Euler calculated without effort, just as men breathe, as eagles sustain themselves in the air.
~François Arago
The 275th day of the year; 275 is the number of partitions of 28 in which no part occurs only once. (Students might try finding the similar number of partitions for 10, or some smaller number to get a sense for how they grow)
275 can be written in 5 ways as a sum of consecutive naturals, for example, 20 + ... + 30
275 is an arithmetic number, because the mean of its divisors, 62, is an integer
275 is the maximum number. of pieces that can be formed from an annulus with 22 straight lines.
EVENTS479 B.C.: an Annular Solar Eclipse known as "Xerxes' eclipse" as noted by Herodotus occurred. David Dickinson @Astroguyz The questions about this eclipse basically boil down to two questions, Why did his advisors think the predicted solar eclipse was a GOOD omen, and why was there no eclipse in the area that day, One of these we have some idea about. The Babylonians had a mathematical relationship for the period between solar eclipses, but didn't seem to understand the actual mechanics of the occurrence. Sometimes when they predicted a solar eclipse it happened, but not where they were. There predictions were accurate often enough that these "hidden" eclipses were significant in there way also.
This cuneiform text mentions the murder of Xerxes I (r. 485-465 BCE) by his son and a lunar eclipse (609-447 BCE). From Babylon, Iraq. British Museum
_by_his_son_and_a_lunar_eclipse_(609-447_BCE)._From_Babylon,_Iraq._British_Museum.jpg)
1608, the Dutch Estates General examined an application for a patent for "a device to observe things at a distance" presented by a certain Hans Lipperhey (?-1619) an obscure spectacles-maker from Middelburg, in southwestern Holland The patent application was rejected on the grounds that, although the usefulness of the device was recognised, especially for military purposes it was deemed impossible to keep the secret of its construction for very long. And especially considering that, in those same days, another instrument-maker - a certain Sacharias Janssen (1588-1630), he too a spectacles-maker in Middelburg, indicated by Pierre Borel (c. 1620-1671) a few decades later as the true inventor of the telescope - declared that he knew how to build the instrument.*Institute and Museum of the History of Science
I doubt that many modern science/math historians believe that Lipperhey invented the telesccope, and neither did any of the myriad other names suggested over the years.
The first historical construct concerns the ‘invention’ itself, because what happened in
1608 was in fact not an invention at all, but merely a recognition of the great potential of a device, which must have been around for some decades, as a kind of toy or as a device whose purpose was to correct or improve vision. Indications of the awareness of the magnifying power of a combination of two lenses, long before the year 1608, are indeed abundant in the contemporary literature. For instance, in 1538 the Italian scholar Girolamo Fracastoro wrote: ‘If someone looks through two eye-glasses, of which one is placed above the other, he shall see everything larger and more closely.’
After seeing or hearing of Lipperhey’s telescope, many scholars had a kind of déjà vu -feeling. Girolamo Sirtori, who in 1612, only four years after the emergence of the instrument, composed his well-known Telescopium, captured this feeling in the following phrase: "It appeared that this conception was in the minds of many men, so that once they
heard about it, any ingenious person began trying to make one, without [the help of ]
a model."
*Huib J. Zuidervaart, The ‘true inventor’ of the telescope. A survey of 400 years of debate origins of the telescope
1667 On this day in 1667, Isaac Newton became a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. He had earned his bachelor's degree in 1665 and then spent two years at home in Lincolnshire inventing much of differential and integral calculus while Cambridge was closed due to the plague.
