer, trying to grab her bib number and thereby remove her from official competition. After knocking down Switzer's trainer and fellow runner, Arnie Briggs, when he tried to protect her, Semple was shoved to the ground by Switzer's boyfriend, Thomas Miller, who was running with her, and she completed the race.]

This should  have been the Day of the Year in 2021, as that's the base five representation for 261(2021)

A bracelet with 261 Blue beads and 3 Red beads can be ordered in 261 different ways.

261 = 4^4 + 4^1 + 4^0

My conjecture:  There is no square that is made up of five Pythagorean triangles with a side shorter than 261, as shown  *HT to @simon_gregg  

See More math Facts for every year day  here 

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EVENTS

1820 André Marie AMPÈRE describes electromagnetic effect.  On 11 September 1820 he heard of H. C. Ørsted's discovery that a magnetic needle is acted on by a voltaic current. Only a week later, on 18 September, Ampère presented a paper to the Academy containing a much more complete exposition of that and kindred phenomena. On the same day, Ampère also demonstrated before the Academy that parallel wires carrying currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether currents are in the same (attraction) or in opposite directions (repulsion). This laid the foundation of electrodynamics.*Wik.

Two of Ampère’s experimental set-ups to demonstrate electromagnetism, engraving, in Annales de chimie et de la physique, vol. 15, 1820 (Linda Hall Library)

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In 1830, B&O locomotive Tom Thumb, the first locomotive built in America, lost in a 14-km race with a horse due to a boiler leak.*TIS

Peter Cooper, an American inventor and industrialist, first came on the engineering scene in 1830, when he assembled from spare parts a locomotive that he called Tom Thumb, and on behalf of which he challenged a horse-drawn rail car to a race, which took place on Aug. 28, 1830 . Tom Thumb lost the race due to mechanical problems, but he won the marathon, since the locomotive’s superiority was evident, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad decided to put their money on steam locomotives.  Their rapid expansion enabled them to buy iron rails from Cooper's iron works in Maryland, which was the whole idea behind Tom Thumb in the first place.  In the early 20th century, the Bureau of Public Roads (now the Federal Highway Administration) commissioned a painting of the race by their staff artist Carl Rakeman (as well as a hundred other events in highway and rail history).  The original Tom Thumb does not survive, but in 1927 the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad commissioned a replica as best they could (there are no images of the original) and it is a popular attraction in their Museum in Baltimore .

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1846  Le Verrier transmits his most famous achievement, his prediction of the existence of the then unknown planet Neptune, using only mathematics and astronomical observations of the known planet Uranus. Encouraged by physicist Arago Director of the Paris Observatory, Le Verrier was intensely engaged for months in complex calculations to explain small but systematic discrepancies between Uranus's observed orbit and the one predicted from the laws of gravity of Newton. At the same time, but unknown to Le Verrier, similar calculations were made by John Couch Adams in England. Le Verrier announced his final predicted position for Uranus's unseen perturbing planet publicly to the French Academy on 31 August 1846, two days before Adams's final solution, which turned out to be 12° off the mark, was privately mailed to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Le Verrier transmitted his own prediction by 18 September letter to Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory. The letter arrived five days later, and the planet was found with the Berlin Fraunhofer refractor that same evening, 23 September 1846, by Galle and Heinrich d'Arrest within 1° of the predicted location near the boundary between Capricorn and Aquarius.*Wik

Excerpt from the Hora XXI sky chart of the Berlin Science Academy completed by Carl Bremiker. The predicted location (square) and the observed location (circle) were noted in pencil, allegedly by Galle, but at some time after the discovery.

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1927   In 1927, Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 47 radio stations. However, the radio network lost money in its first year, and on 18 Jan 1929 Columbia Records sold out to a group of private investors for $400,000, headed by William S. Paley, a Philadelphia cigar manufacturer. The radio network was renamed The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS).  *TiS

In 1928, CBS acquired 25 radio stations and became the first major radio network in the United States. During the 1930s and 1940s, CBS was known for its news coverage and popular radio programs, including The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Jack Benny Program, and The Lone Ranger.

In the 1950s, CBS became a dominant force in television broadcasting. The network launched many successful shows, including I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, and The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1956, CBS introduced the first color television broadcast.  *CBS

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1948 Alan Turing writes to Jack Good and mentions, "Chess machine designed by Champ and myself..". *Turing Archive

Turochamp (sometimes misspelled "Turbochamp") was conceived in 1948 by Alan Turing and his colleague David Champernowne, deriving its name from their surnames .

It evaluated all possible moves up to a depth of two ply (one move by each side). Forced responses—such as captures, checks, and recaptures—were followed further in the search tree.  Each resulting board position received a numerical evaluation based on criteria like material, mobility, piece defense, and king safety.  The move leading to the highest score was selected 

Although Turing attempted to implement Turochamp on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer at Manchester in 1951, the algorithm was too complex for the hardware of the time 

Turochamp is recognized as the earliest known computer chess algorithm, laying the groundwork for future developments in AI and game-tree search.  

