~Frederick Seitz - born 100+ years ago today
The 185th day of the year; the decimal expansion of the first 185 digits of Euler's constant is prime. *Prime Curios
185 is the sum of two square numbers in two different ways: \( 13^2+ 4^2 \) and \(11^2 + 8^2 \) I'm not sure it is commonly known that this implies that these pairs can be used as the opposite sides of a quadrilateral forcing the diagonals to be perpendicular(if the sides of a quadrilateral are 13, 11, 4, 8; then the quadrilateral has perpendicular diagonals.)
That also means that 185 is the hypotenuse of four Pythagorean Triangles, (But not all primitive .)
(60, 75, 185) (111, 148, 185)(57, 176, 185) (104,153,185)
185 =the sum of five squares, 100+64+16+4+1
185 is a palindrome in base 6(505) 5*6^2 + 5.
Like all odd numbers, 185 is the difference of the squares of consecutive integers, 93^2 - 92^2 = 185, because it ends in five, it is the difference of two squares of integers that are five apart; 21^2 - 16^2 = 185
and from Jim Wilder @wilderlab An equation for July 4th: 7⁴ = 2401 = (2 + 4 + 0 + 1)⁴ And a followup from World Observer@WKryst2011 points out that there are only two other such year dates. (student's should find both)
See more Math Facts for every year date here.
1054 The Crab Nebula supernova is recorded in China and Japan. *VFR The Crab Nebula (catalogue designations M1, NGC 1952, Taurus A) is a supernova remnant and pulsar wind nebula in the constellation of Taurus. Corresponding to a bright supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054, the nebula was observed later by John Bevis in 1731. *Wik
1662 “By and by comes Mr. Cooper ... of whom I entend to learn Mathematiques; and so begin with him today ... . After an hour’s being with him at Arithmetique, my first attempt being to learn the Multiplication table, then we parted till tomorrow.” Samuel Pepys, in his diary....At the time he was something like a modern Secretary of the Navy. *VFR
He was an English diarist and naval administrator. He served as administrator of the Royal Navy and Member of Parliament, but is most remembered today for the diary he kept for almost a decade. Though he had no maritime experience, Pepys rose to be the Chief Secretary to the Admiralty under both King Charles II and King James II through patronage, diligence, and his talent for administration. His influence and reforms at the Admiralty were important in the early professionalization of the Royal Navy. *Wik
1744 Euler wrote Christian Goldbach that he has finished his book Introductio in analysin infinitorum (Lausanne 1748). In this work the trigonometric and logarithmic functions were first treated in their modern form. *VFR
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| Thanks to Alan Leaver |
1802 The United States Military Academy at West Point established by act of congress earlier in the year opened on July 4. This school was the first engineering school in the U.S. Charles Davies, a noted textbook writer, taught there.*VFR Before 1812 it was conducted as an apprentice school for military engineers and, in effect, as the first U.S. school of engineering.
1819 William Herschel writes to his sister, Caroline, "Lina, there is a great comet. I want you to come and assist me. Come to dine and spend the day here.... we shall have time to prepare maps and telescopes. I saw it's situation last night, it has a long tail." He was eighty years old at the time, and he was still at work when he died, two years later. *Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way
After her brother died in 1822, Caroline was grief-stricken and moved back to Hanover, Germany, continuing her astronomical studies to verify and confirm William's findings and producing a catalogue of nebulae to assist her nephew John Herschel in his work. Her nephew thought highly of her, in fact he was quoted in 1832 as saying “She runs about the town with me and skips up her two flights of stairs as wonderfully fresh at least as some folks I could name who are not a fourth of her age… In the morning till eleven or twelve she is dull and weary, but as the day advances she gains life, and is quite ‘fresh and funny’ at ten or eleven p.m. and sings old rhymes, nay, even dances to the great delight of all who see her." John Herschel spent long periods with his aunt during the vacations and was greatly influenced by Caroline. She saw him educated at Cambridge, make a name for himself as a mathematician, become elected to the Royal Society, join his father in research in astronomy and be awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society for his achievements. Caroline continued to assist William with his observations but her status had greatly improved from the housekeeper she had been in her young days. She was the guest of Maskelyne at the Royal Observatory in 1799 and a guest of members of the Royal Family at various times in 1816, 1817 and 1818. However, her observations were hampered by the architecture in Hanover, and she spent most of her time working on the catalogue. In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society presented her with their Gold Medal for this work—no woman would be awarded it again until Vera Rubin in 1996. *Wik
1847 lithograph of Caroline Herschel around 97 years of age
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1826 Thomas Jefferson , principal author of the Declaration of Independence dies on U.S. Independence day. (See Date under Deaths) He was buried at his home, Monticello. He wrote his own epitaph: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, of the statute of Virginia for religious freedom, and father of the University of Virginia.” *VFR I find it striking that when he lists his accomplishments, being President of the US did not make his top three.
