I am a great believer in the simplicity of things and as you probably know I am inclined to hang on to broad & simple ideas like grim death until evidence is too strong for my tenacity.
~Sir Ernest Rutherford
The 292nd day of the year; The continued fraction representation of pi is [3; 7, 15, 1, 292, 1, 1, 1, 2...]; the convergent obtained by truncating before the surprisingly large term 292 yields the excellent rational approximation for pi.
The approximation was found by Chinese mathematician and astronomer Zu Chongzhi(429–500 AD), using Liu Hui's algorithm which is based on the areas of regular polygons approximating a circle*Wik (My mnemonic for this, "1,1,3,3,5,5; divide in the niddle, put big over little."
292 is the number of ways to make change for 1 dollar (or for 1 Euro), using only 1, 5 and 25 cent coins (base five coins).
292! + 291! ± 1 are 595-digit twin primes. (Are there smaller sums of consecutive factorials like this that are twin primes?)
1698 Halley began a scientific voyage on HMS Paramore & set out to measure magnetic variation & search for Terra Incognita *Kate Morant@KateMorant
This was the first time a sea voyage had been planned for the sole purpose of scientific discovery.
Halley’s primary goal was to investigate the variation of the Earth’s magnetic compass (magnetic declination) — the angle between true north and magnetic north — in different parts of the Atlantic Ocean.
On his first voyage he sailed to the South Atlantic, reaching about 52° South latitude before being forced to turn back due to crew mutiny and illness.
The next year a second voyage continued his magnetic observations along the coasts of South America, Africa, and the mid-Atlantic.
Halley produced the first magnetic variation chart (1701), showing lines of equal magnetic declination — the first known use of isogonic lines on a map. *PB
1752 Franklin described his kite experiment in a letter written in Philadelphia and addressed to Peter Collinson, who had earlier provided Franklin with some simple apparatus for performing electrical experiments. The kite was not struck by lightning, but Franklin notices the loose strands of the rain soaked hemp rope standing out straight and recognized the phenomena as indicating static electric charge, and reached out a finger and got a mild shock.
On the same date his experiment was described in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
*Julian Rubin web site
The kite experiment was described in The Pennsylvania Gazette on October 19, 1752 as follows:
Franklin's Statement:
Philadelphia, October 19, 1752
As frequent Mention is made in the News Papers from Europe, of the Success of the Philadelphia Experiment for drawing the Electric Fire from Clouds by Means of pointed Rods of Iron erected on high Buildings, &c. it may be agreeable to the Curious to be informed, that the same Experiment has succeeded in Philadelphia, tho' made in a different and more easy Manner, which any one may try, as follows.
Make a small Cross of two light Strips of Cedar, the Arms so long as to reach to the four Corners of a large thin Silk Handkerchief when extended; tie the Corners of the Handkerchief to the Extremities of the Cross, so you have the Body of a Kite; which being properly accommodated with a Tail, Loop and String, will rise in the Air, like those made of Paper; but this being of Silk is fitter to bear the Wet and Wind of a Thunder Gust without tearing. To the Top of the upright Stick of the Cross is to be fixed a very sharp pointed Wire, rising a Foot or more above the Wood. To the End of the Twine, next the Hand, is to be tied a silk Ribbon, and where the Twine and the silk join, a Key may be fastened. This Kite is to be raised when a Thunder Gust appears to be coming on, and the Person who holds the String must stand within a Door, or Window, or under some Cover, so that the Silk Ribbon may not be wet; and Care must be taken that the Twine does not touch the Frame of the Door or Window. As soon as any of the Thunder Clouds come over the Kite, the pointed Wire will draw the Electric Fire from them, and the Kite, with all the Twine, will be electrified, and the loose Filaments of the Twine will stand out every Way, and be attracted by an approaching Finger. And when the Rain has wet the Kite and Twine, so that it can conduct the Electric Fire freely, you will find it stream out plentifully from the Key on the Approach of your Knuckle. At this Key the Phial may be charged; and from Electric Fire thus obtained, Spirits may be kindled, and all the other Electric Experiments be perform'd, which are usually done by the Help of a rubbed Glass Globe or Tube; and thereby the Sameness of the Electric Matter with that of Lightning completely demonstrated.
1759 Gauss writes,in a letter to his former teacher, E. A. W. von Zimmermann, when he showed up at the Göttingen University library, "I cannot deny, that I found it very unpleasant that most of my beautiful discoveries in indefinite analysis were not original. What consoles me is this. All of Euler's discoveries that I have so far found, I have made also, and still more so. I have found a more general, and, I think, more natural viewpoint; yet I still see an immeasurable field before me..." *Animating Creativity, The LaRouche Youth Movement web page.
