Tuesday, 12 May 2026

A Geome-Treat with a Calculus Twist-extended

 So you start with a circle, let’s use x^2 + y^2 = 25 as a specimen.   We pick a point on the curve, say (3,4), and decide we want to find the line tangent to the circle at that point. 


For me it is (was) always a rush showing kids after a year of calculus that it can be done by just thinking of the equation as x(x1) + y(y1) = 25 and then replacing the x1 and y1 in parentheses with the coordinates of a point on the circle, 3 and 4.  The line 3x +4y = 25 not only passes through the point (3,4), but it is also tangent to the circle. 



 Ok, so suppose we do that again.. maybe we pick (4,-3) and write the line 4x-3y = 25. 
Now we have two lines. 
Perhaps we take the time to figure out that the two lines must intersect at (7,1) and in passing we wonder what happens if we plug that point into the x(x) + y(y) = 25 the same way? We look at the result, 7x+y=25, and decide that this time it not only doesn’t go through the point (7,1), it  certainly will not be tangent. 
But what the heck. We have come this far so we can graph that line, too…



I remind you that you probably found those same two points using a compass and straight edge in HS geometry.......

Given a circle and a point outside the circumference, you can find the two points where it will be tangent by construction of another circle, centered on the midpoint of a segment between the given point and the center of the circle.  





Ok, so the treat here is that you can do the Algebraic method above in the creation of the equation through a point on  ANY conic; ellipses, hyperbolas, circles or parabolas.   If you have a point on the curve, you can find the tangent line with the same simple substitution.  And if you have a point not on the conic and want to draw the tangents to the curve through that point, you just plug in that point and it gives you the line through the two tangents. 
In along the way, we'll show a use of the extra circle method with a compass and straightedge creation of tangents from a point not on the curve,,,,except for the hyperbolas.

Parabolas can be a little trickier so here is an example of finding the two tangents through a point not on the curve. 
I’ll use the simple y=x2 for the parabola, and pick a point (1,-1) for the exterior point.  We can replace one of the x variables in y= xx with the 1, but what about the y value.  Since there is only the one y, we can replace it with the average of y and -1, or (y-1)/2.  That gives us the line y-1 =2x , which is just y= 2x+1.  When we graph the whole thing we see that, indeed, the line cuts through points from which tangents to the curve would pass through our given point. 

But, of course, the calculus student must now show that it always works.  
Shall we make that due Wednesday?

For the geometric construction we let the line perpendicular to the axis of symmetry passing through the vertex.  (That is our extra circle in this case, it is just infinite.  We also need the focus of the parabola, (1/4,0)

Our second circle will be be centered on the midpoint of the line joining the given point, A,and the focus.  The intersections of this circle with our "infinite" circle (Points C and D) produces the second points of the two tangents on the parabola from the given point, A.



Ellipse
The algebraic approach in an ellipse works exactly like the circle and parabola.  We create an ellipse with deliberate intent to provide a surprise reentry of a previous method in the geometric solution.  x^2/25 + y^2/  16 = 1.  We calculated a point with x=1 by entering that into the equation of the ellipse and solving for y to get the point (1, 8*(6^.5) /5), or appx. (1,3.9191835...).

inserting these for one x and one y in the squared terms (1x/25+ (8*(6^.5) /5) y/16=1) we get the line y = -1/5 sqrt(2/3) (x - 25).  we can find another point on the tangent by substituting 10 in for x and solving for y, and got y=sqrt(6).  
Next we see what happens when we place these values in for one x and one y in the original ellipse.

10 x /25 + sqrt(6)y/16=1  and finding the line again has a second intersection with the original ellipse at appx (3.57, -2.8) .  


At this point I would like to return to the compass and straightedge construction of two points of tangency from a point not on the ellipse, and yes, there are two circles involved again.  We will use the same ellipse,  x^2/25 + y^2/  16 =1 and select as our external point the point (10,3), just to be near the point of the algebraic method.
We first create a circle that passes through both ends of the major axis centered at the center of the ellipse.  Then a second circle with a center that is the midpoint of the segment from our external point, D=(10,3), to the focus of the ellipse....which focus??? It turns out it doesn't matter. 
Then we find the two points of intersection from our exocircle and the point-focus circle, (G and H). The lines passing through DG and DH will be tangent to the ellipse at points J and K. So very close to the HS geometry method for a circle, how could you forget it now????







On This Day in Math - June 12

   


My work always tried to unite the true
with the beautiful, but when I had to choose... 
I usually chose the beautiful.
~ Hermann Weyl



The 163rd day of the year; 163 is the 38th prime number

\( e^{\pi*\sqrt{163}} \) is an integer. Ok, not quite. 

** Actually,  \( e^{\pi*\sqrt{163}} \) is approximately 262537412640768743.9999999999992

In the April 1975 issue of Scientific American, Martin Gardner wrote (jokingly) that Ramanujan's constant (e^(pi*sqrt(163))) is an integer. The name "Ramanujan's constant" was actually coined by Simon Plouffe and derives from the above April Fool's joke played by Gardner. The French mathematician Charles Hermite (1822-1901) observed this property of 163 long before Ramanujan's work on these so-called "almost integers."


And one more "almost integer" \(\frac{163}{ln 163}\) is 31.999998...

 .     and      *Wikipedia

Colin Beveridge ‏@icecolbeveridge pointed out that \( (2+\sqrt{3})^{163} \) is also very, very close to an integer. (but it is very large,greater than 1093 , and was not, to my knowledge, ever the source of an April fools joke.)

163 is conjectured to be the largest prime that can be represented uniquely as the sum of three squares \( 163 = 1^2 + 9^2 + 9^2 \).

Most students know that the real numbers can be uniquely factored. . Some other fields can be uniquely factored as well, for instance, the complex field a+bi where i represents the square root of -1 is such a field.  In 1801, Gauss conjectured that there were only nine integers k such that \(a + b\sqrt{-k} \) is a uniquely  factorable field.  The largest of these integers is 163.  Today they are called Heegner numbers after a proof by Kurt Heegner in 1952.