1843 Liouville began an address to the Academy of Sciences with the words: “I hope to interest the Academy in announcing [that in] the papers of Evariste Galois I have found a solution, as precise as it is profound, of this beautiful problem: whether or not it [the general equation of fifth degree] is solvable by radicals.” This work of Galois was published in 1846. *VFR
1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, mathematics teacher at Oxford, went boating on the Isis, a tributary of the Thames, with the three daughters of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford. He was especially fond of Alice Liddell, then ten, and it was mainly for her that he began the story of another Alice’s tumble down a rabbit hole. The work was published exactly three years later as Alice’s Adventures under Ground under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, with the famous illustrations by John Tenniel (see note). This work is a favorite of mathematicians, so if you haven’t read it recently, you should. See 26 November 1864. [Note: "When Charles Dodgson – more widely known as Lewis Carroll – made drawings in the early 1960s for his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he was disappointed with the results. He employed cartoonist John Tenniel to create the now-famous illustrations, while his original ideas were consigned to the archive of Christ Church College, Oxford, where he worked as a lecturer in mathematics until his death in 1898. TATE ETC. sent a cultural historian to view Dodgson’s rarely seen drawings which feature in Tate Liverpool’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ exhibition. "
1874 The Eads Bridge is a combined road and railway bridge over the Mississippi River connecting the cities of St. Louis, Missouri and East St. Louis, Illinois. It is located on the St. Louis riverfront between Laclede's Landing, to the north, and the grounds of the Gateway Arch, to the south. The bridge is named for its designer and builder, James Buchanan Eads. Work on the bridge began in 1867.
The Eads Bridge, a was ready to be opened after seven years of construction on July 4, 1874. The celebration included a fifteen-car train filled with 500 dignitaries pulled by three locomotives that departed from the St. Louis, Vandalia, and Terre Haute Railroad station in East St. Louis. Locomotives were provided by the Illinois Central Railroad and the Vandalia line (a Pennsylvania Railroad subsidiary). The route crossed the Eads Bridge and traveled through the tunnel to Mill Creek Valley and then returned.
Locomotive smoke is a concern in tunnels, especially passenger tunnels. Specially designed coke-burning “smoke-consuming engines” from the Baldwin Locomotive Works had yet to be ordered. News reports tell of passengers coughing and gasping for breath. Construction of the tunnel was not yet complete. Only one of the two tracks was available and ventilation was not yet arranged.
The Bridge is now the oldest bridge crossing the Mississippi river.
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| *LibraryofCongress |
1934 Leo Szilard patented the chain-reaction design for the atomic bomb.
1943 The 1943 Gibraltar Liberator AL523 crash was an aircraft crash that resulted in the death of General Władysław Sikorski, the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army and Prime Minister of the Polish government-in-exile. Sikorski's Liberator II crashed off Gibraltar almost immediately after takeoff on 4 July 1943. An estimated sixteen people died, including many other senior Polish military leaders. The plane's pilot was the only survivor. Included in the casulties was Zofia Lesniowka, the first commandant of the Polish Women's Auxiliary Service, the General's Daughter.
The crash was ruled to have been an accident, but Sikorski's death remains an unsolved mystery. The crash marked a turning point for Polish influence on their Anglo-American allies in World War II.
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| *CHM |
1971 Michael S. Hart posts the first e-book, a copy of the United States Declaration of Independence, on the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign's mainframe computer, the origin of Project Gutenberg. *wik
1997 Mars Pathfinder lands on the surface of Mars. Launched on December 4, 1996 by NASA aboard a Delta II booster a month after the Mars Global Surveyor was launched, it landed on July 4, 1997 on Mars's Ares Vallis, in a region called Chryse Planitia in the Oxia Palus quadrangle. The lander then opened, exposing the rover which conducted many experiments on the Martian surface. *Wik