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| Woolsthorpe by Colsterworth, Newton's childhood hom |
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1759 “Your solution of the isoperimetric problems leaves nothing to be desired and I rejoice that this subject, with which I have been so completely occupied since my first efforts, has been carried by you to such a high degree of perfection. The importance of the subject has stimulated me to develop, aided by your lights, an analytical solution that I will keep secret as long as your own meditations are not published, lest I take away from you a part of the glory you deserve.” So wrote Euler to the young Lagrange. See Allen Shields, “Lagrange and the M´ecanique Analytique,” The Mathematical Intelligencer, 10:4, Fall 1988, pp. 7– 10. *VFR
1836 Charles Darwin returned from his voyage on the HMS Beagle to the Pacific. It would be 23 years before he published Origin of Species. *TIS
The second survey expedition of HMS Beagle took place from 27 December 1831 to 2 October 1836. Robert FitzRoy, the newest commander of Beagle, had thought of the advantages of having someone onboard who could investigate geology, and sought a naturalist to accompany them as a supernumerary. At the age of 22, the graduate Charles Darwin hoped to see the tropics before becoming a parson, and accepted the opportunity. He was greatly influenced by reading Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology during the voyage. By the end of the expedition, Darwin had made his name as a geologist, and fossil collector, and the publication of his journal (later known as The Voyage of the Beagle) gave him wide renown as a writer.
Beagle sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, and then carried out detailed hydrographic surveys around the coasts of southern South America, returning via Tahiti and Australia, after having circumnavigated the Earth. The initial offer to Darwin told him the voyage would last two years; it lasted almost five.
Darwin spent most of this time exploring on land: three years and three months on land, 18 months at sea. Early in the voyage, Darwin decided that he could write a geology book, and he showed a gift for theorising. At Punta Alta in Argentina, he made a major find of gigantic fossils of extinct mammals, then known from very few specimens. He collected and made detailed observations of plants and animals. His findings undermined his belief in the doctrine that species are fixed, and provided the basis for ideas which came to him when back in England, leading to his theory of evolution by natural selection.
1856 Sylvester was to dine with Charles Wheatstone, the noted physicist and inventor, and had invited Arthur Cayley to attend and meet Wheatstone. Wheatstone had supported Sylvester's successful candidacy for the Royal Society in 1836. James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters, *James Joseph Sylvester: Life and Work in Letters
edited by Karen Hunger Parshall
1912 Ernest Rutherford presents his theory of the structure of the Atom to a session of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He rejected Thompson's "Plum Pudding" model for an atom with most of its mass concentrated into a tiny charged core in its center. *Brody&Brody, The Science Class You Wish You Had
Rutherford's model proposed that the negatively charged electrons surround the nucleus of an atom. He also claimed that the electrons surrounding the nucleus revolve around it with very high speed in circular paths. He named these circular paths as orbits.
1937 The London Illustrated News had a picture of a wolf bone discovered in Czechoslovakia by Karl Absolom which has 55 notches in groups of 5, the first 25 being separated from the rest by one of double length. Dating from 30,000 BC, this is the earliest record of counting. [Bunt, Jones, Bedient, The Historical Root of Elementary Mathematics, p 2]. *VFR (The head of an ivory Venus figurine was excavated close to the bone.)
1950 On October 2, 1950, Charles M. Schulz introduced the world to what would become one of the most influential comic strips in history with the debut of Peanuts. Syndicated in only seven newspapers, the first four-panel strip featured a character named Shermy praising a passing Charlie Brown to another kid named Patty, only to bluntly conclude in the final frame, "How I hate him!". This simple interaction established the strip's signature blend of childhood innocence and sharp, melancholy humor. However, the famous title wasn't Schulz's choice. He had originally named the strip Li'l Folks, but United Features Syndicate forced a change to avoid legal conflicts with an older, retired cartoon. A production manager at the syndicate arbitrarily chose "Peanuts"—likely inspired by the "Peanut Gallery" audience on the popular Howdy Doody Show—and slapped it on the comic without Schulz's input. Schulz deeply hated the name his entire life, believing it lacked dignity and made no sense. Despite his ongoing resentment toward the title, this momentous publication laid the groundwork for a counterculture phenomenon that would eventually expand to feature legendary characters like Snoopy, who would appear on Ocrober 4, have touch millions of readers worldwide, and permanently redefined the landscape of American newspaper comics.*AI edited
1955 The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) retired. After disassembly, parts of this computer were shipped to the Smithsonian for display. *Goldstein, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, p. 234–5.
