Tuesday, 17 March 2026

Snopes Reduex

 



Bringing back a hit from 2009 !!!!

My recent post mentioning the snopes debunking site reminded me of this classic from the folks at XKCD , which dubs itself as "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language" and frequently lives up to that billing.




On This Day in Math March 17

  

*WolframAlpha


St. Patrick’s Day. The equation of the day is the four-leaved rose r = sin(2θ). Work on this curve was first published by the Italian priest Guido Grandi in 1723. *VFR

"Spirit of '76" by Archibald McNeal Willard, 189


The 76th day of the year; 76 is an automorphic number because the square of 76 ends in 76. (5 and 6 are automorphic because 52 ends in five and 62 ends in six).
There is one other two digit automorphic number (it should be easy to find) but can you find the three digit ones?

76= 8 + 13 + 21 + 34 the sum of four consecutive Fibonacci numbers

76 is the number of 6 X 6 symmetric permutation matrices.

Seventy Six is an unincorporated community in Clinton County, Kentucky, United States. Seventy Six is 6.9 miles north of Albany( and 46 miles west of 88, Ky.). Its post office has been closed. (Strange subtraction, in Kentucky, the difference between 76 and 88 is 46???)




EVENTS

1694 Guillaume L’Hospital hires his former tutor Johann Bernoulli to “work on what I shall ask you ... and also to communicate to me your discoveries, with the request not to mention them to others.” The first calculus text resulted in 1696. It contained the famous “L’Hospital’s rule,” which, we now know, is the work of Bernoulli. [Eves, Circles, 208◦] VFR

(Because L'Hospital is so often discredited by Intro Calculus teachers for his role, I wanted to add more detail in the hopes they will share a more enlightened presentation of his work.)
In a letter from March 17, 1694, l'Hôpital made the following proposal to Johann Bernoulli: in exchange for an annual payment of 300 Francs, Bernoulli would inform L'Hôpital of his latest mathematical discoveries, withholding them from correspondence with others, including Varignon. Bernoulli's immediate response has not been preserved, but he must have agreed soon, as the subsequent letters show. L'Hôpital may have felt fully justified in describing these results in his book, after acknowledging his debt to Leibniz and the Bernoulli brothers, "especially the younger one" (Johann). Johann Bernoulli grew increasingly unhappy with the accolades bestowed on l'Hôpital's work and complained in private correspondence about being sidelined. After l'Hôpital's death, he publicly revealed their agreement and claimed credit for the statements and portions of the text of Analyse, which were supplied to l'Hôpital in letters. Over a period of many years, Bernoulli made progressively stronger allegations about his role in the writing of Analyse, culminating in the publication of his own work on integral calculus in 1742: he remarked that this is a continuation of his old lectures on differential calculus, which he discarded since l'Hôpital had already included them in his famous book. For a long time, these claims were not regarded as credible by many historians of mathematics, because l'Hôpital's mathematical talent was not in doubt, while Bernoulli was involved in several other priority disputes. For example, both H. G. Zeuthen and Moritz Cantor, writing at the cusp of the 20th century, dismissed Bernoulli's claims on these grounds. However, in 1921 Paul Schafheitlin discovered a manuscript of Bernoulli's lectures on differential calculus from 1691–1692 in the Basel University library. The text showed remarkable similarities to l'Hôpital's writing, substantiating Bernoulli's account of the book's origin.
L'Hôpital's pedagogical brilliance in arranging and presenting the material remains universally recognized. Regardless of the exact authorship (one should also note that the book was first published anonymously), Analyse was remarkably successful in popularizing the ideas of differential calculus stemming from Leibniz. *Wik



1845  The rubber band was patented in England on March 17, 1845 by Stephen Perry. Most rubber bands are manufactured out of natural rubber or, especially at larger sizes, an elastomer, and are sold in a variety of sizes.

