On This Day in Math - June 1

 

There are certainly people who regard √2

as something perfectly obvious but jib at √-1.

This is because they think they can visualise 

the former as something in physical space 

but not the latter. 

Actually √-1 is a much simpler concept. 

~Edward Titchmarsh

The 152nd day of the year; the eighth prime number is 19, and 8 x 19 = 152.... 152 is also the largest known even number that can be expressed as the sum of two primes in exactly four ways. (Students should find all four ways. And how many ways can 152 be expressed as the sum of two odd numbers only one of which is prime?)

152 is a refactorable number since it is divisible by the total number of divisors (8) it has, and in base 10 it is divisible by the sum of its digits(8), making it a Niven number.

There are 152  mm tick marks on a six-inch ruler.

152 is the smallest number you can make as the sum of two distinct odd primes cubed.

152 is the sum of four consecutive primes, starting with 31.

the digits 152 occur beginning at the digit of e, that is the 152nd prime number (881).

---

EVENTS

1495 – A monk, John Cor, records the first known batch of Scotch whisky. *@eventsonthisday 

("Can I get an Amen?")

---

1631 Pierre de Fermat married Louise de Long (his mother’s cousin), who gave him three sons. *VFR One of them (Samuel) edited and published his father’s mathematical letters and papers in 1679. It was in these publications that Samuel revealed the marginal note in his father's copy of Diophantus's Arithmetica which became known to the world as Fermat’s Last Theorem.

---

1639 At the request of his dying mentor, the acclaimed mathematician, astronomer, and polymath Peter Krüger, Johannes Hevelius meticulously observed the solar eclipse, then decided to dedicate the rest of his life to understanding the cosmos. *Maria Popova at brainpickings.org

Crüger's Azimuthal Quadrant, completed by Johannes Hevelius 1644 (the observer is Hevelius) *Wik

---

1658 Pascal posed six questions related to the cycloid as challenge problems. They dealt with area, volume of solids of revolution, and center of gravity. See Scripta Mathematica, 26(1963), 297– 298 for a list of the problems.*VFR
Pascal used the pseudonym Amos Dettonville, which is an anagram of the name Louis de Montalt, under which he wrote his “letters provinciales”. Wren, Huygens, and de Sleuse gave partial solutions.

The famous toothache had occurred earlier that year and caused him to return to mathematics and to study the cycloid. 

In 1654, late in the evening Pascal experienced a religious ecstasy that called him to give up his intermittent interest in mathematics and to devote his time to religious contemplation. For years he devoted no time to mathematics. Then one night, unable to sleep because of an abscessed tooth, Pascal began to think about some problems about the cycloid. His pain disappeared and he interpreted this as a sign that God was pleased by his mathematical studies. In a brief time he completed the investigation of the cycloid. Then he established a contest about the cycloid with himself and Roberval as the judges

 Pascal answered all six questions in publications the next year under the same pseudonym. (The Early Mathematical Manuscripts of Leibniz By Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, J. M. Child)

There is a famous statue by Pajou in the Louvre of Pascal in which he is contemplating the Roulette (cycloid). (And in this photo, I am contemplating Pascal contemplating the roulette)

*PatB

---

1709 The Rev. John Colson becomes the first headmaster of Sir Joseph Williamson's Free Mathematical School. He held the position until he was elected Lucasian Professor on March 1, of 1739(1740 NS). *Correspondence of Sir Isaac Newton and Professor Cotes, pg 2

---

1761 The existence of an atmosphere on Venus was concluded by Rusian Polymath Mikhail Lomonosov on the basis of his observation of the transit of Venus of 1761 from the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. He used a two-lens achromat refractor and a weak solar filter (smoked glass) and reported seeing a bump or bulge of light ("Lomonosov's arc") off the solar disc as Venus began to exit the Sun. Lomonosov attributed that effect to refraction of solar rays through an atmosphere; he also reported the appearance of a sliver around the part of Venus that had just entered the Sun's disk during the initial phase of transit. *Wik

---

1809 The word Tangram emerged in American vocabulary about this time. According to various dictionaries, the word may be derived from a Chinese word tang, or it may be derived from the obsolete English word trangam, meaning a trinket or a gimcrack. Merriam-Webster says the word is of unknown origin.

Trangam is found in a 1658 dictionary.

On June 1, 1809, the American Citizen reported, “Vast numbers of those ‘tangrams and gimcracks’ are piled up in the office, of every shape and size, making it a great toy shop. [Joel S. Berson]

A classified advertisement in the Franklin Gazette of Feb. 24, 1818, offers “Chinese Tangrams,” which were probably puzzles [Bill Mullins].