After eleven years of calculating and processing programs, the ENIAC was retired. Designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert had unveiled the machine in February 1946, showing off its 1,000-time improvement in speed over its contemporaries. The ENIAC ran at 5,000 operations a second with a system of plug boards, switches, and punch cards. It occupied 1,000 square feet of floor space. *CHM
1956, the Atomicron, the first atomic clock in the U.S., was unveiled at the Overseas Press Club in New York City. The basis of the timing was the constant frequency of the oscillations of the caesium atom - 9,192,631,830 MHz. It was priced at $50,000. The Atomicron measured 84" high, 22" wide and 18" deep. *TIS
The Atomichron was the world's first commercial atomic clock, built by the National Company, Inc. of Malden, Massachusetts. It was also the first self-contained portable atomic clock and was a caesium standard clock. More than 50 clocks with the trademarked Atomichron name were produced.
*Wlk
A radio-controlled atomic clock from American Time offers a simple way to get synchronized time from a real atomic clock synced by radio broadcast from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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Looks incredibly like battery operated clock on my kitchen wall,
without atomic correction, (thrift store purchase for $2.00 |
1959 At the New England eclipse of October 2, 1959, Dr. E. H. Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land camera, had accompanied Harvard astronomers on a DC-6 plane that flew above the heavy overcast. On this flight, Dr. Land and his colleagues secured several excellent photographs of the corona, using Polaroid cameras with telephoto lenses. *NSEC
2002 Why no one trusts medical research: On this date Ig Nobel prizes were awarded to two groups of medical researchers, one from the US who proved that Coca-Cola is an effective spermicide (New England Journal of Medicine, 1985), and one from Taiwan who proved that it is not(Human Toxicology, 1987). *Improbable.com
Come on science, figure this out, teenagers around the world need to know.
BIRTHS
1568 Marino Ghetaldi (2 Oct 1568, 11 April 1626) was a Croatian mathematician who published work with early applications of algebra to geometry. *SAU His best results are mainly in physics, especially optics, and mathematics. He was one of the few students of François Viète. He took over Viète's work to restore Apollonius' lost works. He followed Pappus's description of the contents of certain lost books and to do this he had to solve the problems which the books were supposed to contain. He published Apollonius redivivus seu restituta Apollonii Pergaei inclinationum geometria and Supplementum Apollonii Galli seu exsuscitata Apollonii Pergaei tactionum geometriae pars reliqua both in Venice in 1607.
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| * National Maritime Museum |
Renowned for the application of algebra in geometry and his research in the field of geometrical optics on which, he wrote 7 works, including the Promotus Archimedus (1603) and the De resolutione et compositione mathematica (1630). He also produced a pamphlet with the solutions of 42 geometrical problems, Variorum problematum colletio, in 1607 and set grounds of algebraization of geometry. His contributions to geometry had been
cited by Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens and Edmond Halley in England.
Ghetaldić was the constructor of the parabolic mirror (66 cm in diameter), kept today at the National Maritime Museum in London. During his sejourn in Padua he met Galileo Galilei, with whom he corresponded regularly. He was a good friend to the French mathematician François Viète. He was offered the post of professor of mathematics in Leuven in Belgium, at the time one of the most prestigious university centers in Europe.
1791 Aléxis Thérèse Petit (2 Oct 1791, 21 June 1820) was a French mathematician who worked on the theory of heat.*SAU
Alexis-Thérèse Petit was a precocious child. A student at the central school in Besançon , it is said that "at ten and a half years old he had already acquired the necessary knowledge to be admitted to the École Polytechnique . " Thanks to the mathematician Jean Nicolas Pierre Hachette , he continued his studies in Paris at the École des Sciences et Belles-Lettres . In 1807, at the age of sixteen, the minimum age, he sat the entrance exams for the École Polytechnique, where he was admitted first in his class. He studied there for two years, after which his exceptional academic results led the school's graduating jury to place him at the very top of his class. He was then appointed tutor of analysis (1809), then tutor of physics (1810) under Jean Henri Hassenfratz , and simultaneously professor of physics at the Lycée Bonaparte, where he was replaced by Claude Pouillet from 1817. In 1811, he became one of the very first Doctors of Science from the Faculty of Sciences of Paris . After Hassenfratz's resignation in 1814, he was put in charge of the course as assistant professor (Charles Lehot replaced him as tutor), he was then 23 years old, then as full professor (1815), a position he held until his death from tuberculosis , which occurred shortly after that of his wife. He became a member of the Philomathic Society of Paris inFebruary 1818.