Notable developments in the evolution of rubber bands began in 1923 when William H. Spencer obtained a few Goodyear inner tubes and cut the bands by hand in his basement, where he founded Alliance Rubber Company. Spencer persuaded the Akron Beacon Journal as well as the Tulsa World to try wrapping their newspapers with one of his rubber bands to prevent them from blowing across lawns. He went on to pioneer other new markets for rubber bands such as: agricultural and industrial applications and a myriad of other uses. Spencer obtained a patent on February 19, 1957 for a new "Method for Making Elastic Bands" which produced rubber bands in an Open Ring design.
 
Originally, and in some instances still today, the rubber tubes will then be placed on mandrels, curing the rubber with heat, and then slicing them across the width of the tube into little bands.

However, in 1969 the world's first continuous cure extrusion line for rubber bands was installed at the Alliance Rubber Company rubber band manufacturing facility in Alliance, OH, U.S.A. Rubber bands produced using this high speed continuous production equipment feature an improved modulus (stretch), a smoother, more consistent quality, and yield a higher count per pound. There is no need to use mandrels in this process. With the continuous cure process, the rubber is forced through the aperture or die, traveling in a continuous stream directly into and through a "curing tunnel" which uniformly raises the extrudite to the vulcanizing temperature and maintains it there for the entire curing or vulcanizing period. *Wik




1856 Joseph Lacomme, a French well-sinker, and illiterate laborer who asked a mathematics professor to tell him the amount of stone needed to cover the bottom of a circular cistern, and unsatisfied with the reply that it would be impossible to tell him exactly, set about experimenting and determined the "True" ratio of the circumference to diameter of a circle. Teaching himself arithmetic and writing to confirm the results he obtained by experimentation he shared his computation with the commissioner of police in Paris. The commissioner introduced Lacomme to his father, who presented him to the Academie and after consideration by a committee, Lacomme received a silver medal from the French Academie for his discovery of the true ratio of diameter to circumfrence of a circle. He would later receive three more medals from other societies for his value of 3 1/8. *Augustus DeMorgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, pgs 46-47
The Kindle edition of A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I is currently $1.60.




1889 A political cartoon in the New York World lampooned President Benjamin Harrison's advisers and cabinet members showing the group sitting around playing the game, Pigs in Clover which had recently been invented by Charles Martin Crandall. The caption read "Will Mr. Harrison be able to get all these hungry pigs in the official pen?"
The events which prompted the story were related in a New York Tribune's March 13, 1889 issue:
Senator William M. Evarts purchased one from a street fakir in order to get rid of him. He took the puzzle home and worked it for hours. The following morning he brought it with him into senate chambers where Senator George Graham Vest stopped by Evarts' desk, borrowed the puzzle and took it to a cloak room. Soon thereafter he was joined by Senators James L. Pugh, James B. Eustis, Edward C. Walthall and John E. Kenna. A page was sent out to buy five of the puzzles and upon his return, the group engaged in a "pig driving contest". About 30 minutes later, Senator Vest announced his accomplishment of driving the last pig in the pen.
*Antique Toy Collectors of America *Wik (Will negotiate trade of my off-spring or other not-too-valuable property for an imageof this cartoon. )
*VIRTUAL MUSEUM OF GAMES



1905 Albert Einstein submits his paper "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light" to the Annalen der Physik. In this revolutionary paper he proposes that light can be conceived both as waves and as discrete quanta (later to be called photons) which are localized at points in space. This paper was the primary reason for his Nobel Prize.




1914 Ramanujan boarded the S.S. Nevasa on 17 March 1914, and at 10 o'clock in the morning, the ship departed from Madras. He arrived in London on 14 April, with E. H. Neville waiting for him with a car. A tweet from @amanicdroid pointed out that, "this was significant for him culturally as a high-caste Hindu as crossing the ocean was taboo. "





1941 The National Gallery of Art opened its doors on the mall in Washington D.C. The gallery was a gift of Pittsburgh financier Andrew W. Mellon. His personal collection of 152 masterpieces has grown to 80,000 priceless works today. Today it is a good place to see some mathematics, from the lack of perspective in its medieval works, to Girl with the Red Hat with its camera obscura technique, to the geometric starkness of the East Wing. *VFR