163 is as easy as 1+2*3^4.

163 is the sum 37 + 59 + 67, all prime



EVENTS


1493 First issue of Nuremberg Chronicles published in Latin (A German edition would be issued in December). The journal is said to have printed an image of the 684 passage of Halley's comet. Roberta Olsen and Jay Pasachoff of Wheaton College have written that the same woodblock was used to depict four other comets. They also said the Chronicles use three more prints to depict this same 684 comet in different editions. The one below, from the Library of Congress Collection, is the one which was in the Art Exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., entitled: "Fire and Ice - A History of Comets in Art"

For more detail about the Chronicles check out this post by the Renaissance Mathematicus.


1676   a partial solar eclipse which was to be viewed as something of an opening ceremony for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich: it was hoped that the King would attend but he did not, Lord Brouncker, President of the Royal Society, being the guest of honour instead. *Rebekah Higgitt, Telescopos


1689 Although they had corresponded, through Oldenburg, about optics sixteen years earlier (much to Newton’s grief), Newton first met Christiaan Huygens at a Royal Society meeting in London.
[Newton, Mathematical Papers, 6, xxiii] *VFR


In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone received a patent for their electromagnetic telegraph. Their invention was put in public service in 1839, five years before the more famous Morse telegraph.*TIS Wheatstone's telegraph was a five wire/five needle telegraph that had a receiver that pointed out the message letter by letter without a code such as Morse used for his one and two wire models. (Wheatstone was very capable of creating codes as well. He was the creator of the Playfair cipher; an ingenious system which prevented frequency analysis by substituting two letters at a time.)






1891, the Swiss Army Soldier Knife

In 1897, the Swiss Army Knife was patented by Carl Elsener *TIS It was in Ibach, in 1884, where Karl Elsener and his mother, Victoria, opened a cutlery cooperative that would soon produce the first knives sold to the Swiss Army. The original model, called the Soldier Knife, was made for troops who needed a foldable tool that could open canned food and aid in disassembling a rifle. The Soldier Knife included a blade, a reamer, a can opener, a screwdriver, and oak handles. *gearjunkie.com





In 1908, the Rotherhithe-Stepney tunnel beneath the Thames in South London was opened for road vehicle traffic. It was built by Sir Maurice Fitzmaurice between 1904 and 1908. With a length of 4860 feet (1481 metres) excluding the approaches, it remains the largest iron-lined subaqueous tunnel in the world. It was constructed partly by tunneling and partly by the cut and cover method. The area around the entrances was cleared resulting in 3,000 people being rehoused. It is located close to the Rotherhithe-Wapping Thames Tunnel built (1825-43) by Marc Brunel and his son, Isambad K. Brunel which was the world's first tunnel beneath a navigable river.*TIS

southern approach *Wik




1973 Germany issued a postage stamp picturing a model of the calculator built by Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tubingen 350 years before. [Scott #1123].




1979 Bryan Allen, age 26, of the U.S. pedaled the Gossamer Albatross on the first human powered flight across the English channel. This 21 mile flight won him a £100,000 prize offered by British industrialist Henry Kremer. Two years earlier Allen was the first to fly an aircraft around a one-mile figure eight course under human power alone. See “Human-powered flight,” Scientific American, November 1985, p. 144. *VFR


*NASA




BIRTHS


1577 Paul Guldin born (original name Habakkuk Guldin) (June 12, 1577 – November 3, 1643) was a Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer. He discovered the Guldinus theorem to determine the surface and the volume of a solid of revolution. This theorem is also known as Pappus–Guldinus theorem and Pappus's centroid theorem, attributed to Pappus of Alexandria. ( simply stated: that the volume = area times distance traveled by the centroid, and surface = arclength times distance travelled by centroid. These nicely produce the surface area and volume of a torus, for example.) He was noted for his association with the German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler. He was born in Mels, Switzerland and was a professor of mathematics in Graz and Vienna.
In Paolo Casati's astronomical work Terra machinis mota (1658), Casati imagines a dialogue between Guldin, Galileo, and Marin Mersenne on various intellectual problems of cosmology, geography, astronomy and geodesy. *Wik
Paul Guldin's critique of Bonaventura Cavalieri's indivisibles is contained in the fourth book of his De Centro Gravitatis (also called Centrobaryca), published in 1641. Cavalieri's proofs, Guldin argued, were not constructive proofs, of the kind that classical mathematicians would approve of. *Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, by Amir Alexander





1737 Nicolas Vilant FRSE (12 June, 1737-27 May, 1807) was a mathematician from Scotland in the 18th century, known for his textbooks. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783.

Vilant was Regius Professor of Mathematics in the University of Saint Andrews from 1765 to his death in 1807. Often ill, he was unable to teach most of this time, and lectures were given by assistants, among them John West. Under Newtonian tradition, he was unable to follow the continental developments in mathematical analysis, like most of his British contemporaries.

He was a good mathematician, and his textbooks were very popular until the first years of the 19th century. The most renowned was The Elements of Mathematical Analysis,( perhaps the first book in English to use the phrase "Mathematical Analysis" in its title) for the Use of Students, first printed in 1777 and used as a university textbook from 1783, reprinted for student use. *Wik




1806 John A. Roebling ( June 12, 1806 – July 22, 1869), civil engineer and designer of bridges, was born in Mühlhausen, Prussia. The Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling's last and greatest achievement, spans New York's East River to connect Manhattan with Brooklyn. When completed in 1883, the bridge, with its massive stone towers and a main span of 1,595.5 feet between them, was by far the longest suspension bridge in the world. Today, the Brooklyn Bridge is hailed as a key feature of New York's City's urban landscape, standing as a monument to progress and ingenuity as well as symbolizing New York's ongoing cultural vitality. *Library of Congress