He is known for having proposed in 1819 , with Pierre Louis Dulong , a theory to explain the value of the specific heat of metals known as the Dulong and Petit law .
He was François Arago 's brother-in-law (their wives were sisters).
A street and a school in Vesoul ( Haute-Saône ), his hometown, bear the name of Rue Petit.*Wik
1825 John James Walker (2 Oct 1825, 15 Feb 1900) The range of Walker's mathematical research was quite impressive. He wrote some articles on theoretical mechanics but his more elaborate papers were on advanced algebra and geometry. Walker was a strong advocate of Hamilton's quaternions and strongly believed that they had not been given as wide a use as they merited. He applied quaternions to a variety of problems, mostly of an elementary nature.
The three most important papers that Walker wrote were on the analysis of plane curves and curved lines. The papers were closely connected and all appeared in the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. He wrote further articles on cubic curves and in this area he wrote the memoir On the diameters of cubic curves which was published in the Transactions of the Royal Society in 1889. *SAU
1852 Sir William Ramsay (2 Oct 1852; 23 Jul 1916) Scottish chemist who discovered the "inert gases", neon, krypton and xenon, and co-discovered argon, radon, calcium and barium. Nobel laureate (1904) "in recognition of his services in the discovery of the inert gaseous elements in air, and his determination of their place in the periodic system." Died in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.*TIS
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| #Linda Hall Org |
1886 Robert Julius Trumpler (2 Oct 1886; 10 Sep 1956) Swiss-born U.S. astronomer who moved to the US in 1915 and worked at the Lick Observatory. In 1922, by observing a solar eclipse, he was able to confirm Einstein's theory of relativity. He made extensive studies of galactic star clusters, and demonstrated (1930) the presence throughout the galactic plane of a tenuous haze of interstellar material that absorbs light generally that dims and reddens the light from of distant clusters. The presence of this obscuring haze revealed how the size of spiral galaxies had been over-estimated. Whereas Harlow Shapley, in 1918, determined the distance to the centre of the Milky Way to be 50,000 light-years away, Trumpler's work reduced this to 30,000 light-years.*TIS
1901 Charles Stark Draper (2 Oct 1901; 25 Jul 1987) American aeronautical engineer, educator, and science administrator who earned degrees from Stanford, Harvard, and MIT then, in 1939, became head of MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, which was a centre for the design of navigational and guidance systems for ships, airplanes, and missiles from World War II through the Cold War. He developed gyroscope systems that stabilized and balanced gunsights and bombsights and which were later expanded to an inertial guidance system for launching long-range missiles at supersonic jet targets. He was "the father of inertial navigation." The Project Apollo contract for guiding man and spacecraft to the moon was also placed with the Instrumentation Lab. *TIS
1908 Arthur Erdélyi studied in Brno and Prague and came to Scotland before the Second World War to avoid the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. He became a lecturer at Edinburgh and after a period in the USA he returned to Edinburgh as a Professor. He was an expert on Special Functions. He became President of the EMS in 1971. *SAU
1926 Michio Suzuki (October 2, 1926 – May 31, 1998) was a Japanese mathematician who studied group theory.
He was a Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1953 to his death. He also had visiting positions at the University of Chicago (1960–61), the Institute for Advanced Study (1962–63, 1968–69, spring 1981), the University of Tokyo (spring 1971), and the University of Padua (1994). Suzuki received his Ph.D in 1952 from the University of Tokyo, despite having moved to the United States the previous year. He was the first to attack the Burnside conjecture, that every finite non-abelian simple group has even order.
A notable achievement was his discovery in 1960 of the Suzuki groups, an infinite family of the only non-abelian simple groups whose order is not divisible by 3. The smallest, of order 29120, was the first simple group of order less than 1 million to be discovered since Dickson's list of 1900.