2014 U S Independence day occurs on Friday. In what year will it next appear on a Friday? And the time after that?
1868 Henrietta Swan Leavitt (July 4, 1868 – December 12, 1921) American astronomer known for her discovery of the relationship between period and luminosity in Cepheid variables, pulsating stars that vary regularly in brightness in periods ranging from a few days to several months. Leavitt's greatest discovery came from her study of 1777 variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. She determined the periods of 25 Cepheid variables and in 1912 announced what has since become known as the famous Period-Luminosity relation: "since the variables are probably nearly the same distance from the earth, their periods are apparently associated with their actual emission of light, as determined by their mass, density, and surface brightness." Today the Period-Luminosity relation is used to calculate the distances of galaxies.*TIS
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| *Wik |
1906 Dan Rutherford (4 July 1906 in Stirling, Scotland - 9 Nov 1966 in St Andrews, Fife, Scotland)studied at St Andrews and Amsterdam. He spent most of his career in St Andrews becoming Gregory Professor of Applied Mathematics. In spite of this title most of his research was in pure mathematics and in particular in algebra. He became President of the EMS in 1940 and 1963. *SAU
1911 Frederick Seitz (July 4, 1911 – March 2, 2008) American physicist who made fundamental contributions to the theory of solids, nuclear physics, fluorescence, and crystals. As Eugene Wigner's first doctoral student, late in 1932, Seitz developed the cellular method of deriving solid-state wave functions. The widespread application of this Wigner-Seitz method to the understanding of metals is regarded as the catalyst for the formation of the field of solid-state physics in the U.S. His subsequent research focused on the theory and properties of crystals. He studied dislocations and imperfections in crystal structures, the effect of irradiation on crystals, and the process of diffusion (the movement of atoms or particles caused by random collision) in crystalline materials.*TIS
1936 Birthday of Guy Otttewel, writer of the eclipse book Understanding Eclipses and many other astronomical publications. *NSEC
1945 John Allen Paulos (July 4, 1945 - )born in Denver, Colorado. Currently a professor at Temple University, he is the author of the popular book Innumeracy. *VFR American mathematician and author of books encouraging people to make sense of the statistics and figures that inform their lives. He represents that mathematics as a subject that is easy to learn and understand. Paulos argues that ignorance of basic mathematical concepts discourages critical thinking and results in costly mistakes and misguided decisions by both political leaders and ordinary people in their everyday lives.*TIS
In 1728 Grandi published Flores geometrici a work in which he defines the clelie curve. He named the curve after Countess Clelia Borromeo and dedicated his book to her. If the longitude and colatitude of a point P on a sphere is denoted by θ and φ and if P moves so that θ = m φ, where m is a constant, then the locus of P is a clelie. Grandi also applied the term "clelies" to the curves determined by certain trigonometric equations involving the sine function
a sin θ = b sin mφ
a sin θ = a - b sin mφ
Grandi also worked on hydraulics and was involved with a number of projects such as ones to drain the Chiana Valley and the Pontine Marshes. He also published a number of works on mechanics and astronomy. His practical work on mechanics included experimenting with a steam engine. *SAU
1901 Peter Guthrie Tait (28 April 1831 – 4 July 1901) Scottish physicist and mathematician who helped develop quaternions, an advanced algebra that gave rise to vector analysis and was instrumental in the development of modern mathematical physics.*TIS Tait was a fellow-pupil of Maxwell at Edinburgh Academy and both of them went on to study at Edinburgh University and Cambridge. Tait became Professor of Mathematics at Queen's College Belfast and then moved to the Chair of Natural Philosophy at Edinburgh which he occupied for more than 40 years. With his collaborations with Maxwell, Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Hamilton he made important contributions in both mathematics and physics. He became one of the first honorary members of the EMS in 1883. *SAU
1910 Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, (14 March 1835 - 4 July 1910) Italian astronomer who is remembered for his observations of Mars over seven oppositions and named the "seas" and "continents". In 1877, he saw on the surface of the planet Mars the markings that he called canali (channels), later misinterpreted as "canals." He made extensive studies, both observational and theoretical, of comets, determining from the shapes of their tails that there was a repulsive force from the sun. He showed that meteor swarms travel through space in cometary orbits. He explained the regular meteor showers as the result of the dissolution of comets and proved it for the Perseids. He suggested that Mercury and Venus rotate on their axes, discovered the asteroid Hesperia (1861) and was a major observer of double stars.*TIS
1934 Marie Marja Sklodowska Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish-born French chemist and physicist. In 1898, her celebrated experiments on uranium minerals led to discovery of two new elements. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie (subsequently redefined as the emission of 3.7 x 1010 alpha particles per sec.) With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was then sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her pioneering work before the need for protection was known.*TIS
1962 Thomas Jefferson Jackson See (19 Feb 1866 in Montgomery City, Missouri - 4 July 1962 in Oakland, California, USA) was an U S astronomer who studied in the University of Missouri and in Berlin. He fell out with his astronomical colleagues and was eventually banned from publishing. He spend the last part of his life arguing against Einstein's Theory of Relativity. *SAU
1986 Oscar Zariski (April 24, 1899 – July 4, 1986) His work was on foundations of algebraic geometry using algebraic methods. He worked on the theory of normal varieties, local uniformisation and the reduction of singularities of algebraic varieties.*SAU
1987 Bengt Strömgren (21 Jan 1908; 4 Jul 1987) Bengt (Georg Daniel) Strömgren was a Danish astrophysicist who pioneered the present-day knowledge of the gas clouds in space. Researching for his theory of the ionized gas clouds around hot stars, he found relations between the gas density, the luminosity of the star, and the size of the "Strömgren sphere" of ionized hydrogen around it. He surveyed such H II regions in the Galaxy, and he also did important work on stellar atmospheres and ionization in stars. *TIS
2002 Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (5 March 1915 in Paris – 4 July 2002 in Paris) was a French mathematician. He pioneered the theory of distributions, which gives a well-defined meaning to objects such as the Dirac delta function. He was awarded the Fields medal in 1950 for his work (developing the theory of distributions, a new notion of generalized functions motivated by the Dirac delta-function of theoretical physics). (Harald Bohr presented the Fields Medal to Schwartz at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Harvard).
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
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