1843 Sir David Gill (12 June 1843 – 24 January 1914) Scottish astronomer known for his measurements of solar and stellar parallax, showing the distances of the Sun and other stars from Earth, and for his early use of photography in mapping the heavens. From his first training as a watchmaker, he progressed to the timekeeping requirements of astronomy. He designed, equipped, and operated a private observatory near Aberdeen. In 1877, Gill and his wife measured the solar parallax by observing Mars from Ascension Island. To determine parallaxes, he perfected the use of the heliometer, a telescope that uses a split image to measure the angular separation of celestial bodies. He later redetermined the solar parallax to such precision that his value was used for almanacs until 1968. *TIS




1851 Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of key patents in wireless telegraphy. In his 1894 Royal Institution lectures ("The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors"), Lodge coined the term "coherer" for the device developed by French physicist Édouard Branly based on the work of Italian physicist Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti. In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. He was also credited by Lorentz (1895) with the first published description of the length contraction hypothesis, in 1893, though in fact Lodge's friend George Francis FitzGerald had first suggested the idea in print in 1889. *Wik




1855 Eduard Wiltheiss (12 June 1855 Worms, Germany – 7 July 1900 Halle) was a German mathematician who made major contributions to the theory of abelian functions *SAU

In April 1874, immediately following his Abitur examinations, Wiltheiss entered the University of Giessen to study mathematics. At Giessen his lecturers included R Baltzer, M Pasch and P A Gordan. Moritz Pasch was a geometer while Paul Gordan was famed for his work in invariant theory. However Gordan had undertaken research on abelian functions before becoming fascinated by invariant theory, and Wiltheiss went on to undertake research on that topic, making a major contribution to the theory of abelian functions. From Giessen Wiltheiss went to Berlin in 1876 to continue his mathematical studies. There he attended lectures by the three great mathematicians Weierstrass, Kummer, and Kronecker. 




1888 Zygmunt Janiszewski, (June 12, 1888, Warsaw - January 3, 1920, Lviv) the father of Polish mathematics, born. At the end of World War I, Janiszewski was the driving force behind the creation of one of the strongest schools of mathematics in the world. This is all the more remarkable, given Poland's difficult situaltion at war's end.
Janiszewski devoted the family property that he had inherited from his father to charity and education. He also donated all the prize money that he received from mathematical awards and competitions to the education and development of young Polish students.
In mathematics, his main interest was topology.
He was the driving force, together with Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, behind the founding of the mathematics journal Fundamenta Mathematicae. Janiszewski proposed the name of the journal in 1919, though the first issue was published in 1920, after his death. It was his intent that the first issue comprise solely contributions by Polish mathematicians. It was Janiszewski's vision that Poland become a world leader in the field of mathematics—which she did in the interbellum.
His life was cut short by the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which took his life at Lwów on 3 January 1920 at the age of 31. He willed his body for medical research, and his cranium for craniological study, desiring to be "useful after his death". *Wik




1904 Adolf Lindenbaum (12 June 1904 – ? August 1941) was a Polish-Jewish logician and mathematician best known for Lindenbaum's lemma and Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras.

He was born and brought up in Warsaw. He earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under Wacław Sierpiński and habilitated at the University of Warsaw in 1934. He published works on mathematical logic, set theory, cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, the axiom of choice, the continuum hypothesis, theory of functions, measure theory, point-set topology, geometry and real analysis. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw from 1935 until the outbreak of war in September 1939. He was Alfred Tarski's closest collaborator of the inter-war period. Around the end of October or beginning of November 1935 he married Janina Hosiasson, a fellow logician of the Lwow–Warsaw school. He and his wife were adherents of logical empiricism, participated in and contributed to the international unity of science movement, and were members of the original Vienna Circle. Sometime before the middle of August 1941 he and his sister Stefanja were shot to death in Naujoji Vilnia (Nowa Wilejka), 7 km east of Vilnius, by the occupying German forces or Lithuanian collaborators




1922 Margherita Hack, Knight Grand Cross OMRI ( 12 June 1922 – 29 June 2013) was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour.

An athlete in her youth, Hack played basketball and competed in track and field during the National University Contests, called the Littoriali under Mussolini's fascist regime, where she won the long jump and the high jump events.

She was full professor of astronomy at the University of Trieste from 1964 to the 1st of November 1992, when Hack was placed "out of role" for seniority. She has been the first Italian woman to administrate the Trieste Astronomical Observatory from 1964 to 1987, bringing it to international fame.

Member of the most physics and astronomy associations, Margherita Hack was also director of the Astronomy Department at the University of Trieste from 1985 to 1991 and from 1994 to 1997. She was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (national member in the class of mathematical physics and natural sciences; second category: astronomy, geodesic, geophysics and applications; section A: astronomy and applications). She worked at many American and European observatories and was for long time member of working groups of ESA and NASA. In Italy, with an intensive promotion work, she obtained the growth of activity of the astronomical community with access to several satellites, reaching a notoriety of international level.

Hack has published several original papers in international journals and several books both of popular science and university level. In 1994 she was awarded with the Targa Giuseppe Piazzi for the scientific research, and in 1995 with the Cortina Ulisse Prize for scientific dissemination.

In 1978, Margherita Hack founded the bimonthly magazine L'Astronomia, whose first issue came out in November 1979;[20] later, together with Corrado Lamberti, she directed the magazine of popular science and astronomy culture Le Stelle.



1937 Vladimir Arnold  (12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) won a Wolf prize for his work on dynamical systems, differential equations, and singularity theory. He died nine days before his birth date in 2010.