1964, In a headline, the New York Times notes the Nazi past of William Mrazek, one of the Marshall Space Flight Center’s managers working on the Saturn V. Mrazek was one of the Operation Paperclip engineers who came to the U.S. in late 1945. * @ChasingMoonBk  



1988 Apple Computer sues Microsoft Corporation for copyright infringement in its Windows design. After Apple developed a highly successful graphical user interface for its Macintosh computer released in 1984, Microsoft fought back with an operating system of its own, called "Windows." In 1995, Apple lost the lawsuit, in which it claimed that the similarities of the Windows and Macintosh environments extended too far.*CHM

2013 Flash of Meteor hitting moon visible to naked eye. Scientists monitoring the moon for meteorite impacts spotted the biggest impact event to date: a space rock the size of a basketball slammed into the lunar surface at a speed of 56,000 miles per hour (90,000 km/hr), creating a new crater around 20 meters wide.
The flash was impressive — it unleashed the equivalent energy of 5 tons of TNT exploding and would have been visible to anyone casually looking at the moon, no telescope required. *NASA The impact hit almost exactly on a crater already present. This animated gif shows before and after shots of the site.



BIRTHS

1733 Carsten Niebuhr (March 17, 1733 Lüdingworth – April 26, 1815 Meldorf, Dithmarschen), German mathematician, cartographer, and explorer in the service of Denmark. Niebuhr's first book, Beschreibung von Arabien, was published in Copenhagen in 1772, the Danish government providing subsidies for the engraving and printing of its numerous illustrations. This was followed in 1774 and 1778 by the two volumes of Niebuhr's Reisebeschreibung von Arabien und anderen umliegenden Ländern. These works (particularly the one published in 1778), and most specifically the accurate copies of the cuneiform inscriptions found at Persepolis, were to prove to be extremely important to the decipherment of cuneiform writing. Before Niebuhr's publication, cuneiform inscriptions were often thought to be merely decorations and embellishments, and no accurate decipherments or translations had been made up to that point. Niebuhr demonstrated that the three trilingual inscriptions found at Persepolis were in fact three distinct forms of cuneiform writing (which he termed Class I, Class II, and Class III) to be read from left to right. His accurate copies of the trilingual inscriptions gave Orientalists the key finally crack the cuneiform code, leading to the discovery of Old Persian, Akkadian, and Sumerian. *Wik




1876 Ernest Benjamin Esclangon (March 17, 1876 – January 28, 1954) was a French astronomer and mathematician. During World War I, he worked on ballistics and developed a novel method for precisely locating enemy artillery. When a gun is fired, it initiates a spherical shock wave but the projectile also generates a conical wave. By using the sound of distant guns to compare the two waves, Escaglon was able to make accurate predictions of gun locations.
After the armistice, Esclangon became director of the Strasbourg Observatory and professor of astronomy at the university the following year. In 1929, he was appointed director of the Paris Observatory and of the International Time Bureau, and elected to the Bureau des Longitudes in 1932. In 1933, he initiated the talking clock telephone service in France. He was elected to the Académie des Sciences in 1939.
Serving as director of the Paris Observatory throughout World War II and the German occupation of Paris, he retired in 1944. He died in Eyrenville, France.
The binary asteroid 1509 Esclangona and the lunar crater Esclangon are named after him.*Wik



1915 Wolfgang Döblin, known in France as Vincent Doblin, (17 March 1915 – 21 June 1940) was a German-French mathematician. Wolfgang was the son of the Jewish-German novelist, Alfred Döblin. His family escaped from Nazi Germany to France where he became a citizen. Studying probability theory at the Institute Henri Poincaré under Fréchet, he quickly made a name for himself as a gifted theorist. He became a doctor at age 23. Drafted in November 1938, after refusing to be exempted of military service, he had to stay in the active Army when World War II broke out in 1939, and was quartered at Givet, in the Ardennes, as a telephone operator. There, he wrote down his latest work on the Chapman-Kolmogorov equation, and sent this as a "pli cacheté" (sealed envelope) to the French Academy of Sciences. His company, sent to the sector of the Saare on the ligne Maginot in April 1940, was caught in the German attack in the Ardennes in May, withdrew to the Vosges, and capitulated on June 22, 1940. On June 21, Doblin had committed suicide in Housseras (a small village near to Epinal), at the moment where German troops came in sight of the place. In his last moments, he burned his mathematical notes.
The sealed envelope was opened in 2000, revealing that Döblin was ahead of his time in the development of the theory of Markov processes. In recognition of his results, Itō's lemma is now referred to as the Itō–Doblin Theorem.
His life was recently the subject of a movie by Agnes Handwerk and Harrie Willems, A Mathematician Rediscovered. *Wik