1892: The first long-distance telephone line opened between the cities of New York and Chicago, although it could only handle one call at a time.
Seated at a telephone in the American Telephone and Telegraph Company’s office in Quincy street, Chicago Mayor Washburne conducted Chicago’s end of the above conversation. At the. other end of the wire was Mayor Grant of New York. With this simple ceremony the long-distance telephone between Chicago and New York was formally placed in service.
Sixty persons were present to see it done. They were telephone men, merchants, and newspaper men. There were 150 people around Mayor Grant at the company’s office in Cortland street. New York, and the company so managed matters that everybody got a chance to test the workings of the line. They invited all to stand beneath two funnels fastened to the gas fixture and keep perfectly still. They did so and heard the “Star Spangled Banner” played by a cornetist in New York. Then the New York crowd gathered around similar funnels while cornetist Cobb of Johnny Hand’s orchestra played the national anthem for them. *chicagology.com
This was not the first long distance call in the US, that had happened fifteen years earlier in California. The world's first long-distance telephone line, established in 1877, connected French Corral with Bowman Lake (previously known as French Lake) at the headwaters of the Yuba River. It was strung across trees and poles for a distance of 60 mi (97 km) in Nevada County, California, passing through Birchville, Sweetland, North San Juan, Cherokee, North Columbia, Lake City, North Bloomfield, Moores Flat, Graniteville, and Milton.
The line was operated by the Ridge Telephone Company for the service of Milton Mining and Water Company, as well as other water companies. The line was an improvement over the system used in nearby Downieville, California The site is now a California Historical Landmark. *Wik Unfortunately, it seems no one made note of the first conversation.
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1901 Alberto Santos-Dumont won the French Aero Club’s Deutsch Prize, rounding the Eiffel Tower and landing at Parc Saint Cloud in twenty-nine minutes and thirty seconds in his dirigible. Later it became common that a crowd would gather to see the aviator driving his Baladeuse (The Wanderer), a personal sized dirigible, over the streets as if it were a carriage or automobile.A few years later, on October 23, 1906, Santos-Dumont won the Archdeacon prize by flying his Hargrave box kite inspired aircraft at Bagatelle in Paris. He was hailed by many in Europe as the first to fly, despite the fact that the Wright Brothers had achieved such a feat three years earlier in the United Sates. But Orville and Wilbur Wright kept their invention under wraps, avoiding any public exhibitions while they sought a patent. Most aeronauts in Europe considered them to be bluffing., *theappendix.net
1948 The National Bureau of Standards authorized construction of its Standards Western Automatic Computer. The machine, which would be built at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles, had an objective to compute using already-developed technology. This was in contrast to the machine’s cousin, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, which tested components and systems for computer *CHM
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1965 The London Times reported that an archaeologist has located what he believes to be the tomb of Archimedes.*VFR
The 1965 report referred to an archaeological find in Syracuse, Sicily, by the Italian archaeologist Salvatore Ciancio. He argued that a rock-cut burial discovered in the Grotticelle necropolis was the long-lost tomb of Archimedes. His case was published that year as La Tomba di Archimede.
But the claim did not hold up. The archaeological authorities in Syracuse, particularly the distinguished archaeologist Bernabò Brea, disputed Ciancio's identification at the time. The supposed tomb lacked the crucial identifying feature described by Cicero—a sphere and cylinder associated with Archimedes' mathematical work. (Archimedes proved that a sphere fits tightly inside a cylinder. The sphere has 2/3 the volume and surface area of that cylinder. He was so proud of this discovery that he asked for this shape to be carved on his tomb. *PB)
Later archaeological study has made the case even weaker. UNESCO's archaeological documentation dates the prominent "Archimedes' Tomb" at Grotticelle to the Roman period—roughly the late 1st century BC to early 1st century AD, about two centuries after Archimedes died in 212 BC. It is now understood as a Roman funerary chamber, not Archimedes' tomb.