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BIRTHS

1752 Adrien-Marie Legendre (18 Sep 1752; 10 Jan 1833) French mathematician who contributed to number theory, celestial mechanics and elliptic functions. In 1794, he was put in charge of the French government's department that was standardizing French weights and measures. In 1813, he took over as head of the Bureau des Longitudes upon the death of Lagrange, its former chief. It was in a paper on celestial mechanics concerning the motion of planets (1784) that he first introduced the Legendre Polynomials. His provided outstanding work on elliptic functions (1786), and his classic treatise on the theory of numbers (1798) and also worked on the method of least squares. *TIS

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1819 Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (18 Sep 1819; 11 Feb 1868) French physicist whose Foucault Pendulum experimentally proved that the Earth rotates on its axis (6 Jan 1851). Using a long pendulum with a heavy bob, he showed its plane rotated at a rate related to Earth's angular velocity and the latitude of the site. He studied medicine and physics and became an assistant at the Paris Observatory (1855). He invented an accurate test of a lens for chromatic and spherical aberrations. Working with Fizeau, and also independently, he made accurate measurements of the absolute velocity of light. In 1850, Foucault showed that light travels slower in water than in air. He also built a gyroscope (1852), the Foucault's prism (1857) and made improvements for mirrors of reflecting telescopes. *TIS (a brief biography of Foucault is here)

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1839 John Aitken (18 Sep 1839; 14 Nov 1919) Scottish physicist and meteorologist who, through a series of experiments and observations in which he used apparatus of his own design, elucidated the crucial role that microscopic particles, now called Aitken nuclei, play in the condensation of atmospheric water vapour in clouds and fogs. Ill health prevented Aitken from holding any official position; he worked instead in the laboratory in his home in Falkirk. Much of his work was published in the journals of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of which he was a member.*TIS

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1854 Sir Richard Tetley Glazebrook (18 Sep 1854; 15 Dec 1935) English physicist who was the first director of the UK National Physical Laboratory, from 1 Jan 1900 until his retirement in Sep 1919. At first, the laboratory's income depended on much routine, commercial testing, but Glazebrook championed fundamental, industrially oriented research. With support from individual donors, buildings were added for electrical work, metrology, and engineering. Data useful to the shipbuilding industry was collected in pioneering experimental work on models of ships made possible by a tank funded by Alfred Yarrow (1908). From 1909, laboratory began work benefitting the embryonic aeronautics industry, at the request of the secretary of state for war. The lab to contributed substantially to military needs during WW I *TIS

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1863 William Henry Metzler (18 Sept 1863, 18 April 1943) was a Canadian mathematician who graduated from Toronto University and taught at Syracuse University and Albany Teachers Training College, both in New York State. He published papers on the theory of matrices and determinants, several of them in the Proceedings of the EMS. *SAU

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1907 Edwin Mattison McMillan (Sep 18, 1907 - September 7, 1991) McMillan was an American physicist and Nobel laureate credited with being the first-ever to produce a transuranium element, neptunium. For this, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg in 1951.
McMillan and his colleagues discovered the elements neptunium (Np) and plutonium (Pu), the two elements following uranium (U) in the periodic table. Their names were inspired by the position of the planets in the solar system - Neptune is beyond Uranus and Pluto (before being declassified as a planet) is beyond Neptune. *http://www.rsc.org/

Three Nobel Prize winners (left to right): Edwin McMillan, Emilio Segre, Glenn Seaborg, photograph, 1959 (nara.getarchive.net) *Linda Hall Library

*Linda Hall org

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1909 Johannes Haantjes ( Itens , 18 September 1909 – Leiden , 8 February 1956 ) was a Dutch mathematician who mainly concerned himself with differential geometry . His last scientific position was that of professor at Leiden University with teaching responsibility for geometry . 

From the 1940s onwards, Haantjes was mainly concerned with metric geometry , in particular with dimension theory. Within that geometry, a curvature was named, partly after him: the Haantjes-Finsler curvature . It is one of the many extensions of the ordinary curvature concept , with applications to wavelets , among others . 

It should not go unmentioned that Haantjes has a total of 53 publications to his name  , including several articles by the group of mathematicians (including A. Nijenhuis and G. Laman) who were concerned with the so-called “ geometric object ”, and the fact that in 1954 he wrote a book that was used for many years in teacher training: Inleiding in de differentialometrkunde . *Wik

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1926 James Cooley, (September 18, 1926 – June 29, 2016) co-creator of the fast Fourier transform, was born. Working with John Tukey, Cooley in 1965 worked out a vast improvement to a common mathematical algorithm called the Fourier transform. Although the algorithm had been useful in computing, its complexity required too much time. While working at IBM, Cooley built on Tukey's ideas for a swifter version. *CHM

Cooley received a B.A. degree in 1949 from Manhattan College, Bronx, NY, an M.A. degree in 1951 from Columbia University, New York, NY, and a Ph.D. degree in 1961 in applied mathematics from Columbia University. He was a programmer on John von Neumann's computer at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ, from 1953 to 1956, where he notably programmed the Blackman–Tukey transformation.

He worked on quantum mechanical computations at the Courant Institute, New York University, from 1956 to 1962, when he joined the Research Staff at the IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY. Upon retirement from IBM in 1991, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, where he served on the faculty of the computer engineering program. *Wik

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1943 Nan McKenzie Laird (born September 18, 1943 - ) is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of Public Health, Emerita in Biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She served as Chair of the Department from 1990 to 1999. She was the Henry Pickering Walcott Professor of Biostatistics from 1991 to 1999.