He classified several classes of simple groups of small rank, including the CIT-groups and C-groups and CA-groups.
There is also a sporadic simple group called the Suzuki group, which he announced in 1968. The Tits ovoid is also referred to as the Suzuki ovoid. *Wik
1929 Branko Grünbaum ( October 2, 1929 in Osijek , Croatia ; September 14, 2018 in Seattle , Washington) was an Israeli mathematician of Yugoslavian descent who worked on discrete geometry.
A scholarship allowed Grünbaum to spend from September 1958 to June 1960 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA. Branko and Zdenka, with their son Ram, sailed on the T.S.S. Olympia arriving in New York on 5 September 1958 having left Lisbon exactly one month earlier. From New York they travelled by train to Princeton. After two years at Princeton, they spent one year in Seattle at the University of Washington where their second son Daniel Grünbaum was born on 2 November 1960. The family had spent the summer of 1960 at the University of California, Los Angeles, living during this time in Santa Monica. While in Seattle, Grünbaum accepted a position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
There now arose a complication with his marriage. Branko and Zdenka's Orthodox Jewish marriage had been annulled because Branko's mother was not Jewish. In the City of Seattle, on 5 September 1961, Branko Grünbaum and Zdenka Bienenstock were married by a Justice of the Peace at 9:30 a.m. just before they left the United States for Jerusalem. Back at the Hebrew University his career went extremely well and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1964. By this time he had over fifty publications and, let us note at this point, that he carried on with a remarkably high publication rate throughout his life; MathSciNet list 271 publications in total.
Grünbaum now felt slightly uneasy in Israel since, despite having a Jewish father, he had been declared a non-Jew since his mother was not Jewish. This eventually contributed to his decision to leave Israel and emigrate to North America. In 1965 he went to Michigan State University to spend a sabbatical year. While there he learnt of another marriage being annulled in similar circumstances to his own and the Israeli immigrant from the mixed marriage had her passport and citizenship revoked; this tipped the balance. It was not an easy decision, however, since Zdenka had been half way through her Ph.D. studies in Chemistry when they left Israel and she would have liked to have returned to complete the degree. Grünbaum had two possible places in North America which were particularly attractive because of his interest in geometry, the University of Toronto where Donald Coxeter was a professor, and the University of Washington in Seattle where he could work with Victor Klee. He chose the University of Washington where he was appointed to a full professorship in 1966 and remained there for the rest of his career until he retired in 2001. *SAU
DEATHS1853 Dominique François Jean Arago (26 Feb 1786, 2 Oct 1853) was a French physicist and astronomer who discovered the chromosphere of the sun (the lower atmosphere, primarily composed of hydrogen gas), and for his accurate estimates of the diameters of the planets. Arago found that a rotating copper disk deflects a magnetic needle held above it showing the production of magnetism by rotation of a nonmagnetic conductor. He devised an experiment that proved the wave theory of light, showed that light waves move more slowly through a dense medium than through air and contributed to the discovery of the laws of light polarization. Arago entered politics in 1848 as Minister of War and Marine and was responsible for abolishing slavery in the French colonies. *TIS A really great blog about Arago, With the catchy title, "François Arago: the most interesting physicist in the world!" is posted here. Read this introduction, and you will not be able to resist:
When he was seven years old, he tried to stab a Spanish solider with a lance
When he was eighteen, he talked a friend out of assassinating Napoleon
He once angered an archbishop so much that the holy man punched him in the face
He has negotiated with bandits, been chased by a mob, broken out of prison
He is:
François Arago, the most interesting physicist in the world
Admit it, this guy is so cute, you want to hit him for existing.