He entered Moscow State University in 1954 as an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. He was awarded his first degree in 1959 with a dissertation On mappings of a circle to itself written with Kolmogorov as advisor. Speaking of his undergraduate years he said :-
The constellation of great mathematicians in the same department when I was studying at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics was really exceptional, and I have never seen anything like it at any other place. Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Petrovsky, Pontryagin, P Novikov, Markov, Gelfond, Lusternik, Khinchin and P S Aleksandrov were teaching students like Manin, Sinai, Sergi Novikov, V M Alexeev, Anosov, A A Kirillov, and me. All these mathematicians were so different! It was almost impossible to understand Kolmogorov's lectures, but they were full of ideas and were really rewarding! ... Pontryagin was already very weak when I was a student at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, but he was perhaps the best of the lecturers. *SAU





DEATHS



1835 Edward Troughton  (October 1753 - June 12, 1835) English scientist and instrument maker. Troughton established himself as the leading maker of instruments in England. He began his instrument making career with instruments to aid navigation, for example, he designed the 'pillar' sextant, patented in 1788, the dip sector, the marine barometer and the reflecting circle built in 1796. Other instruments which he designed were for use in surveying. He designed the pyrometer, the mountain barometer and the large surveying theodolites. His famous instruments were astronomical ones. He made the Groombridge Transit Circle in 1805 and a six foot Mural Transit Circle in 1810 which was erected at the Observatory in Greenwich in 1812. *TIS  Troughton was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1809. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1810. *Wik

Mendoza repeating circle, made circa 1810 by Edward Troughton, London. On display at the Musée national de la Marine, Paris.





1885 (Henry Charles) Fleeming Jenkin (25 Mar 1833; 12 Jun 1885 at age 52) British engineer noted for his work in establishing units of electrical measurement. After earning an M.A. (1851), he worked for the next 10 years with engineering firms engaged in the design and manufacture of submarine telegraph cables and equipment for laying them. In 1861 his friend William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) procured Jenkin's appointment as reporter for the Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped compile and publish reports that established the ohm as the absolute unit of electrical resistance and described methods for precise resistance measurements. *TIS

Drawing of the first ever aerial tramway or telpher, designed and engineered by Fleeming Jenkin. It was installed in Glynde in Sussex in 1885 to transport clay, and was finished after Jenkin's death.





1900 Jean Frenet (7 February 1816 – 12 June 1900) was a French mathematician best remembered for the Serret-Frenet formulas for a space-curve and they were presented in his doctoral thesis at Toulouse in 1847. *SAU  He wrote six out of the nine formulas, which at that time were not expressed in vector notation, nor using linear algebra.*Wik





1916 Silvanus Phillips Thompson FRS (19 June 1851 – 12 June 1916) was an English professor of physics at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury, England. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1891 and was known for his work as an electrical engineer and as an author. Thompson's most enduring publication is his 1910 text Calculus Made Easy, which teaches the fundamentals of infinitesimal calculus, and is still in print. Thompson also wrote a popular physics text, Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism, as well as biographies of Lord Kelvin and Michael Faraday.

 He also wrote popular biographies of Faraday and Lord Kelvin. At his death he was professor at City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury (London). Thompson’s particular gift was in his ability to communicate difficult scientific concepts in a clear and interesting manner. He attended and lectured at the Royal Institution giving the Christmas lectures in 1896 on Light, Visible and Invisible with an account of Röntgen Light. He was an impressive lecturer and the radiologist AE Barclay said that: “None who heard him could forget the vividness of the word-pictures he placed before them.”





1980 Egon Sharpe Pearson, (Hampstead, 11 August 1895 – Midhurst, 12 June 1980) was the only son of Karl Pearson, and like his father, a leading British statistician.
He went to Winchester School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and succeeded his father as professor of statistics at University College London and as editor of the journal Biometrika.
Pearson is best known for development of the Neyman-Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing.
He was President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1955–56, and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1955. He was awarded a CBE in 1946.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar 1966. His candidacy citation read: "Known throughout the world as co-author of the Neyman-Pearson theory of testing statistical hypotheses, and responsible for many important contributions to problems of statistical inference and methodology, especially in the development and use of the likelihood ratio criterion. Has played a leading role in furthering the applications of statistical methods - for example, in industry, and also during and since the war, in the assessment and testing of weapons." *Wik




1985 Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng (Chinese: 华罗庚; Wade–Giles: Hua Lo-keng; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his important contributions to number theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in the People's Republic of China. He was largely responsible for identifying and nurturing the renowned mathematician Chen Jingrun who proved Chen's theorem, the best known result on the Goldbach conjecture.

[Chen's theorem states that every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of either two primes, or a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes).  Chen's theorem represents the strengthening of a previous result due to Alfréd Rényi, who in 1947 had shown there exists a finite K such that any even number can be written as the sum of a prime number and the product of at most K primes.]

n addition, Hua's later work on mathematical optimization and operations research made an enormous impact on China's economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1982. He was elected a member of the standing Committee of the first to sixth National people's Congress, Vice-chairman of the sixth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (April 1985) and vice-chairman of the China Democratic League (1979). He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1979.

Hua did not receive a formal university education. Although awarded several honorary PhDs, he never got a formal degree from any university. In fact, his formal education only consisted of six years of primary school and three years of secondary school. For that reason, Xiong Qinglai, after reading one of Hua's early papers, was amazed by Hua's mathematical talent, and in 1931 Xiong invited him to study mathematics at Tsinghua University.



2007  June 12 Donald Jeffry Herbert (July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007), was  an American television personality better known as Mr. Wizard – died June 12, 2007, at age 89.  Herbert's first 34 years of life gave no hint of his future career.  Going then by his given name of Donald Kemske, he grew up and was educated in rural Wisconsin, majored in general science and English at what is now UW-La Crosse, and was considering an acting career, when the War broke out.  He enlisted, took flight training, and ending up flying over 50 missions as a B-24 bomber pilot, surviving the war, and coming out as a decorated captain.  Peacetime found him working for radio stations in Chicago as an actor for children's on-air theater.  As television reared its cathode-ray-tube head in the late 1940s, Herbert (having dropped the Kemske from his name) got the idea of a science show for kids.  He pitched the concept to station KNBQ in Chicago, they apparently liked the idea, and Meet Mr. Wizard went on the air on Mar. 3, 1951. *Linda Hall Org 

 I admit, I was a regular fan during the mid to late fifty's.

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) doing a demonstration with a birthday candle with Rita, “Science in a Candle,” Meet Mr. Wizard, 1964 





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

On This Day in Math - May 12

  

 





The true foundation of theology is to ascertain the character of God. It is by the art of Statistics that law in the social sphere can be ascertained and codified, and certain aspects of the character of God thereby revealed. The study of statistics is thus a religious service.