Laird began her undergraduate studies at Rice University in 1961, first majoring in mathematics, before switching to French. She left Rice in her junior year in college and moved to New York City. Later, she resumed studies at University of Georgia in computer science before eventually switching to statistics and earned her BA in 1969. Laird worked between 1969 and 1971 as a computer programmer on the Apollo program at MIT's Draper Laboratory before starting her graduate studies at Harvard University in statistics in 1971. She received her PhD from Harvard in 1975 under Arthur Dempster and was hired as a faculty member directly after graduation. She remained at Harvard until her retirement, when she became an emeritus professor.

Laird is well known for many seminal papers in biostatistics applications and methods, including the expectation–maximization algorithm.

Her honors include the third International Prize in Statistics in 2021, the 25th Annual Distinguished Statistician Lecture from the University of Connecticut, the American Statistical Association and Pfizer in 2016, the 25th Annual Lowell Reed Lecturer, from the American Public Health Association in 2011, the Samuel S. Wilks Award, from the American Statistical Association in 2011, the Myra Samuels Lecturer award from Purdue University in 2004, the Janet L. Norwood Award in 2003 from the American Statistical Association, the Florence Nightingale David Award in 2001 from the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies, and several other fellowships.

Laird is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, as well as the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. She is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. *Wik

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DEATHS

1783 Leonhard Euler dies (15 Apr 1707, 18 Sep 1783) . After having discussed the topics of the day, the Montgolfiers, and the discovery of Uranus, “He [Euler] ceased to calculate and to live,”according to the oft-quoted words of de Condorcet. *VFR   Swiss mathematician and physicist, one of the founders of pure mathematics. He not only made decisive and formative contributions to the subjects of geometry, calculus, mechanics, and number theory but also developed methods for solving problems in observational astronomy and demonstrated useful applications of mathematics in technology. At age 28, he blinded one eye by staring at the sun while working to invent a new way of measuring time. *TIS (Students who have not, should read Dunham's "Euler, The Master of us All")

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1891 William Ferrel (born 29 Jan 1817, 18 Sep 1891) American meteorologist was an important contributor to the understanding of oceanic and atmospheric circulation. He was able to show the interrelation of the various forces upon the Earth 's surface, such as gravity, rotation and friction. Ferrel was first to mathematically demonstrate the influence of the Earth's rotation on the presence of high and low pressure belts encircling the Earth, and on the deflection of air and water currents. The latter was a derivative of the effect theorized by Gustave de Coriolis in 1835, and became known as Ferrel's law. Ferrel also considered the effect that the gravitational pull of the Sun and Moon might have on the Earth's rotation and concluded (without proof, but correctly) that the Earth's axis wobbles a bit. *TIS 

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1896 Armand Hippolyte Fizeau (23 Sep 1819, 18 Sep 1896) French physicist was the first to measure the speed of light successfully without using astronomical calculations (1849). Fizeau sent a narrow beam of light between gear teeth on the edge of a rotating wheel. The beam then traveled to a mirror 8 km/5 mi away and returned to the wheel where, if the spin were fast enough, a tooth would block the light. Knowing this time from the rotational speed of the wheel, and the mirror's distance, Fizeau directly measured the speed of light. He also found that light travels faster in air than in water, which confirmed the wave theory of light, and that the motion of a star affects the position of the lines in its spectrum. With Jean Foucault, he proved the wave nature of  the Sun's heat rays by showing their interference (1847). *TIS

"Fizeau" is one of the 72 names inscribed on the frieze below the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, all of whom were French scientists, mathematicians, engineers, or industrialists from the hundred years before the tower's public opening for the 1889 World's Fair. Of the 72, Fizeau is the only one who was still alive when the tower was opened. *Wik

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1913 Samuel Roberts FRS (15 December 1827, Horncastle, Lincolnshire – 18 September 1913, London) was a British mathematician.
Roberts studied at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Horncastle. He matriculated in 1845 at the University of London, where he earned in 1847 his bachelor's degree in mathematics and in 1849 his master's degree in mathematics and physics, as first in his class. Next he studied law and became a solicitor in 1853. After a few years of law practice he abandoned his law career and returned to mathematics, although he never had an academic position. He had his first mathematical paper published in 1848. In 1865 he was an important participant in the founding of the London Mathematical Society (LMS). From 1866 to 1892 he acted as legal counsel for LMS, from 1872 to 1880 he was the organization's treasurer, and from 1880 to 1882 its president. In 1896 he received the De Morgan Medal of the LMS. In 1878 he was elected FRS.
Roberts published papers in several fields of mathematics, including geometry, interpolation theory, and Diophantine equations.
Roberts and Pafnuty Chebyschev are jointly credited with the Roberts-Chebyshev theorem related to four-bar linkages *Wik

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1967 Sir John Douglas Cockcroft (27 May 1897, 18 Sep 1967) British physicist, who shared (with Ernest T.S. Walton of Ireland) the 1951 Nobel Prize for Physics for pioneering the use of particle accelerators to study the atomic nucleus. Together, in 1929, they built an accelerator, the Cockcroft-Walton generator, that generated large numbers of particles at lower energies - the first atom-smasher. In 1932, they used it to disintegrate lithium atoms by bombarding them with protons, the first artificial nuclear reaction not utilizing radioactive substances. They conducted further research on the splitting of other atoms and established the importance of accelerators as a tool for nuclear research. Their accelerator design became one of the most useful in the world's laboratories. *TIS

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1977 Paul Isaak Bernays (17 Oct 1888, 18 Sep 1977) Swiss mathematician and logician who is known for his attempts to develop a unified theory of mathematics. Bernays, influenced by Hilbert's thinking, believed that the whole structure of mathematics could be unified as a single coherent entity. In order to start this process it was necessary to devise a set of axioms on which such a complete theory could be based. He therefore attempted to put set theory on an axiomatic basis to avoid the paradoxes. Between 1937 and 1954 Bernays wrote a whole series of articles in the Journal of Symbolic Logic which attempted to achieve this goal. In 1958 Bernays published Axiomatic Set Theory in which he combined together his work on the axiomatisation of set theory. *TIS

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2002  Siobhán Vernon (née O'Shea) was the first Irish-born woman to get a PhD in pure mathematics in Ireland, in 1964.