In 1973, a US Federal Judge signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent invalid and belatedly credited physicist John Atanasoff with developing the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff- Berry Computer or the ABC. Built in 1937-42 at Iowa State University by Atanadoff and a graduate student, Clifford Berry, it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits. These ideas were communicated from Atanasoff to John Mauchly, who used them in the design of the better-known ENIAC built and patented several years later.*TIS
1994 The Pentium FDIV bug error was isolated to the Pentium Pro chip by Professor Thomas R. Nicely at Lynchburg College, Virginia, USA while working on Brun's constant (the sum of the reciprocals of the odd twin primes). Nicely had noticed some inconsistencies in the calculations on June 13, 1994 shortly after adding a Pentium system to his group of computers, but was unable to eliminate other factors (such as programming errors, motherboard chipsets, etc.) until October 19, 1994. On October 24, 1994 he reported the issue to Intel. The bug was rarely encountered by average users (Byte magazine estimated that 1 in 9 billion floating point divides with random parameters would produce inaccurate results) *Wik
2014 Small chance that Comet C/2013 A1 (Siding Spring), discovered in the beginning of 2013, might collide with Mars. At the moment, based on the observation arc of 74 days, the nominal close approach distance between the red planet and the comet might be as little as 0.00073 AU, that is approximately 109,200 km! Distance to Mars’ natural satellite Deimos will be smaller by 6000 km, making it 103,000 km. On the 19th October 2014, the comet might reach apparent magnitude of -8…-8.5, as seen from Mars! *Spaceobs.org
Fortunately Mars, and all three Mars orbiters were spared.
Comet Siding Spring as seen by Hubble on 11 March 2014
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BIRTHS
1795 Arthur Jules Morin (19 October 1795 – 7 February 1880) was a French physicist. He conducted experiments in mechanics and invented the Morin dynamometer.
In 1850, he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His name is one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.*Wik (He was also the director of my favorite Paris Museum, Musee des Arts et Métiers.) In the issue of Nature which appeared on 5 February 1880 the following report appears:-
We regret to state that General Morin, the well-known director of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, is lying in a very precarious state in consequence of a severe cold. Great anxiety is felt for him at the Institute, of which he is one of the most respected and popular members. The General is aged 85 years. In the following issue of Nature, his death in Paris on 7 February was reported. *SAU
1871 John Miller (19 Oct 1871 in Glasgow, Scotland - 14 July 1956 in Victoria Infirmary, Glasgow, Scotland) studied at Glasgow and Göttingen. He returned to Glasgow to the Royal College of Science and Technology (the precursor to Strathclyde University). He became President of the EMS in 1913. *SAU
1903 Jean Frédéric Auguste Delsarte (October 19, 1903, Fourmies – November 28, 1968, Nancy) was a French mathematician known for his work in mathematical analysis, in particular, for introducing mean-periodic functions and generalized shift operators. He was one of the founders of the Bourbaki group.*Wik
From left to right: Simone Weil (accompanying her brother André), Charles Pisot , André Weil (hidden), Jean Dieudonné (sitting), Claude Chabauty , Charles Ehresmann , and Jean Delsarte.
1910 Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (19 Oct 1910; 21 Aug 1995) Indian-born American astrophysicist who (with William A.Fowler) won the 1983 Nobel Prize for Physics for formulating the currently accepted theory on the later evolutionary stages of massive stars. He was one of the first scientists to combine the disciplines of physics and astronomy. Early in his career he demonstrated that there is an upper limit, now called the Chandrasekhar limit, to the mass of a white dwarf star. A white dwarf is the last stage in the evolution of a star such as the Sun. When the nuclear energy source in the center of a star such as the Sun is exhausted, it collapses to form a white dwarf. Further, it shows that stars much more massive than the Sun must either explode or form black holes. *TIS
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1939 Doris J. Schattschneider (née Wood ;October 19, 1939 - ) is an American mathematician, a retired professor of mathematics at Moravian College. She is known for writing about tessellations and about the art of M. C. Escher, for helping Martin Gardner validate and popularize the pentagon tiling discoveries of amateur mathematician Marjorie Rice, and for co-directing with Eugene Klotz the project that developed The Geometer's Sketchpad.
Marjorie Rice was an amateur mathematician and San Diego mother of five who became fascinated by Martin Gardner's descriptions of tessellations by pentagonal tiles in Scientific American. She investigated, and devising her own notation system, had found a previously unknown type of pentagon tiling by February 1976. She drew up several tessellations by these new pentagon tiles and mailed her discoveries to Martin Gardner. He, in turn, sent Rice's work to Schattschneider, who was an expert in tiling patterns. Schattschneider was skeptical at first, but upon careful examination, was able to validate Rice's results. Schattschneider not only helped Martin Gardner publicize the pentagon tilings discoveries of Rice, but lauded her work as a significant discovery by an amateur mathematician.
In 1995, at a regional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held in Los Angeles, Schattschneider convinced Rice and her husband to attend her lecture on Rice's work. At the conclusion of the talk, Schattschneider introduced the amateur mathematician who had advanced the study of tessellation. "And everybody in the room . . . gave her a standing ovation."
Schattschneider won the Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for excellence in expository writing in Mathematics Magazine in 1979, for her article "Tiling the plane with congruent pentagons".