~F N David: Games, God and Gambling (1962)


The 132nd day of the year; 132 and its reversal (231) are both divisible by the prime 11 (132/11 = 12, 231/11 = 21). Note that the resulting quotients are also reversals. *Prime Curios
 



If you take the sum of all 2-digit numbers you can make from 132, you get 132:  These are called Osiros numbers, and there are only three using two digits of a three digit number.  One is a year date, and one is a little too big. 

12 + 13 +  21 + 23 + 31 + 32 =132  

132 = 2 * 3 * 11, these three factors can be arranged in three orders to produce a prime, 2311, 2113, and 1123.  (and of course, no arrangement of the original three digits can form a prime ) and of all the 12 permutations of the digits of the three factors,  there are 7;  (1123, 1213, 1321, 2113, 2131, 2311, and 3121) that are all prime.
And speaking of the factors 11, 2, 3, a nice palindromic expression for 132 is 11*2*3+3*2*11

132 is a Harshad (Joy-Giver) number, since it is divisible by the sum of its digits.
It is also called a refactorable number because it is divisible by the number of its divisors, 12.

132 is also a self number, as there is no number n which added to the sum of the digits of n is equal to 132.

132 is not a palindrome in any base 2-12, but in base 7(246)  it has digits that are each the double of the digits in 132.  (I just noticed that, and wonder how often something like that happens?)

132 is the last year day which will be a Catalan Number. The Catalan sequence was described in the 18th century by Leonhard Euler, who was interested in the number of different ways of dividing a polygon into triangles (the octagon can be divided into 6 triangles 142 ways. The sequence is named after Eugène Charles Catalan, who discovered the connection to parenthesized expressions during his exploration of the Towers of Hanoi puzzle.
I got a comment in a different post from a Jeffo who gave a pretty solution for the towers problem....
Jeffo said...

If the rods are placed in a circular arrangement instead of linear, then a correct solution will involve always moving the smallest disk one rod clockwise every other move. The alternate moves are forced.   





EVENTS

1364 Founding of the Uniwersytet Jagiellonski in Krakow,

Poland and re-established in 1400 by a member of the Jagiello family)
King Casimir III of Poland received permission to found an institution of higher learning (first called Krakow Academy)in Poland from Pope Urban V. A royal charter of foundation was issued on 12 May 1364, and a simultaneous document was issued by the City Council granting privileges to the Studium Generale. The King provided funding for one chair in liberal arts, two in Medicine, three in Canon Law and five in Roman Law, funded by a quarterly payment taken from the proceeds of the royal monopoly on the salt mines at Wieliczka.
Copernicus (1473-1543) was a student in 1491‑1496 (or 1495) and there is a statue in the library courtyard.

1732 Laura Maria Caterina Bassi awarded Doctorate of science from University of Bologna:
The University of Bologna is the oldest university in Europe and at the beginning of the eighteenth century students were still examined by public disputation, i.e. the candidate was expected to orally defend a series of academic theses. At the beginning of 1732 Bassi took part in a private disputation in her home with members of the university faculty in the presence of many leading members of Bolognese intellectual society. As a result of her performance during this disputation she was elected a member of the prestigious Bologna Academy of Science on 20th March. Rumours of this extraordinary young lady quickly spread and on 17th April she defended forty-nine theses in a highly spectacular public disputation. On 12th May following a public outcry she was awarded a doctorate from the university in a grand ceremony in the city hall of Bologna. Following a further public disputation the City Senate appointed her professor of philosophy at the university, making her the first ever female professor at a European university.
See more at *Thony Christie, The Renaissance Mathematicus




1796 A paper on “Newton's Binomial Theorem Legally Demonstrated by Algebra” read to the Royal Society by the Rev. William Sewell, A. M. Communicated by Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. K. B. P. R. S.

1819 Sophie Germain penned a letter from her Parisian home to Gauss in which she gave a strategy for a general proof of Fermat’s last theorem. Germain's letter to Gauss contained the first substantial progress toward a proof in 200 years. *WIK  "... I have never ceased to think of the theory of numbers. ... A long time before our Academy proposed as the subject of a prize the proof of the impossibility of Fermat's equation, this challenge ... has often tormented me." *MacTutor

"In this letter she laid out her grand plan to prove Fermat's Last Theorem. Her goal was to prove that for each odd prime exponent p, there are an infinite number of auxiliary primes of the form 2Np+1 such that the set of non-zero p-th power residues x^p mod (2Np+1) does not contain any consecutive integers. If there were a solution to x^p + y^p = z^p, then Germain observes that any such auxiliary prime would have to necessarily divide one of the numbers x, y, or z. Her letter and manuscripts found in various libraries showed her analysis for the primes p less than 100 and for auxiliary primes with N from 1 to 10."  *Larry Riddle

Department of Mathematics, Agnes Scott College




1930, the Adler Planetarium and Astronomical Museum was opened to the public in Chicago, Illinois. A program using the Zeiss II star projector was presented by Prof. Philip Fox, who resigned from the staff of Northwestern Observatory to take charge of the new $1 million facility. Housed in a granite building, it was donated to the city by Max Adler, retired vice president of Sears, Roebuck & Co. He had been so impressed when he previously visited the world’s first planetarium at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Germany, that he resolved to construct America's first modern planetarium open to the public in his home city. Its site was within the fairgrounds of the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933-34, and was an outstanding attraction. *TIS



1936, the Dvorak typewriter keyboard was patented in the U.S. by Dvorak and Dealey (Patent No. 2,040,248). The efficiency experts August Dvorak (a cousin of the composer) and William Dealey studied the typewriter to determine that they could arrange the keys in a new way which would speed up the operators of the typewriter. They designed a keyboard to maximize efficiency by placing common letters on the home row, and make the stronger fingers of the hands do most of the work. By contrast, the original QWERTY layout was designed for the earlier, less efficient typewriters. Previously, speed would result in two type bars hitting each other in their travel, so the original keyboard was laid out to reduce collisions.