Siobhán Vernon worked as a demonstrator in the Department of Mathematics at University College, Cork while she completed her M.Sc. and was then appointed Senior Demonstrator. Encouraged by Dr Patrick Brendan Kennedy, Siobhán began to publish research in 1956 and was appointed to the full-time post of Assistant in 1957. Continuing her research career, she spent a year as a visiting lecturer in Royal Holloway College, University of London, in 1962-63.

Returning to University College, Cork, she submitted her published papers for the award of PhD, which was awarded in 1964 by the National University of Ireland. She was appointed lecturer in 1965.

Following her marriage to geologist Peter Vernon, Siobhán reduced her teaching to half-time, as they raised their four children. She later returned to full time teaching, retiring in 1988.

In 1995 she was honoured with a Catherine McAuley award as a distinguished past pupil by the Convent of Mercy in Macroom. *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

On This Day in Math - September 17

 

God is a child; and when he began to play, he cultivated mathematics. 

It is the most godly of man's games.

~V Erath

The 260th day of the year; 260 is the constant for each row, column and diagonal of the first known(1891) 8x8 bimagic square.
The 8x8 is the smallest order possible for a bimagic square (the squares of the numbers also form a magic square) that uses consecutive digits. The constant for the magic square formed by the squares is 11,180.

More on the first of these in 1891 at the Feb 1 On This Day in Math.

260 is also the sum of the 8x8 pandiagonal square created by Emory McClintock in 1897.  A pandiagonal magic square, in addition to satisfying the requirement of a magic square, has the additional property that all diagonals, including broken diagonals, i.e. those that wrap around from one edge of the square to the opposite edge, add to the same sum. 

260 =66^2-64^2 , and also 16^2 + 2^2 = 4^4 + 4^1, and 14^2 + 8^2

260 is a Palindrome in base 8 (404)

The Mayan Sacred Calendar had a 260 year cycle. 

A 5x5 magic square with a constant of 260 can be formed by taking the standard 1-25 magic square and multiplying each term by four.  Another is to use 39, 40, 41,... , 64

260 is also the sum of the squares of the divisors of 15. /( 260 = 1^2 + 3^2 + 5^2 + 15^2 /)
See More Math Facts for every Year Day here

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EVENTS

In 1683, the Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek wrote to the Royal Society reporting his discovery of microscopic living animalcules (live bacteria). He had made observations on the plaque between his own teeth, "a little white matter, which is as thick as if 'twere batter." Looking at these samples with his microscope, Leeuwenhoek reported how in his own mouth: "I then most always saw, with great wonder, that in the said matter there were many very little living animalcules, very prettily a-moving. The biggest sort. . . had a very strong and swift motion, and shot through the water (or spittle) like a pike does through the water. The second sort. . .oft-times spun round like a top. . . and these were far more in number." *TIS

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1787 U.S. Constitution signed. Its format was influenced by the axiomatic approach of Euclidean Geometry. *VFR (I would appreciate insight into what this means? comments? Suggestions? Wild guesses?)The U.S. 

Constitution (1787) reflects axiomatic structure in the following ways:

Foundational Principles (like axioms):"We the People..." sets the source of authority.

The Preamble lays out fundamental goals (like the “why”).

Definitions of Powers and Terms:Articles I–III clearly define the roles and powers of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.

Systematic, Logical Order: The document proceeds from general principles to specific structures — just like a geometric treatise builds from axioms to propositions.

Checks and Balances (logical consistency):

Like Euclidean logic ensures no contradiction, the Constitution tries to balance powers to avoid internal contradiction in governance.

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1789 William Herschel discovers the small moon Mimas, Saturns smallest and innermost moon.  The name of this, and the other six known moons of Saturn was suggested by William's son John in 1847.  All were named for mythological giants of Greek literature.  The large crater, now named for Herschel was not observed until photographed by the Cassinni probe on November 7, 2004.

*Tech Explorist

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1871 Opening of the Mount Cenis (Fréjus) Tunnel (1857-70) through the Alps, the world's first important mountain tunnel. The two track railway tunnel unites Italian Savoy (north of the mountains) through Switzerland with the rest of Italy to the south. At 8 miles long and it was more than double the length of any previous tunnel. In 1861, after three years of tedious hand-boring a mere eight inches a day into the rock face, Sommeiller introduced the first industrial-scale pneumatics for tunnel digging. He built a special reservoir, high above the tunnel entrance, to produce a head of water that compressed air (to 6 atm.) for pneumatic drills, able to dig up to 20 times faster. Authorized on 15 Aug 1857, the tunnel opened on 17 Sep 1871, as a major triumph of engineering.*TIS

During the 2000s, the Fréjus Rail Tunnel underwent a series of works to modernise and improve it, including the increase of its bore to accommodate wider rail vehicles, such as container trucks on piggy-back wagons, as part of the Autoroute Ferroviaire Alpine. 