1929 Andrei Mikhailovich Razmadze (11 Aug 1889, 2 Oct 1929) His work was on the calculus of variations, continuing work by Weierstrass and Hilbert. The fundamental lemma of the calculus of variations is named after him. He also did important work on discontinuous solutions.*SAU
1933 Philipp Forchheimer (7 Aug 1852, 2 Oct 1933) Austrian hydraulic engineer who made significant studies of groundwater hydrology. Early in his academic career, he worked on problems of soil mechanics. Later, he turned to hydraulic problems, establishing the scientific basis of the discipline by applying standard techniques of mathematical physics - in particular Laplace's equation - to problems of groundwater movement. Laplace's equation had already been well developed for heat flow and fluid flow. Forchheimer extended the preexisting mathematical theory to calculations of groundwater flow. He was also the first to both mathematically and experimentally examine the features of dambreak waves in a rectangular channel (with his PhD student Armin Schoklitsch).*TIS
1962 Boris Yakovych Bukreyev (6 September 1859 – 2 October 1962) was a Russian and Soviet mathematician who worked in the areas of complex functions and differential equations.
In 1889, Bukreyev became a professor of mathematics at the University of Kiev, in Ukraine, Russian Empire. He studied Fuchsian functions of rank zero. He was interested in projective and non-Euclidean geometry. He worked on differential invariants and parameters in the theory of surfaces, being interested in the history of mathematics.*Wik
1977 Arthur Erdélyi ( December 12, 1977; October 2, 1908) studied in Brno and Prague and came to Scotland before the Second World War to avoid the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. He became a lecturer at Edinburgh and after a period in the USA he returned to Edinburgh as a Professor. He was an expert on Special Functions. He became President of the EMS in 1971. *SAU
2006 Paul Richard Halmos (March 3, 1916 – October 2, 2006) was a Hungarian-born American mathematician who made fundamental advances in the areas of probability theory, statistics, operator theory, ergodic theory, and functional analysis (in particular, Hilbert spaces). He was also recognized as a great mathematical expositor. In a series of papers reprinted in his 1962 Algebraic Logic, Halmos devised polyadic algebras, an algebraic version of first-order logic differing from the better known cylindric algebras of Alfred Tarski and his students. An elementary version of polyadic algebra is described in monadic Boolean algebra.
In addition to his original contributions to mathematics, Halmos was an unusually clear and engaging expositor of university mathematics. This was so even though Halmos arrived in the USA at 13 years of age and never lost his Hungarian accent. He chaired the American Mathematical Society committee that wrote the AMS style guide for academic mathematics, published in 1973. In 1983, he received the AMS's Steele Prize for exposition. Some of his classics were:
How to read mathematics
How to write mathematics
How to speak mathematics.
In the American Scientist 56(4): 375–389, Halmos argued that mathematics is a creative art, and that mathematicians should be seen as artists, not number crunchers. He discussed the division of the field into mathology and mathophysics, further arguing that mathematicians and painters think and work in related ways.
Halmos's 1985 "automathography" I Want to Be a Mathematician is an account of what it was like to be an academic mathematician in 20th century America. He called the book “automathography” rather than “autobiography”, because its focus is almost entirely on his life as a mathematician, not his personal life. The book contains the following quote on Halmos' view of what doing mathematics means:
“ "Don't just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?”
In these memoirs, Halmos claims to have invented the "iff" notation for the words "if and only if" and to have been the first to use the “tombstone” notation to signify the end of a proof, and this is generally agreed to be the case. The tombstone symbol ∎ (Unicode U+220E) is sometimes called a halmos. *Wik
2009 Shaun Wylie (17 January 1913 – 2 October 2009) was a British mathematician and World War II codebreaker. Wylie was born in Oxford, England. The fourth son of Sir Francis Wylie (later the first Warden of Rhodes House, Oxford) and his wife Kathleen (formerly Kelly), he was educated at the Dragon School (in Oxford) and then Winchester College. He won a scholarship to New College, Oxford where he studied mathematics and classics. In 1934, he went to study topology at Princeton University, obtaining a PhD in 1937 with Solomon Lefschetz as his supervisor. At Princeton he met fellow English mathematician Alan Turing. He became a fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1938/1939.