Michael Will wrote, "And yet, here we are, 88 years later and all Qwerty. A testament to the power and plasticity of the human brain and hands. Typing is probably the best high school class I took." 

"James Burke always showed how the great advances in science & tech weren't always from brilliant theory. Rather, they often came from simple crossovers between skill sets." 

 My response was to remark on the fact that just as public schools were starting tp push programming and computer skills classes, they took away typing classes.






1941 Zuse Completes Z3 Machine:


Konrad Zuse completes his Z3 computer, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It followed in the footsteps of the Z1 - the world’s first binary digital computer - which Zuse had developed in 1938. Much of Zuse’s work was destroyed in World War II, although the Z4, the most sophisticated of his creations, survives. *CHM  For a little more information and perspective on Zuse and his creations, see this Renaissance Mathematicus blog.


1984 The Hindu newspaper from Madras, India, reported the unveiling of a statue of Srinivasa Ramanujan. [Mathematics Magazine 57 (1984), p 244]. *VFR




2004 discovery of what was believed to be the world's oldest seat of learning, the Library of Alexandria, was announced by Zahi Hawass, president of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities during a conference at the University of California. A Polish-Egyptian team had uncovered 13 lecture halls featuring an elevated podium for the lecturer. Such a complex of lecture halls had never before been found on any Mediterranean Greco-Roman site. Alexandria may be regarded as the birthplace of western science, where Euclid discovered the rules of geometry, Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the Earth and Ptolemy wrote the Almagest, the most influential scientific book about the nature of the Universe for 1,500 years*TIS



2013, This is the third "Pythagorean Day" of the 21st Century, 5/12/13. The first was on March 4, 2005 (3/4/05) and the second on June 8, 2010. How many more will there be in the 21st Century, and when is the next one?


BIRTHS

1820 Florence Nightingale (12 May 1820 – 13 August 1910) is remembered as the mother of modern nursing. But few realize that her place in history is at least partly

linked to her use, following William Farr, Playfair and others, of graphical methods to convey complex statistical information dramatically to a broad audience. An example of "Stigler's Law of Eponomy" (Stigler, 1980), Nightingale's Coxcomb chart did not orignate with her, though this should not detract from her credit. She likely got the idea from William Farr, a close friend and frequent correspondent, who used the same graphic principles in 1852. The earliest known inventor of polar area charts is Andre-Michel Guerry (1829). [gallery of data visualization]
Pearson wrote of here, "Her statistics were more than a study, they were indeed her religion. For her Quetelet was the hero as scientist, and the presentation copy of his Physique sociale is annotated by her on every page. ... she held that the universe -- including human communities -- was evolving in accordance with a divine plan; that it was man's business to endeavor to understand this plan and guide his actions in sympathy with it. But to understand God's thoughts, she held we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose. Thus the study of statistics was for her a religious duty.
K Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours for Francis Galton (1924). *SAU


1845 Henri Brocard (12 May 1845 – 16 January 1922) who published (1897–99) a two volume catalog of plane curves and their properties. *VFR
His best-known achievement is the invention and discovery of the properties of the Brocard points, the Brocard circle, and the Brocard triangle, all bearing his name.  Contemporary mathematician Nathan Court wrote that he, along with Émile Lemoine and Joseph Neuberg , was one of the three co-founders of modern triangle geometry. 
In a triangle ABC with sides ab, and c, where the vertices are labeled AB and C in counterclockwise order, there is exactly one point P such that the line segments APBP, and CP form the same angle, ω, with the respective sides ca, and b, namely that

\angle PAB = \angle PBC = \angle PCA.\,

*Wik


1851 Samuel Dickstein (May 12, 1851 – September 29, 1939) was a Polish mathematician of Jewish origin. He was one of the founders of the Jewish party "Zjednoczenie" (Unification), which advocated the assimilation of Polish Jews.
He was born in Warsaw and was killed there by a German bomb at the beginning of World War II. All the members of his family were killed during the Holocaust.
Dickstein wrote many mathematical books and founded the journal Wiadomości Mathematyczne (Mathematical News), now published by the Polish Mathematical Society. He was a bridge between the times of Cauchy and Poincaré and those of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He was also thanked by Alexander Macfarlane for contributing to the Bibliography of Quaternions (1904) published by the Quaternion Society.
He was also one of the personalities, who contributed to the foundation of the Warsaw Public Library in 1907.*Wik



1857 Oskar Bolza (12 May 1857–5 July 1942) After studying with Weierstrass and Klein, and realizing the difficulties of obtaining a suitable position in Germany, he came to the U.S. where he played an important role in the development of mathematics at Hopkins, Clark and Chicago. *VFR He published "The elliptic s-functions considered as a special case of the hyperelliptic s-functions" in 1900. From 1910, he worked on the calculus of variations. Bolza wrote a classic textbook on the subject, "Lectures on the Calculus of Variations" (1904). He returned to Germany in 1910, where he researched function theory, integral equations and the calculus of variations. In 1913, he published a paper presenting a new type of variational problem now called "the problem of Bolza." The next year, he wrote about variations for an integral problem involving inequalities, which later become important in control theory. Bolza ceased his mathematical research work at the outbreak of WW I in 1914.*TIS




1902 Frank Yates FRS (May 12, 1902 – June 17, 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. In 1931 Yates was appointed assistant statistician at Rothamsted Experimental Station by R.A. Fisher. In 1933 he became head of statistics when Fisher went to University College London. At Rothamsted he worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design. During World War II he worked on what would later be called operational research. *Wikipedia




1910 Dorothy Mary Hodgkin OM FRS (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994), known professionally as Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin or simply Dorothy Hodgkin, was a British biochemist who developed protein crystallography, for which she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.
She advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three-dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the confirmation of the structure of penicillin that Ernst Boris Chain and Edward Abraham had previously surmised, and then the structure of vitamin B12, for which she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
In 1969, after 35 years of work and five years after winning the Nobel Prize, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. X-ray crystallography became a widely used tool and was critical in later determining the structures of many biological molecules where knowledge of structure is critical to an understanding of function. She is regarded as one of the pioneer scientists in the field of X-ray crystallography studies of biomolecules. *Wik


A three dimensional contour map of the electron density of penicillin derived from x-ray diffraction. The points of highest density show the positions of individual atoms in the penicillin. This device was used by Hodgkin to deduce the structure.