*Wik

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1901 Peter Cooper Hewitt patents the first mercury-vapor lamp.Hewitt was issued U.S. patent #682692 on September 17, 1901. *Wik

In 1902, Hewitt developed the mercury arc rectifier, the first rectifier that 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.

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 cruise missile. *Wik

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1908  The Wright Flyer flown by Orville Wright, with Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge as passenger, crashes, killing Selfridge, who becomes the first airplane fatality. *the painter flynn

the painter flynn

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1914  In 1898, with the aid of his friend, Charles Walcott, Director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Samuel Pierpont Langley became the third Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution , secured funding, including $50,000 from the U.S. War Department, to build a full-scale, piloted flying machine that he named, Aerodrome A. 

 Langley had his first genuine success on May 6, 1896, with his Aerodrome Number 5. It made the world's first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. It was launched from a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River near Quantico, Virginia.

On October 3, 1903, the first flight attempt of Aerodrome A splashed into the Potomac River with Langley’s assistant, Charles Manly, at the controls. A second attempt on December 9 proved equally disastrous with the aircraft breaking apart soon after launch and crashing into the water. Though the pilot was unharmed, public ridicule in the press forever damaged Langley’s aviation dreams. He died three years later without making another flight.

In 1917, Walcott tried Langley's Aerodrome 5 using pontoons made by Glenn Curtiss.   . On September 17, 1914, the Great Aerodrome made a successful flight over Lake Keuka in New York. Secretary Walcott now felt that he had evidence to resurrect Langley’s rightful place in aviation history.

*Washington Post

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1971 RCA withdraws from computer market, losing $490M *CHM

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1985 The Los Angeles Times reported that scientists at Chevron tested their new $10 million Cray X­MP supercomputer and discovered the 30^th Mersenne Prime and largest known prime (to that date), 2²¹⁶⁰⁹¹− 1
*[Part I, pp. 3, 19; Mathematics Magazine

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2008, On September 17, a team of researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas led by Founders Professor Hal Sudborough announced the acceptance by the journal Theoretical Computer Science of a more efficient algorithm for pancake sorting than the one proposed by Gates and Papadimitriou in 1979. This establishes a new upper bound of (18/11)n, improving upon the existing bound of (5/3)n from 1979 by William H Gates, soon to be known as Bill Gates of Microsoft, then a Sophomore student at Harvard. *wik

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BIRTHS

1794 Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (French: [; 17 September 1743 – 29 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher and mathematician. His ideas, including support for a liberal economy, free and equal public instruction, constitutional government, and equal rights for women and people of all races, have been said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, of which he has been called the "last witness", and Enlightenment rationalism. A critic of the constitution proposed by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in 1793, the Convention Nationale — and the Jacobin faction in particular — voted to have Condorcet arrested. He died in prison after a period of hiding from the French Revolutionary authorities. 

From 1765 to 1774, he focused on science. In 1765, he published his first work on mathematics, entitled Essai sur le calcul intégral, which was well received, launching his career as a mathematician. He went on to publish more papers, and on 25 February 1769, he was elected to the Académie royale des Sciences.

Condorcet worked with Leonhard Euler and Benjamin Franklin. He soon became an honorary member of many foreign academies and philosophic societies, including the American Philosophical Society (1775), the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1785), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1792) and also in Prussia and Russia.

In 1785, Condorcet published his Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions, one of his most important works. This work described several now famous results, including Condorcet's jury theorem, which states that if each member of a voting group is more likely than not to make a correct decision, the probability that the highest vote of the group is the correct decision increases as the number of members of the group increases, and Condorcet's paradox, which shows that majority preferences can become intransitive with three or more options – it is possible for a certain electorate to express a preference for A over B, a preference for B over C, and a preference for C over A, all from the same set of ballots.

The paper also outlines a generic Condorcet method, designed to simulate pair-wise elections between all candidates in an election. He disagreed strongly with the alternative method of aggregating preferences put forth by Jean-Charles de Borda (based on summed rankings of alternatives). Condorcet was one of the first to systematically apply mathematics in the social sciences.

He also considered the instant-runoff voting elimination method, as early as 1788, though only to condemn it, for its ability to eliminate a candidate preferred by a majority of voters.

Condorcet's statue by Jacques Perrin, on Quai de Conti in Paris, France

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1764 John Goodricke (17 Sep 1764; 20 Apr 1786) English astronomer who was the first to notice that some variable stars were periodic. Born a deaf-mute, after a proper education he was able to read lips and to speak. He was the first to calculate the period of Algol to 68 hours and 50 minutes, where the star was changing its brightness by more than a magnitude as seen from Earth. Even better, he suggested that the variability was caused by a dark object, possibly a planet, that regularly passed in front of the star. The modern explanation is that Algol is a binary star, with the eclipse caused by the smaller orbiting star.