During World War II, Turing had been recruited to work at Bletchley Park, Britain's codebreaking centre. Turing wrote to Wylie around December 1940, who was by then teaching at Wellington College, inviting him to work at Bletchley Park. He accepted, and arrived in February 1941. He joined Turing's section, Hut 8, which was working on solving the Enigma machine as used by the Kriegsmarine. He became head of the crib subsection,[8] and allocated time on the bombe codebreaking machines. Hugh Alexander, successor to Turing as head of Hut 8, commented that "except for Turing, no-one made a bigger contribution to the success of Hut 8 than Shaun Wylie; he was astonishingly quick and resourceful and contributed to theory and practice in a number of different directions".
Wylie transferred in Autumn 1943 to work on "Tunny", a German teleprinter cipher. He married Odette Murray, a WREN in the section. In 1945, soon after the victory in Europe, Wylie demonstrated how Colossus – electronic machines used to help solve Tunny – could have been used unmodified to break the Tunny "motor wheels", a task which had been previously done by hand. While at Bletchley Park, he became president of the dramatic club. He had also played international hockey for Scotland, but according to fellow codebreaker I. J. Good, he "never mentioned any of his successes".
Wylie supervised five PhD students at Cambridge, through whom he had over 1600 "descendants" in 2021 according to the American Mathematical Society Mathematical Genealogy Project.[5] In addition he influenced the intellectual development of generations of pupils at the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys/Hills Road Sixth Form College where he taught maths (particularly statistics, with his beloved chi-squared distribution) and classical Greek and where he also produced plays (such as Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard) and supervised the school chess team. He also came out of retirement temporarily to teach Mathematics at Long Road Sixth Form College.
After retirement from teaching, Wylie was instrumental in the founding of the Liberal Democrats and in the Cambridge-based University of the Third Age and at the time of his death was preparing to read in the next Cambridge Greek Play, Aeschylus' Agamemnon. sounds like a rich full life and he lived every minute of it.]
His eldest son, the late Keith Wylie (1945–1999), a barrister, was a croquet international and open champion of Great Britain.
Shaun Wylie died on 2 October 2009, aged 96
2011 Frank Levin (19 June 1927, Dayton, Ohio, USA, 2 October 2011, Swansea, Wales) was an American mathematician who worked mainly in infinite group theory.
Frank Levin was born 19 June 1927 in Dayton, Ohio, the eldest of two children. When the younger child, Julie, was born, their father deserted the family, leaving their mother the difficult task of bringing up two children, in some considerable poverty. This was in fact the time of the great depression in America. Because Julie lacked a father, Frank was forced to be the father substitute, which he did well, so that his sister was always grateful to him. Those difficult years obviously remained with him all his life, and he was always extremely careful in spending.
Early on he showed signs of academic brilliance and at Primary School did four years in one. His undergraduate degree from Wright State in Dayton, Ohio, was interrupted in his final year at the age of 18, when he was called up for military service.
To look at, he was an unlikely candidate for a soldier, being slight of build, and entirely non-aggressive, but a soldier is what he became. He was not involved in fighting but in the occupation of Japan after the Second World War. It is difficult to imagine a milder man, but he was nevertheless promoted, a consequence of his noticing a memo, and he realised it meant he could be promoted if he applied, and so of course he did.
He returned to the United States on a navy boat, which gave him a feel for travel. And travel he later on would. Having served in the U.S. army, he was entitled to a University education. He had to repeat his interrupted year at Wright State.
He took his Ph.D. in 1955 under the supervision of Arno Jäger with his thesis titled On the Algebraic Theory of Linear Multidifferential Polynomials.
His first job was at the Ford factory, where he was given the project of calculating the characteristics of the suspension of a car, a lengthy and laborious piece of calculation. When he had completed his results, his chief looked at them and said they were completely wrong. It turned out the chief had given Frank the wrong data to begin with. "Oh well," the boss said, "Here is the right data. Just do the calculation again."
Initially he taught at the University of Kentucky. His next appointment was at Rutgers University, but for much of his tenure he was elsewhere, in Europe, and finally the faculty insisted he make up his mind to return permanently. He then got a job in Germany in Ruhr-Universität Bochum with the aid of his former supervisor Arno Jäger. In Bochum he took the advanced qualification of docent, and became a professor.
Frank liked best of all to work with other mathematicians. In total there were thirteen co-authors, *SAU
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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