1919 Wu Wenjun (Chinese: 吴文俊; 12 May 1919 – 7 May 2017), also commonly known as Wu Wen-tsün, was a Chinese mathematician, historian, and writer. He was an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), best known for Wu class, Wu formula, and Wu's method of characteristic set.
He was also active in the field of the history of Chinese mathematics. He was the chief editor of the ten-volume Grand Series of Chinese Mathematics, covering the time from antiquity to late part of the Qin dynasty.
In 1957, he was elected as an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 1986 he was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in Berkeley. In 1990, he was elected as an academician of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).

Along with Yuan Longping, he was awarded the State Preeminent Science and Technology Award by President Jiang Zemin in 2000, when this highest scientific and technological prize in China began to be awarded. He also received the TWAS Prize in 1990[3] and the Shaw Prize in 2006. He was the President of the Chinese society of mathematics. He died on May 7, 2017, 5 days before his 98th birthday.




1926 James Samuel Coleman (May 12, 1926 – March 25, 1995) was a U.S. sociologist, a pioneer in mathematical sociology whose studies strongly influenced education policy. In the early 1950s, he was as a chemical engineer with Eastman-Kodak Co. in Rochester, N.Y. He then changed direction, fascinated with sociology and social problems. In 1966, he presented a report to the U.S. Congress which concluded that poor black children did better academically in integrated, middle-class schools. His findings provided the sociological underpinnings for widespread busing of students to achieve racial balance in schools. In 1975, Coleman rescinded his support of busing, concluding that it had encouraged the deterioration of public schools by encouraging white flight to avoid integration.*TIS



1977  Maryam Mirzakhani (12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. In 2005, as a result of her research, she was honored in Popular Science's fourth annual "Brilliant 10" in which she was acknowledged as one of the top 10 young minds who have pushed their fields in innovative directions.

Both Maryam Mirzakhani and her friend Roya Beheshti made the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team in 1994. The international competition was held that year in Hong Kong and Mirzakhani scored 41 out of 42 and was awarded a gold medal. Beheshti was awarded a silver medal. Again in 1995 Mirzakhani was a member of the Iranian Mathematical Olympiad team. This time the international competition was held in Toronto, Canada, and Mirzakhani scored 42 out of 42 and was again awarded a gold medal.

On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, becoming the first Iranian to be honored with the award and the first of only two women to date. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".

On 14 July 2017, Mirzakhani died of breast cancer at the age of 40

*Wik, *MacTutor  



Maryam, (+ epsilon) with the other Field's
Medalist of 2014





DEATHS

1003 Gerbert d'Aurillac (Pope Sylvester II)  (c. 946 – 12 May 1003)  French scholar who reintroduced the use of the abacus in mathematical calculations. He may have adopted the use of Arabic numerals (without the zero) from Khwarizmi. He built clocks, organs and astronomical instruments based on translations of Arabic works(One of his mechanical instruments was an oracular metal cast head that answered questions yes or no, sort of a tenth century magic 8-ball with speaking ability). (He was often accused after his death of being in league with demons )
He made no original contribution to mathematics or astronomy . However, he served in the all-important role of popularizer, communicating the value and importance of science to the uninitiated public. With the inspiration of Gerbert, Europe began its slow crawl out of the Dark Ages.*TIS

Sylvester, in blue, as depicted in the Gospels of Otto III






1682 Michelangelo Ricci ( 30 Jan., 1619; Rome, -  12 May,  1682; Romewas a friend of Torricelli; in fact both were taught by Benedetti Castelli. He studied theology and law in Rome and at this time he became friends with René de Sluze. It is clear that Sluze, Torricelli and Ricci had a considerable influence on each other in the mathematics which they studied.
Ricci made his career in the Church. His income came from the Church, certainly from 1650 he received such funds, but perhaps surprisingly he was never ordained. Ricci served the Pope in several different roles before being made a cardinal by Pope Innocent XI in 1681.
Ricci's main work was Exercitatio geometrica, De maximis et minimis (1666) which was later reprinted as an appendix to Nicolaus Mercator's Logarithmo-technia (1668). It only consisted of 19 pages and it is remarkable that his high reputation rests solely on such a short publication.
In this work Ricci finds the maximum of xm(a - x)n and the tangents to ym = kxn. The methods are early examples of induction. He also studied spirals (1644), generalised cycloids (1674) and states explicitly that finding tangents and finding areas are inverse operations (1668). *SAU

In his own time Ricci's fame as a mathematician rested more on the many letters he wrote on mathematical topics, rather than on his published work. He corresponded with many mathematicians across Europe including Clavius, Viviani and de Sluze.




1684 Edme Mariotte(1620 ? – 12 May 1684) Little is known about his early life in the Cote d'Or region of eastern France, but in  1660 he discovered the eye's blind spot.and supposedly amazed the French Royal Court.  At this time he may have been working at a Parish Church, but that is not known.  In 1668 Colbert invited Mariotte to participate in the "l'Académie des Sciences", and in 1670 he moved to Paris. He published regularly right from his appointment. He is actually pictured in the portrait of the Establishment of the Academy, just to the left of Huygens and Cassini (he is sixth from the right in the picture).

*Wikipedia

The first volume of the Academies papers was released in 1673, and he had many of the articles.  His scope reached across the natural sciences including papers on fluid motion, heat, sound and acoustics, air pressure, and freezing water.  When he is known at all, it is usually as confirming what we now call Boyle's Law, but in fact his work went well beyond what Hooke and Boyle had shown, and he demonstrated that the pressure decreased in arithmetic progression as the altitude changed in geometric progression.  He also was the first to explain how the altitude at a high place could be calculated with a barometer.  He did not give a formula, but described a procedure assuming that a rise of  63 "Paris feet" resulted in the drop in the barometric reading of 1 line or 1/144th of an inch.  And I choose to call the desk toy called Newton's cradle by so many, Mariotte's cradle, since he was the first to describe this law of impact between bodies.  Edme quit the Academy in 1681 and died on 12 May 1684 in Paris.