He was also first to correctly propose that the distant sun is periodically occulted by a dark body. John Goodricke was admitted to the Royal Society on 16 April 1786, when 21 years old. He didn't recognize this honor, because he died four days later, in York, from pneumonia.*TIS

The constellation Perseus, engraving, in Johann Bayer, Uranometria, 1603. Algo (beta Persei) is the star in the right eye of the head of Medusa (Linda Hall Library)

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1826 (Georg Friedrich) Bernhard Riemann (17 Sep 1826; 20 July 1866) was a German mathematician whose work widely influenced geometry and analysis. In addition, his ideas concerning geometry of space had a profound effect on the development of modern theoretical physics and provided the foundation for the concepts and methods used later in relativity theory. He clarified the notion of integral by defining what we now call the Riemann integral. He was an original thinker and a host of methods, theorems and concepts are named after him. Riemann suffered from tuberculosis and he spent his last years in Italy in an attempt to improve his health. *TIS 

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1846 Seth Carlo Chandler (17 Sep 1846; 31 Dec 1913) an American astronomer best known for his discovery (1884-85) of the Chandler Wobble, a complex movement in the Earth's axis of rotation (now refered to as polar motion) that causes latitude to vary with a period of 14 months. His interests were much wider than this single subject, however, and he made substantial contributions to such diverse areas of astronomy as cataloging and monitoring variable stars, the independent discovery of the nova T Coronae, improving the estimate of the constant of aberration, and computing the orbital parameters of minor planets and comets. His publications totaled more than 200. *TIS

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1857 Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (17 Sep 1857; 19 Sep 1935) Russian pioneer space theorist who, while a provincial Russian schoolteacher, worked out many of the principles of space travel. In 1883, he noted that vehicle in space would travel in the opposite direction to gas that it emitted, and was the first to seriously propose this method propulsion in space travel. He wrote various papers, including the 1903 article "Exploration of Space with Reactive Devices." The engineering equations he derived included parameters such as specific impulse, thrust coefficient and area ratio. He established that the most efficient chemical combination would be that of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. He was later recognized by the Soviet Union as the "father of cosmonautics." He also built the first wind tunnel.*TIS

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1905 Hans Freudenthal (September 17, 1905,– October 13, 1990) was a Dutch mathematician. He made substantial contributions to algebraic topology and also took an interest in literature, philosophy, history and mathematics education.
In 1937 he proved the Freudenthal suspension theorem.
Later in his life, Freudenthal focused on elementary mathematics education. In the 1970s, his single-handed intervention prevented the Netherlands from following the worldwide trend of "`new math"'. He was also a fervent critic of one of the first international school achievement studies.
In 1971 he founded the IOWO at Utrecht University, that after his death was renamed Freudenthal Institute, the current Freudenthal institute for science and mathematics education. He was awarded the Gouden Ganzenveer award in 1984, and died in Utrecht in 1990, sitting on a bench in a park where he always took a morning walk.*Wik

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1916 Oswald Garrison "Mike" Villard Jr (17 Sep 1916; 7 Jan 2004) American electronics engineer who developed over-the-horizon radar (a way to detect objects out of direct sight by bouncing radar off the ionosphere, an electrically charged layer in the upper atmosphere) so radar could peer around the Earth's curvature to detect aircraft and missiles thousands of miles away. His interest in electricity began with a copy of Harper's Electricity Book for Boys. At age 12, he put together a radio from a kit. During WW II, he researched countermeasures to protect Allied forces against enemy radio and radar devices. He made pioneering studies of radar jamming. In 1947, he designed a simplified voice transmitter permitting two-way communication on a single radio channel, such as a telephone conversation. *TIS

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1934 Warren J. Mitofsky, (17 September 1934 - 1 September 2006)While working at the Census Bureau in the 1960s, he and a colleague, Joseph Waksberg, began to devise a random-digit dialing (RDD) system that now bears both their names.
Mr. Mitofsky went to work at CBS News in 1967. Not long afterwards, he organized the first "exit poll" in a Kentucky gubernatorial election, with his first national exit poll being in 1972. He directed the CBS News Election and Survey Unit until 1990, leading, in 1975, to the joint effort with the NYTimes, the CBS News/New York Times Poll (which The Times calls the New York Times/CBS News Poll), which he directed until 1990.
Since 2003, Mitofsky, considered the "Father of Exit Polling" by many, led election-night analysis for the News Election Pool, providing exit-poll results and projections. (Mitofsky disliked the term "exit poll"; he preferred "Election Day survey".)
In exit polls on Election Day in 2004, Mitofsky's early exit polls found Senator John Kerry leading over President Bush, which led some in the news media to prepare for Senator Kerry becoming President Kerry. But such was too premature, as Mitofsky readily acknowledged, later discovering that the pro-Kerry exit-poll lead was caused by Republicans refusing to participate at a greater rate than Democrats in the exit polls. [Guess this shows the importance of not ignoring nonresponse.]
However, despite all this, Mitofsky will probably be best remembered by many for his efficient method of sampling telephone numbers using random-digit dialing (RDD), which is now known as the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method. In 1970, Mitofsky wrote an unpublished CBS News memorandum titled "Sampling of Telephone Households" that helped make his name a household word in public-opinion polling. Eight years later, Joseph Waksberg published an analogous paper, "Sampling Methods for Random Digit Dialing", in the prestigious Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), thus resulting in the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method appellation.
The Mitofsky-Waksberg Method of RDD is a cluster-sampling method
for sampling residential telephone numbers that greatly increases
the percentage of calls that do reach residential households. *David Bee

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DEATHS

1802 Baron Georg von Vega (b. 1754- September 17, 1754), a military officer and mathematician famous for his military campaigns and his table of logarithms, was murdered for “his money and his watch.” [Eves, Adieu, 257◦] *VFR

Vega published a series of books containing logarithmic tables. The first volume appeared in 1783. Much later, in 1797, it was followed by a second volume that included a collection of integrals and other useful formulae. His Handbook, originally published in 1793, was later translated into several languages and issued in over 100 editions.