1972 Kalpana Chawla (March 17, 1962 – February 1, 2003) was an American astronaut and the first Indian woman in space. She first flew on Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 as a mission specialist and primary robotic arm operator. In 2003, Chawla was one of the seven crew members killed in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster. *Wik




DEATHS
1652 Benjamin Bramer (15 Feb 1588 in Felsberg, Germany - 17 March 1652 in Ziegenhain, Germany) was an architect who published work on the calculation of sines. He was tutored by Jost Bürgi in a wide range of subjects but it was mathematics that he loved and he passed this love on to Bramer. (Bramer married Bürgi's daughter) Bramer followed Alberti (1435), Dürer (1525) and Bürgi (1604) when in 1630 he constructed a device that enabled one to draw accurate geometric perspective. The instrument had been described in a 1617 publication Trigonometrica planorum mechanica oder Unterricht und Beschreibung eines neuen und sehr bequemen geometrischen Instrumentes zu allerhand Abmessung. Bramer designed several other mathematical instruments, for example a description of the pantograph appears in the same 1617 publication. The instrument is designed to copy a geometric shape and reproduce it at a reduced or enlarged scale. It consists of an assemblage of rigid bars adjustably joined by pin joints; as the point of one bar is moved over the outline to be duplicated, the motion is translated to a point on another bar, which makes the desired copy according to the predetermined scale. Bramer has not been recognised as the inventor of the pantograph, this distinction going to the Jesuit Christoph Scheiner who describes a similar instrument in his 1631 publication Pantographice seu acre delineandi res quaslibet by parallelogrammum linear seu cavum mechanicum, mobile. Although Scheiner's publication did much to spread knowledge of the pantograph, the instrument he describes is technically inferior to the earlier instrument as described by Bramer. *SAU




1767 George Parker (born 1697, 17 Mar 1764) [2nd Earl of Macclesfield] English astronomer who was instrumental in changing the computation of current chronology, subsequently enacted as the British Calendar Act of 1751 which he co-authored and co-promoted. (Shortly thereafter, he was elected President of the Royal Society, 1752-1764). Since 1582, the new calendar of Pope Gregory XIII had been used in most of Europe. In England the new calendar was rejected as popish. By 1750, the old calendar became 11 days out of sequence with the position of the Earth in its orbit due to its lack of leap years. Parker was assisted in these calculations by his friend James Bradley, the astronomer royal, and received influential support from Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield. *TIS



1771 Chester Moor Hall, (Dec. 9, 1703, Leigh, Essex, Eng.— March 17, 1771, Sutton, Surrey), English jurist and mathematician who invented the achromatic lens, which he utilized in building the first refracting telescope free from chromatic aberration (colour distortion).
Convinced from study of the human eye that achromatic lenses were feasible, Hall experimented with different kinds of glass until he found (1729) a combination of crown glass and flint glass that met his requirements. In 1733 he built several telescopes with apertures of 2.5 inches (6.5 cm) and focal lengths of 20 inches (50 cm).*britannica.com