1742 Joseph Privat de Molières (1677 in Tarascon, Bouches-du-Rhône, France - 12 May 1742 in Paris, France) In 1723 he was appointed to a chair at the Collège Royal to succeed Varignon.
He argued against Newton and for Descartes' view of physics although he knew Newton's to be the more precise. Of course, although we now accept Newton's ideas of gravitation without much thought, it is clear if one thinks about it for a while that the idea of action at a distance through a vacuum is absurd. Many around this time voiced such an opinion (Newton himself realised this was a weakness in his theories) but where Privat de Molières differed from other critics of Newton's theory of gravitation is that he attempted to make a mathematically sound theory based on the idea of vortices. Understanding the accuracy of the theory of gravitation, Privat attempted to bring Newton's calculations into the vortex theory of matter of Malebranche. The problem was Kepler's laws, easily explained by Newton, but the cause of real problems for Descartes' vortex theory of planetary motion. In fact in a memoir written in 1733 Privat criticised Newton's theories for being too accurate saying that physical phenomena did not have geometrical precision *SAU




1753 Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (alternative names are Facio or Faccio;) (26 February 1664 – 12 May 1753) was a Swiss mathematician known for his work on the zodiacal light problem, for his very close (some have suggested "romantic" ) relationship with Isaac Newton, for his role in the Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy , and for originating the "push" or "shadow" theory of gravitation.
[Le Sage's theory of gravitation is a kinetic theory of gravity originally proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690 and later by Georges-Louis Le Sage in 1748. The theory proposed a mechanical explanation for Newton's gravitational force in terms of streams of tiny unseen particles (which Le Sage called ultra-mundane corpuscles) impacting all material objects from all directions. According to this model, any two material bodies partially shield each other from the impinging corpuscles, resulting in a net imbalance in the pressure exerted by the impact of corpuscles on the bodies, tending to drive the bodies together.]
He also developed and patented a method of perforating jewels for use in clocks.

When Leibniz sent a set of problems for solution to England he mentioned Newton and failed to mention Faccio among those probably capable of solving them. Faccio retorted by sneering at Leibniz as the ‘second inventor’ of the calculus in a tract entitled ‘Lineæ brevissimæ descensus investigatio geometrica duplex, cui addita est investigatio geometrica solidi rotundi in quo minima fiat resistentia,’ 4to, London, 1699. Finally he stirred up the whole Royal Society to take a part in the dispute (Brewster, Memoirs of Sir I. Newton, 2nd edit. ii. 1–5).
In 1707, Fatio came under the influence of a fanatical religious sect, the Camisards, which ruined Fatio's reputation. He left England and took part in pilgrim journeys across Europe. After his return only a few scientific documents by him appeared. He died in 1753 in Maddersfield near Worcester, England. After his death his Geneva compatriot Georges-Louis Le Sage tried to purchase the scientific papers of Fatio. These papers together with Le Sage's are now in the Library of the University of Geneva.
Eventually he retired to Worcester, where he formed some congenial friendships, and busied himself with scientific pursuits, alchemy, and the mysteries of the cabbala. In 1732 he endeavoured, but it is thought unsuccessfully, to obtain through the influence of John Conduitt [q. v.], Newton's nephew, some reward for having saved the life of the Prince of Orange. He assisted Conduitt in planning the design, and writing the inscription for Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey. *Wik




1856 Jacques Philippe Marie Binet (February 2, 1786 – May 12, 1856) was a French mathematician, physicist and astronomer born in Rennes; he died in Paris, France, in 1856. He made significant contributions to number theory, and the mathematical foundations of matrix algebra which would later lead to important contributions by Cayley and others. In his memoir on the theory of the conjugate axis and of the moment of inertia of bodies he enumerated the principle now known as Binet's theorem. He is also recognized as the first to describe the rule for multiplying matrices in 1812, and Binet's formula expressing Fibonacci numbers in closed form is named in his honour, although the same result was known to Abraham de Moivre a century earlier.
u_n = \frac{(1 + \sqrt{5})^n - (1 - \sqrt{5})^n}{2^n \sqrt{5}}
*Wik
Cauchy wrote his obituary, the only one he ever wrote. Apparently Cauchy was motivated by their common Bourbon fervour. [Ivor Grattan-Guiness, Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800–1840, p. 192] *VFR



1859  Robert Leslie Ellis (25 August 1817 – 12 May 1859) was an English polymath, remembered principally as a mathematician and editor of the works of Francis Bacon. A brilliant man with broad interests and abilities who suffered from ill health all his short life. Senior Wrangler in the Mathematical tripos at Cambridge and  also First Smith's prizeman. In 1840 he became a fellow of Trinity College and was interested in areas of mathematics which involved philosophical ideas. *SAU




1910 Sir William Huggins (7 Feb 1824; 12 May 1910 at age 86) English astronomer who explored the spectra of stars, nebulae and comets to interpret their chemical composition, assisted by his wife Margaret Lindsay Murray. He was the first to demonstrate (1864) that whereas some nebulae are clusters of stars (with stellar spectral characteristics, ex. Andromeda), certain other nebulae are uniformly gaseous as shown by their pure emission spectra (ex. the great nebula in Orion). He made spectral observations of a nova (1866). He also was first to attempt to measure a star's radial velocity. He was one of the wealthy 19th century private astronomers that supported their own passion while making significant contributions. At age only 30, Huggins built his own observatory at Tulse Hill, outside London *TIS



1952 George Lidstone (11 Dec 1870 in London, England - 12 May 1952 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was an actuary who worked for various Edinburgh insurance companies. He wrote papers on various numerical and statistical topics. *SAU   Actuary in the modern sense originated in the middle of the 19th  Century.  Before that, the term was used for a court clerk.  the term is from the Latin for bookkeeper.






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