In 1993, she received the Deborah and Franklin Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics.
In 2012, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
She delivered the Martin Gardner Lecture at MathFest in August 2021.
1586 Egnatio Danti (April 1536 – 10 October 1586), an Italian Dominican who made contributions to architecture, geography and astronomy.Finally, among Danti's publications, we mention Trattato del radio latino (1586) which is Danti's work describing his surveying instrument. This book appeared in the year in which Danti died. The other task he undertook just before his death was to travel to Rome, at the request of Pope Sixtus, to assist the architect Domenico Fontana, who had become architect to the papacy when Sixtus was elected, in moving the Egyptian obelisk from its place in the circus of the Vatican. The obelisk had been brought to Rome in the 1st century AD and Danti and Fontana erected it in 1586 where it now stands in the centre of St Peter's Square in the Vatican. After his return from this trip to Rome, Danti contracted pneumonia from which he died. *SAU
1875 Sir Charles Wheatstone (6 Feb 1802, 19 Oct 1875) English physicist who popularized the Wheatstone bridge, a device that accurately measured electrical resistance and became widely used in laboratories. He didn't actually invent the "Wheatstone Bridge". His contemporary, Samuel Hunter Christie, came up with the idea of the bridge circuit, but Wheatstone set the precedent for using it in the way in which it has been most commonly used. Over time, the device became associated with him and took on his name. He did, however, invent the concertina (1829), the stereoscope (1838), and an early form of the telegraph. He also developed a chronoscope (1842) to determine the velocity of projectiles at an English gunnery.*TIS (For students of discrete math, or interested in codes, Wheatstone was also the creator of the Playfair Cipher.) A story is told that among friends he was "the life of the party" however he was afraid to speak in public. It was not unlike Wheatstone to set up a speaking engagement and cancel at the very last minute due to an awful case of stage fright. As a result of this condition Michael Faraday commentated much of Whetstone's work to the Royal Society through Faraday's famous Friday night lectures. On one such occasion Wheatstone was scheduled to speak at the Royal society and of course literally ran out the back door of the conference hall at the last minute. Faraday stepped onto the stage and delivered one of his most famous lectures, which was on the discovery of the Electro-magnetic field.
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1878 Irénée-Jules Bienaymé (28 August 1796 - 19 October 1878) was a French statistician. He built on the legacy of Laplace generalizing his least squares method. He contributed to the fields and probability, and statistics and to their application to finance, demography and social sciences. In particular, he formulated the Bienaymé-Chebyshev inequality concerning the law of large numbers and the Bienaymé formula for the variance of a sum of uncorrelated random variables.*Wik
1890 Émile Léonard Mathieu (15 May 1835 in Metz, France - 19 Oct 1890 in Nancy, France) is remembered especially for his discovery (in 1860 and 1873) of five sporadic simple groups named after him. These were studied in his thesis on transitive functions.*SAU
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1899 Francis Guthrie (born 22 January 1831 in London; d. 19 October 1899 in Claremont, Cape Town) was a Cape Colony mathematician and botanist who first posed the Four Colour Problem in 1852. He studied mathematics under Augustus De Morgan, and botany under John Lindley at University College London. Guthrie obtained his B.A. in 1850, and LL.B. in 1852 with first class honours. While colouring a map of the counties of England, he noticed that at least four colours were required so that no two regions sharing a common border were the same colour. He postulated that four colours would be sufficient to colour any map. This became known as the Four Color Problem, and remained one of the most famous unsolved problems in graph theory for more than a century until it was eventually proven in 1976 using a lengthy computer-aided proof by Appel and Haken.
Guthrie arrived in South Africa on 10 April 1861 and was met and entertained by Dr Dale (later Sir Langham Dale), who was instrumental in the establishing of the University of the Cape of Good Hope in June 1873. Guthrie took up the post of mathematics master at the Graaff-Reinet College. While there he gave a course of acclaimed public lectures on botany in 1862 and thus started a lifelong friendship with local resident Harry Bolus. He advised Bolus to take up the study of botany to ease his grief at the loss of his six-year-old son. When Bolus left for Cape Town a few years later, he persuaded Guthrie to move there as well in 1875. For a while, he practised at the Bar and edited a newspaper before becoming the professor of mathematics at the South African College, which later became the University of Cape Town. He remained there from 1876 until he retired in 1898, staying on his farm at Raapenberg.
When Bolus undertook to do the family of Ericaceae for Flora Capensis, he enlisted Guthrie's aid and they collaborated until Guthrie's death. Before his death, Guthrie had made an extensive collection of the Cape Peninsula flora, which was eventually housed as the Guthrie Herbarium in the University of Cape Town Botany Department, and used for teaching and reference. Though Guthrie did not live to see the published work, he had the satisfaction of knowing that the greater part of the work on Erica had been completed. He is buried in the old cemetery attached to St. Thomas's Church in Rondebosch.