1782 Daniel Bernoulli (29 January 1700 (8 Feb new style), 8 March 1782) was a Dutch-Swiss mathematician and was one of the many prominent mathematicians in the Bernoulli family. He is particularly remembered for his applications of mathematics to mechanics, especially fluid mechanics, and for his pioneering work in probability and statistics. Bernoulli's work is still studied at length by many schools of science throughout the world. The son of Johann Bernoulli (one of the "early developers" of calculus), nephew of Jakob Bernoulli (who "was the first to discover the theory of probability"), and older brother of Johann II, He is said to have had a bad relationship with his father. Upon both of them entering and tying for first place in a scientific contest at the University of Paris, Johann, unable to bear the "shame" of being compared as Daniel's equal, banned Daniel from his house. Johann Bernoulli also plagiarized some key ideas from Daniel's book Hydrodynamica in his own book Hydraulica which he backdated to before Hydrodynamica. Despite Daniel's attempts at reconciliation, his father carried the grudge until his death.
He was a contemporary and close friend of Leonhard Euler. He went to St. Petersburg in 1724 as professor of mathematics, but was unhappy there, and a temporary illness in 1733 gave him an excuse for leaving. He returned to the University of Basel, where he successively held the chairs of medicine, metaphysics and natural philosophy until his death.
In May, 1750 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was also the author in 1738 of Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis (Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk), in which the St. Petersburg paradox was the base of the economic theory of risk aversion, risk premium and utility.
One of the earliest attempts to analyze a statistical problem involving censored data was Bernoulli's 1766 analysis of smallpox morbidity and mortality data to demonstrate the efficacy of vaccination. He is the earliest writer who attempted to formulate a kinetic theory of gases, and he applied the idea to explain Boyle's law. He worked with Euler on elasticity and the development of the Euler-Bernoulli beam equation. *Wik



1846 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (22 Jul 1784, 17 Mar 1846 at age 61). He is noted for the special class of functions that have become an indispensable tool in applied mathematics. This, like all of his mathematical work, was motivated by his work in astronomy. *VFR In 1809, at the age of 26, Bessel was appointed director of Frederick William III of Prussia's new Königsberg Observatory and professor of astronomy, where he spent the rest of his career. His monumental task was determining the positions and proper motions for about 50,000 stars, which allowed the first accurate determination of interstellar distances. Bessel's work in determining the constants of precession, nutation and aberration won him further honors. Other than the sun, he was the first to measure the distance of a star, by parallax, of 61 Cygni (1838). In mathematical analysis, he is known for his Bessel function. *TIS
Bessel's equation arises when finding separable solutions to Laplace's equation and the Helmholtz equation in cylindrical or spherical coordinates. Bessel functions are therefore especially important for many problems of wave propagation and static potentials.






1853 Christian Doppler (29 Nov 1803; 17 Mar 1853) Austrian physicist who first described how the observed frequency of light and sound waves is affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector, known as the Doppler effect. In 1845, to test his hypothesis, Doppler used two sets of trumpeters: one set stationary at a train station and one set moving on  Bert Nederan open train car, all holding the same note. As the train passed the station, it was obvious that the frequency of the notes from the two groups didn't match. Sound waves would have a higher frequency if the source was moving toward the observer and a lower frequency if the source was moving away from the observer. Edwin Hubble used the Doppler effect of light from distant stars to determine that the universe is expanding.*TIS
HT to Bert Nederbragt for reminding me that C. H. D Buys Ballot tested the Doppler effect for sound waves in 1845 by using a group of musicians playing a calibrated note on a train in the Utrecht-Amsterdam line. 




1922 Heinrich Suter (4 January 1848, Hedingen near Zurich, Switzerland – 17 March 1922) was a historian of science specializing in Islamic mathematics and astronomy.*Wik
... in 1900, Swiss historian of mathematics and astronomy Heinrich Suter published the bio-bibliographical survey Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber und ihre Werke. Suter's book contained information on scholars not only in the Arab countries but in all the Islamic countries from the 8th to the 17th centuries. Die Mathematiker und Astronomen der Araber und ihre Werke contains information on approximately 500 scholars whose time of life was known and 100 with unknown dates. *MacTutor



1956 Irène Joliot-Curie (12 Sep 1897; 17 Mar 1956) French physicist and physical chemist, wife of Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who shared the 1935 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "in recognition of their synthesis of new radioactive elements." For example, in their joint research they discovered that aluminium atoms exposed to alpha rays transmuted to radioactive phosphorus atoms. She was the daughter of Nobel Prize winners Pierre and Marie Curie. From 1946, she was director of the Radium Institute, Paris, founded by her mother. She died of leukemia, like her mother, resulting from radiation exposure during research.*TIS
Irène and Marie Curie in 1925
*Wik