His most significant work was Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus (Treasury of All Logarithms), first published in 1794 in Leipzig (its 90th edition appeared in 1924). Although based on the tables of Adriaan Vlacq, Vega's version corrected numerous errors and extended the logarithms of trigonometric functions for small angles. An engineer, Franc Allmer, an honorary senator of the Graz University of Technology, discovered a copy of Vega's 10-digit logarithmic tables in the Museum of Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen. Gauss frequently used Vega's tables and even wrote calculations in the margins. He also found and marked some errors in the millions of values Vega had calculated.

A copy of Thesaurus Logarithmorum Completus from the private collection of mathematician and computing pioneer Charles Babbage (1791–1871) is preserved at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh.

Over the years, Vega also wrote a four-volume textbook titled Vorlesungen über die Mathematik (Lectures on Mathematics). Volume I was published in 1782 when Vega was 28 years old, followed by Volume II in 1784, Volume III in 1788, and Volume IV in 1800. These textbooks include valuable tables; for example, Volume II contains closed-form expressions for the sines of multiples of 3 degrees, presented in a user-friendly format.

Vega also authored at least six scientific papers. On August 20, 1789, he set a world record by calculating pi to 140 decimal places, of which the first 126 were correct. *Wik

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1823 Abraham-Louis Bréguet (10 Jan 1747, 17 Sep 1823) Swiss-French horologist and inventor who became the leading French watchmaker of his time because of his artistic as well as technical skill. His innovations included a self-winding or "perpétuelle" watch (1780), the gong spring which decreased the size of repeater watches, and the first anti-shock device or "pare-chute", which improved the reliability of his watches while making them less fragile. In 1775 he founded the Breguet watchmaking firm. After a two year interruption during the French Revolution, he continued business with more inventions. He sold the first modern carriage clock to Bonaparte, and created the tact watch by which time could be read by touch.*TIS

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1876 Charles Davies (January 22, 1798 – September 17, 1876) was a professor of mathematics at the United States Military Academy, notable for writing a series of mathematical textbooks.

Davies was born in Washington, Connecticut. His father was a County Sheriff or County Judge. During Davies' early years, the family moved to St Lawrence County, New York, where he was educated in local schools. He entered the US Military Academy at West Point in December 1813, through the influence of General Joseph Swift, who had met Davies' father during the War of 1812. Davies had earned praise for the services rendered to General James Wilkinson's army in the Descent of the St. Lawerence during the fall of 1813. Having been brought up on the frontier, Davies had had little formal education, but he had no difficulty in pursuing the courses at the academy. He graduated from the academy in December 1815.

He joined the Light Artillery as a Bvt. Second Lieut. on December 11, 1815. He served a year in garrison at New England posts till August 31, 1816, when he was transferred to the Corps of Engineers. He resigned from the Army on December 1, 1816, and took a post as Assistant Professor of Mathematics at West Point. He became a Professor in May 1823.

Davies resigned from West Point in May 1837. From 1839 till 1841, he was a professor at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, wherein he established a connection with Alfred Smith Barnes for publication of his books. He resigned from this position due to illness. He was reappointed in the army as a paymaster in November 1841, and was the Treasurer at West Point from December 11, 1841, to December 19, 1846. In 1848, he joined the New York University as a Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. Upon his retirement a year later, he was conferred the degree of Doctor of Law from Geneva College, New York. Davies had chosen to retire to devote more time in writing textbooks. After a brief teaching stint at the Normal School in Albany, New York, he accepted a position at Columbia College, New York City in 1857 and was appointed as emeritus professor in 1865.

He died on September 17, 1878. He was engaged with authoring textbooks till his death. He was buried in the family cemetery at Oswegatchie, New York.

Charles Davies' books were published by A.S. Barnes & Co. His earliest works were translations of French authors. But according to author John H. Lienhard, those books were based only very loosely upon the original French works. Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry (1828), his most popular work, appeared in 33 editions/printings and sold more than 300,000 copies. By 1875, his publisher had sold over 7,000,000 copies of his books and was selling 350,000 copies every year.

Mathematical historian Florian Cajori wrote of his books as being "perspicuous, clear, and logically arranged."

The following works by Davies were used as textbooks at West Point:

Elements of Descriptive Geometry, with Their Application to Spherical Trigonometry, Spherical Projections, and Warped Surfaces (1826); 1866 edition

Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry (1828), translated from the French of A. M. Legendre, by David Brewster. Revised and Adapted to the Course of Instruction in the United States.

Elements of Surveying (1830)

A Treatise on Shades and Shadows, and Linear Perspective (1832)

Common School Arithmetic (1833)

Elements of Algebra (1835), translated from the French Élémens d'algèbre of M. Pierre Louis Marie Bourdon [fr][6]

Elements of the Differential and Integral Calculus (1836)

Elements of Analytical Geometry (1837); 1845 revised edition

I own a copy of his Practical Arithmetic, 1876  *Wik *PB notes

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1877 William Fox Talbot (11 Feb 1800, 17 Sep 1877) English mathematician, physicist, chemist who invented the negative-positive photographic process. He improved Thomas Wedgewood's discovery (1802) that brushing silver nitrate solution onto paper produces a light-sensitive medium able to record negative images, but Wedgewood was unable to control the darkening. In February 1835, Fox Talbot found that a strong solution of salt fixed the image. Using a camera obscura to focus an image onto his paper to produce a negative, then - by exposing a second sheet of paper to sunlight transmitted through the negative - he was the first to produce a positive picture of which he was able to make further copies at will. His Pencil of Nature (1844) was the first photographically illustrated book. *TIS

About 40 "substantially complete" copies of the original 1844-1846 edition still exist and at least two facsimile editions have been issued.