He was described as being warm-hearted, good-humoured, patient, and unpretentious. The scope of his interests was diverse and ranged from a lecture titled, "The Heat of the Sun in South Africa", in which he pointed out that it must be possible to transform solar energy into mechanical power, to aeronautics, where he was involved in the development of the first aircraft. Although dubbed the inventor of the first flying machine, no documentation of his work exists.
Some fynbos species from the Bredasdorp area were named after him: Gladiolus guthriei, Erica guthriei and Homoglossum guthriei, as well as the genus Guthriea Bolus. Cyrtanthus guthrieae was named after his daughter Louisa Guthrie, who was also a botanist. The new genus Guthriea was collected by Harry Bolus from Oudeberg in the Graaff-Reinet district, and also recorded from the Wittebergen in the Barkly East district and Mont-aux-Sources in Natal. To date no other species in this genus have been found.
Guthrie was an early member of the South African Philosophical Society (later the Royal Society of South Africa), an active member of the Meteorological Commission and an examiner of the Cape University.
The standard author abbreviation Guthrie is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name. *Wik
1937 Sir Ernest Rutherford (30 Aug 1871, 19 Oct 1937) (baron) New Zealand-born British physicist who laid the groundwork for the development of nuclear physics. He worked under Sir J. J. Thomson at Cambridge University (1895-98). Then he collaborated with Frederick Soddy in studying radioactivity. In 1899 he discovered alpha particles and beta particles, followed by the discovery of gamma radiation the following year. In 1905, with Soddy, he announced that radioactive decay involves a series of transformations. In 1907, with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden, he devised the alpha-particle scattering experiment that led in 1911 to the discovery of the atomic nucleus. In 1919 he achieved the artificial splitting of light atoms. In 1908 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. *TIS
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1944 Denes König (21 Sept 1884 in Budapest, Hungary - 19 Oct 1944 in Budapest, Hungary) At Göttingen, König had been influenced by Minkowski's lectures on the four color problem. These lectures contributed to his growing interest in graph theory, on which he lectured in Budapest from 1911. His book, Theorie der endlichen und unendlichen Graphen, was published in 1936, and was a major factor in the growth of interest in graph theory worldwide. It was eventually translated into English under the title Theory of finite and infinite graphs (translated by R McCoart), Birkhauser, 1990; this also contains a biographical sketch by Tibor Gallai. König's work on the factorization of bipartite graphs relates closely to the marriage problem of Philip Hall. König's use of graphs to give a simpler proof of a determinant result of Frobenius seems to have led to some hostility between the two men.
After the Nazi occupation of Hungary, König worked to help persecuted mathematicians. This led to his death a few days after the Hungarian National Socialist Party took over the country. *SAU
1972 Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin (7 July 1905 – 19 October 1972) was a French mathematician, the second woman to obtain a doctorate in pure mathematics in France, the first woman to become a full professor of mathematics in France, the president of the French Mathematical Society, and an expert on fluid mechanics and abstract algebra.
Rue Marie-Louise-Dubreil-Jacotin, a street in the 13th arrondissement of Paris within Paris Diderot University, is named after her, and the University of Poitiers also has a street with the same name. In semigroup theory, the Dubreil-Jacotin semigroups are also named after her, as is the Dubreil-Jacotin–Long equation, "the standard model for internal gravity waves" in fluid mechanics.
1979 Marjorie Lee Browne (September 9, 1914 – October 19, 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to receive a doctoral degree in the U.S., and one of the first black women to receive a doctorate in mathematics in the U.S.*Wik
In the 1960s, long before personal computers were widely available, Browne saw how important computing would become for both mathematics and education. At her institution, North Carolina College (now North Carolina Central University), resources were limited, and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were often left behind when it came to cutting-edge technology. Browne decided her students should not be excluded from the future of mathematics just because of lack of equipment.
So, she wrote a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation and successfully secured funding for an IBM 650 computer—one of the very first digital computers available at a university. This was extraordinary: NCCU became one of the earliest schools in the Southeast to acquire such a machine, and Browne used it not only for her own research but also to teach her students computing at a time when most undergraduates, especially African-American students, had never even seen a computer.
The impact was lasting—her push ensured that generations of students at NCCU were trained in modern mathematical tools, giving them opportunities that otherwise would have been denied. Many of her students went on to become influential educators and mathematicians themselves, carrying forward her commitment to access and excellence.*PBnotes
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
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