1956 Henry Frederick Baker FRS (3 July 1866 – 17 March 1956) was a British mathematician, working mainly in algebraic geometry, but also remembered for contributions to partial differential equations (related to what would become known as solitons), and Lie groups.
Baker was born in Cambridge, England and educated at The Perse School before winning a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge in October 1884. Baker graduated as Senior Wrangler in 1887, bracketed with 3 others.
Baker was elected Fellow of St John's in 1888 where he remained for 68 years.
In June, 1898 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1911, he gave the presidential address to the London Mathematical Society.
In January 1914 he was appointed Lowndean Professor of Astronomy. *Wik
In the 1920's and 30's before the war Baker's graduate students would meet at what they called Professor Baker’s "Tea Party". They met each Saturday to discuss the areas of research in which they were working. It was to one of these meetings that a young Donald Coxeter brought his "Aunt Alice", the 69 year old Alicia Boole to co-present on the subject of Polytopes in higher dimensions.
This is one of many fascinating people in the family of George Boole and "Those Amazing Boole Girls."




1962 Wilhelm Blaschke (13 Sep 1885; 17 Mar 1962) German mathematician whose major contributions to geometry concerned kinematics and differential geometry. Kinetic mapping (important later in the axiomatic foundations of various geometries) he both discovered and established it as a tool in kinematics. He also initiated topological differential geometry (the study of invariant differentiable mappings)*TIS



2003 Su Buqing, also spelled Su Buchin ( September 23, 1902 – March 17, 2003), was a Chinese mathematician, educator and poet. He was the founder of differential geometry in China, and served as president of Fudan University and honorary chairman of the Chinese Mathematical Society.
Praised commonly in mathematical field as the "first geometer in the orient", Su was engaged in research, teaching and education in differential geometry and computational geometry. In his early years, he made excellent contributions to affine differential geometry and projective differential geometry. He obtained extraordinary achievements in general space differential geometry, conjugating net theory in higher-dimensional space and computer aided geometry design.

Su's research on general surfaces led to the discovery of quartic algebraic surfaces of the third order. In recognition of his achievements, a geometric shape known as the "Su-cone" was named after him. In the 1940s, he made notable contributions to the theory of K-spreads, involving families of K-dimensional manifolds in space.

Throughout his career, Su authored over 160 mathematical papers published in both domestic and international journals. He also wrote more than 20 monographs and textbooks on topics such as projective curves, projective surfaces, and affine differential geometry. Su's main papers are included in Selected Works of Buqing Su (1991). Notable among his works are "The General Projective Theory of Curves," (English translation 1958) "Affine Differential Geometry," (English translation 1983) and "Computational Geometry, Curve and Surface Modeling," (Chinese 1980; English edition 1989) co-authored with Dingyuan Liu. *Wik



2007 John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"

The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN.[2] He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages"







Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*LH = Linda Hall Org
*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

Monday, 16 March 2026

Billion, Centilion, Decillion, Million Math Terms History

Billion,Centilion, Decillion,   Billion seems to have been a French creation, and was originally bi-million. The term originally meant 10^12 or one million millions, and still has this meaning in many countries today. In the US and some other countries it is used for 10^9 or one thousand million. The table below compares the names as used in the US and in Germany:
Value -----German name--------US name
10^6 ----- Million ---------- Million
10^9 ------ Millard------------Billion
10^12 ----- Billion -----------Trillion
10^15------ Billiarde -------- Quadrillion

Cajori attributes the first publication of the words above million to Nicholas Chuquet (1445-1488). Here is a quote from his A History of Elementary Mathematics with Hints on Methods of Teaching:

Their origin dates back almost to the time when the word million was first used. So far as known, they first occur in a manuscript work on arithmetic by that gifted French physician of Lyons, Nicolas Chuquet (1445- He employs the words byllion, tryllion, quadrillion, quyllion, sixlion, septyllion, octyllion, nonyllion, "et ainsi des aultres se plus oultre on voulait proceder" to denote the second, third, etc. powers of a million, i.e. (1,000,000)2, (1,000,OO0)3, etc. Evidently Chuquet had solved the difficult question of numeration. The new words used by him appear in 1520 in the printed work of La Roche. Thus the great honor of having simplified numeration of large numbers appears to belong to the French. In England and Germany the new nomenclature was not introduced until about a century and a half later. In England the words billion, trillion, etc., were new when Locke wrote, about 1687. In Germany these new terms appear for the first time in 1681 in a work by Heckenberg of Hanover, but they did not come into general use before the eighteenth century. About the middle of the seventeenth century it became the custom in France to divide numbers into periods of three digits, instead of six, and to assign to the word billion, in place of the old meaning, (1000,000)2 or 1012, the new meaning of 109

In The Book of Numbers by John Conway and Richard Guy (pp. 14-15) they write

These arithmeticians [Chuquet and de la Roche] used "illion" after the prefixes
b, tr, quadr, quint, sext, sept, oct and non to denote the
2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th powers of a million. But around the middle of the 17th century, some other French arithmeticians used them instead for the
3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th powers of a thousand. Although condemned by the greatest lexicographers as "erroneous" (Litr'e) and "an entire perversion of the original nomenclature of Chuquet and de la Roche" (Murray), the newer usage is now standard in the U.S., although the older one survives in Britain and is still standard in the continental countries (but the French spelling is nowadays "llon" rather than "llion".
Because of continued conflict with England for the first fifty years of the new United States existence, it was much more willing to base the foundation for its numeration system on the method of the French, who had supported them in their revolution. In spite of this, "In many textbooks prior to the War of 1812 (eg. those by Consider and John Stery 1790, John Vinall 1792, and Johann Ritter 1807) if any numbers higher than 999,999,999 were discussed, the British system was used." [for example 1,000,000,000 was one-thousand million rather than one-billion ] {from Karen D. Michalowicz and Arthur C Howard in "Pedagogy in Text", from the NCTM's A History of School Mathemaitics}  


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

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

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

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

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

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


Decillion occurs in English in 1847.

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

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

 Centillion is found in English in 1863 in The Normal: or, Methods of Teaching the Common Branches, Orthoepy, Orthography, Grammar, Geography, Arithmetic and Elocution by Alfred Holbrook
In Many South Asian numbering system, 10^9 is known as 100 crore or 1 arab.  in Japanese 10,000 is a common base, and above this they normally use 
10,000: ichi-man 「1万」
100,000: juu-man 「10万」
1,000,000: hyaku-man (one million) 「100万」
10,000,000: issen-man 「1000万」.

*(Wikipedia, Jeff Miller, PB notes)

On This Day in Math - March 16

  


Memorial for Ohm ,

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



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

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

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

275 + 75 is prime

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




EVENTS

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

Jones who coined Pi, by Hogarth  




1763 Jerome Lalande writes in his diary about a visit to England, and "I went to see the Tower, and from there by water to Surrey Street to see Mr Short (James Short FRS was an optician who had been called to London to teach mathematics to William, Duke of Cumberland)
who spoke to me about the difficulty in giving his mirrors a parabolic figure. It is done only by guess-work." *Richard Watkins
Lalande was a French astronomerfreemason and writer. On 8 May and again on 10 May 1795 a star was observed and recorded at his observatory with uncertainty noted on its position with a colon, this notation could also indicate an observing error so it was not until the original records of the observatory were reviewed that it was established with certainty that the object was Neptune and the position error between the two nights was due to the planet's motion across the sky.




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





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

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




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




1916 Srinivasa Ramanujan graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelor of Arts by Research (the degree was called a Ph.D. from 1920). He had been allowed to enroll in June 1914 despite not having the proper qualifications. Ramanujan's dissertation was on Highly composite numbers and consisted of seven of his papers published in England.
This paper, as it appeared originally, is not complete. Since the London Mathematical Society was in
some financial difficulty at that time, Ramanujan had to suppress part of what he had written in order
to save expense. 
Highly composite numbers are sometimes used to search for primes, since the proof that primes are infinite uses a product of all "known" primes.