William Henry Fox Talbot’s home, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire, England, was used as a filming location for several of the Harry Potter movies. Parts of the abbey’s cloisters, chapter house, and sacristy were used to represent areas of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in The Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone and The Chamber of Secrets, among others.

“The Open Door” plate six from The Pencil of Nature. This print is a variant of the print presented in the book. It was removed from it’s backing and remains in better condition than many others. Image

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1891 Józeph Miksa Petzval (6 Jan 1807, 17 Sept 1891) worked for much of his life on the Laplace transform. He was influenced by the work of Liouville and wrote both a long paper and a two volume treatise on the Laplace transform and its application to ordinary linear differential equations. His study is thorough but not entirely satisfactory since he was unable to use contour integration to invert the transform.
But for a student of Petzval we might today call the Laplace transform the Petzval transform. Petzval fell out with this student who then accused Petzval of plagiarising Laplace's work. Although this was untrue, Boole and Poincaré, influenced no doubt by the quarrel, called the transformation the Laplace transform.
Petzval is best remembered for his work on optical lenses and lens aberration done in the early 1840's (Petzval curvature is named after him) which allowed the construction of modern cameras. Petzval produced an achromatic portrait lens that was vastly superior to the simple meniscus lens then in use. *SAU

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1908 Thomas E. Selfridge , a 1903 classmate of Douglas MacArthur at West Point, whose tombstone at West Point reads “Gave up his life in the service of his country at Fort Myers, Virginia, September 17, 1908, falling with the first government aeroplane.” The pilot, an Ohio bicycle maker named Orville Wright, survived. [Rick Atkinson, The Long Grey Line (1989), pp. 1–2] (His father was a general, but Selfridge Field, now an Air Natl. Guard base near Detroit, is named for the Lt.,the first person to die in a crash of a powered airplane.)

For more information about Lt. Selfridge and his early relation to flying, the Fort Myers, and Alexander G. Bell, see this great article at the Smithsonian site sent to me by the author, Julia Blakely.

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1994 Sir Karl Raimund Popper CH FRS FBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the classical inductivist views on the scientific method in favour of empirical falsification, and for founding the Department of Philosophy at the London School of Economics. According to Popper, a theory in the empirical sciences can never be proven, but it can be falsified, meaning that it can (and should) be scrutinized with decisive experiments. Popper was opposed to the classical justificationist account of knowledge, which he replaced with "the first non-justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy", namely critical rationalism.

In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defense of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he believed made a flourishing open society possible. His political thought resides within the camp of Enlightenment rationalism and humanism. He was a dogged opponent of totalitarianism, nationalism, fascism, romanticism, collectivism, and other kinds of (in Popper's view) reactionary and irrational ideas, and identified modern liberal democracies as the best-to-date embodiment of an open society.

In 1937, Popper finally managed to get a position that allowed him to emigrate to New Zealand, where he became lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote his influential work The Open Society and Its Enemies. In Dunedin he met the Professor of Physiology John Carew Eccles and formed a lifelong friendship with him. In 1946, after the Second World War, he moved to the United Kingdom to become a reader in logic and scientific method at the London School of Economics (LSE), a constituent School of the University of London, where, three years later, in 1949, he was appointed professor of logic and scientific method. Popper was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1958 to 1959. He resided in Penn, Buckinghamshire.

Popper died of "complications of cancer, pneumonia and kidney failure" in Kenley at the age of 92 on 17 September 1994. He had been working continuously on his philosophy until two weeks before when he suddenly fell terminally ill, writing his last letter two weeks before his death as well.

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1999 Leonard Carlitz (26 Dec 1907, 17 Sept 1999) Carlitz published 771 papers, supervised 44 doctoral and 51 master's theses. His major mathematical contributions are to finite field theory, number theory, and combinatorics. But his publications extend beyond these areas to include algebraic geometry, commutative rings and algebras, finite differences, geometry, linear algebra, and special functions.*SAU

Carlitz was sometimes called the “one-man mathematical journal” because of his astonishing output (over 770 papers!).

Carlitz had a reputation for replying almost instantly to mathematical queries. Colleagues joked that if you sent him a letter in the morning describing a new problem in combinatorics or number theory, by evening you’d already receive a reply with a general theorem—and possibly the draft of a paper—worked out.

The mathematician George Andrews once remarked that Carlitz seemed to publish faster than anyone could possibly read, let alone referee, his work. Editors would sometimes receive submissions from him so frequently that they half-seriously wondered whether he had a secret team of assistants—when in fact it was just Carlitz’s unmatched speed and energy.

This relentless pace also had a funny side: one young mathematician recalled nervously showing Carlitz a new identity he had discovered. Carlitz listened politely, then replied, “Yes, very nice—I proved it in 1942.” And then, with a smile, added, “but your proof is prettier.” 

One student joked that “working with Carlitz was like trying to take a sip from a fire hydrant.” Another said that the real challenge of being his student wasn’t solving problems but keeping up with the ones he solved for you before you even knew you had them. PBnotes

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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