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

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


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










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


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




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

BIRTHS

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

HERE RESTS THE EARTHLY CASE OF

CAROLINE HERSCHEL.

BORN AT HANOVER, MARCH 10, 1750.

DIED JANUARY 9, 1848.

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

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

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

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





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





1821 Heinrich Eduard Heine (16 March 1821 in Berlin, Germany - 21 Oct 1881 in Halle, Germany) Heine is best remembered for the Heine-Borel theorem. He was responsible for the introduction of the idea of uniform continuity.*SAU
Heine became known for results on special functions and in real analysis. In particular, he authored an important treatise on spherical harmonics and Legendre functions (Handbuch der Kugelfunctionen). He also investigated basic hypergeometric series. He introduced the Mehler–Heine formula.*Wik




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




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




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




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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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



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

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

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





1954 John E. Laird (March 16, 1954 Ann Arbor, Michigan - ) is a computer scientist who, with Paul Rosenbloom and Allen Newell, created the Soar cognitive architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Laird is a Professor of the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of Michigan. He was the director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory there from 1994 to 1999. *Wik
"As of June 1, 2022, I’ve retired from the University of Michigan, and the John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering  in the Computer Science and Engineering Division of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan.

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




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

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




DEATHS


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

1838 Nathaniel Bowditch (26 Mar 1773, 16 Mar 1838 at age 65) Self-educated American mathematician and astronomer. He learned Latin to study Newton's Principia and later other languages to study mathematics in these languages. Between 1795 and 1799 he made four sea voyages and in 1802 he was in command of a merchant ship. He was author of the best book on navigation of his time, New American Practical Navigator (1802), and his translation (assisted by Benjamin Peirce) of Laplace's Mécanique céleste gave him an international reputation. Bowditch was the discoverer of the Bowditch curves (more often called Lisajous figures for their co-discoverer), which have important applications in astronomy and physics.*TIS Bowditch was a navigator on the Wilkes Expedition and an island in the Stork Archipelago in the South Pacific is named for him (and sometimes called Fakaofu)(I can give no explanation for the discrepancy in the date of death on his tombstone.)
1841 Félix Savart (30 Jun 1791, 16 Mar 1841 at age 49)French physicist who researched various manifestations of vibration. With Jean-Baptiste Biot, he developed the Biot-Savart Law (1820) concerning the magnetic field intensity around a current-carrying wire. After earning a degree in medicine (1816), he took an interest in physics, beginning with a study of the violin to explain the contributions from its components to the sound from the strings. He presented a memoir on the subject to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1819. He conducted extensive research in acoustics, the nodal patterns of vibrating systems (including air columns), and related enquiries into the elasticity of substances. He also investigated the voice and hearing. He devised a rotating toothed wheel to produce a sound of any frequency by a reed held against it, to measure high frequency hearing limits. *TIS




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




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




1933 Alfréd Haar (11 Oct 1885 in Budapest, Hungary - 16 March 1933 in Szeged, Hungary) was a Hungarian mathematician who is best remembered for his work on analysis on groups, introducing a measure on groups, now called the Haar measure. *SAU
 In 1904 he began to study at the University of Göttingen. His doctorate was supervised by David Hilbert. The Haar measure, Haar wavelet, and Haar transform are named in his honor. Between 1912 and 1919 he taught at Franz Joseph University in Kolozsvár. Together with Frigyes Riesz, he made the University of Szeged a centre of mathematics. He also founded the Acta Scientiarum Mathematicarum journal together with Riesz. *Wik




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





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




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




1992 Yves-André Rocard (22 May 1903 in Vannes, France - 16 March 1992 in Paris, France) French mathematician and physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb for France.
After obtaining a double doctorate in mathematics (1927) and physics (1928) he was awarded a professorship in electronic physics at the École normale supérieure in Paris.

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




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

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







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