According to Wikipedia and this web page, the word tangram was coined by Dr. Thomas Hill in 1848 for his book Geometrical Puzzles for the Young. [Perhaps this is the first use of the word with its modern meaning.] According to the same web page, the device was invented between 1796 and 1802 in China by Yang-cho-chu-shih, who published the book Ch'i ch'iao t'u (Pictures using seven clever pieces). * Jeff Miller

---

In 1869, Thomas Edison of Boston, Mass., received his first patent. It was for an "electrographic vote recorder." The device was the first of its kind, and would enable a legislator to register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to the right or left. His application was executed on 13 Nov 1868 and submitted to the U.S. Patent Office on 28 Nov 1868 (No. 90646).   Edison's invention stirred little interest and was never manufactured.

---

1889 Charles P. Steinmetz arrived in New York City, having fled Breslau because of his socialist views. He went to work for the Eickenmeyer Dynamo Machine Company, later General Electric, as an electrical engineer. In spite of a natural inclination to mathematics, circumstances forced him to become the most distinguished and highest paid electrical engineer in the world. [A Century of Mathematics in America, Part I, p. 14]. *VFR

Steinmetz is the very short man in the center.
Einstein to his right.

---

1890 The first census compiled by machine was started. The previous census took nearly a decade to compute. The 1890 census recorded the U.S. population at 62,979,766. See 8 January 1889. [Kane, p. 169] *VFR ... The 2010 census reported the population of the USA as 308,745,538.  (*****NOTE... 

@thepainterflynn

 gives this date as the first use of "Hollerith's tabulating machine to count census returns." Wikipedia says the census for 1990 BEGAN on June 2, 1990, and took six years to complete.This last fact is confirmed by "Report of the Commissioner of Labor in Charge of The Eleventh Census to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ending June 30, 1895"  saying the census would end "during the present calendar year. ... " )

After using census data in many years of teaching AP stats, I had a chance to actually work on the 2020 census as an enumerator. All I can say is quote from Billy Currington's country song, " Beer is Good, God is Great, and people are crazy!"

1890 Hollerith census card with fields coded

---

1912 The famous problem of the division of coconuts with leftovers going to a monkey seems to have first been printed in English around this date, in School Science and Mathematics by N. Anning. The problem is known to have existed back to the 8th century when Mahavira wrote the recreational math book: Ganita-sara-sangraha. *Singmaster

 In 1926 Saturday Evening Post prints "Coconuts" story by Ben Ames Williams with problem of five men and a monkey and a pile of coconuts. In the following week 2000 letters to the Post demand to know the answer. Editor-in-chief Horace Latimore sent Williams an emphatic telegram, "FOR THE LOVE OF MIKE, HOW MANY COCONUTS? HELL POPPING AROUND HERE."

For those who seek the problem:  see this date 

---

1936 Einstein first, and perhaps only, paper ever subjected to peer review. It would be rejected, with good reason, and he would not take it well. The Physical Review received Einstein’s submission on 1 June 1936, according to the journal’s logbook. Tate returned the manuscript to Einstein on 23 July with a critical review and the mild request that he “would be glad to have [Einstein’s] reaction to the various comments and criticisms the referee has made.” Einstein wrote back on 27 July in high dudgeon, withdrawing the paper and dismissing out of hand the referee’s comments. In the paper it seems Einstein thought he had a proof that gravity waves, something of his own creation, could not exist. *Physics Today

---

1944 First COLOSSUS Mark II works.
The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to help read encrypted German messages during World War II. They used vacuum tubes (thermionic valves) to perform the calculations.
Colossus was designed by engineer Tommy Flowers with input from Harry Fensom, Allen Coombs, Sid Broadhurst and Bill Chandler at the Post Office Research Station, Dollis Hill to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at Bletchley Park. The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was operational at Bletchley Park by February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark 2 first worked on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Normandy Landings. Ten Colossi were in use by the end of the war.   The Colossus was used to find possible key combinations for the Lorenz machines – rather than decrypting an intercepted message in its entirety.
In spite of the destruction of the Colossus hardware and blueprints as part of the effort to maintain a project secrecy that was kept up into the 1970s—a secrecy that deprived some of the Colossus creators of credit for their pioneering advancements in electronic digital computing during their lifetimes—a functional replica of a Colossus computer was completed in 2007. *Wik

---

In 1947, the Doomsday Clock appeared for the first time, as the fourth quadrant of a clock face with its hands at 7 min.  to midnight. It was the background image on the cover of the June issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. From then to the present, the Doomsday Clock image has been on the cover of the Bulletin, though the hands over the years have been shown moving forward or back to conveyy how close humanity is to catastrophic destruction. Midnight represents Doomsday. The closest approach, two minutes to midnight began on the Sep 1953 cover. Russia's first hydrogen bomb test the previous month (12 Aug 1953) within nine months of an American H-bomb test (1 Nov 1952). In  Dec 1991, the clock was set at 17 min. to midnight marking the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

The Bulletin has reset the minute hand on the Doomsday Clock 25 times since its debut in 1947, most recently in 2023 when we moved it from 100 seconds to midnight to 90 seconds to midnight. 

---

1957 The June issue of Mad Magazine carried, among several other unusual features, the first published work of 19 year old Case Western Reserve Freshman, Donald Knuth. His article developed the "Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures". The base of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm.  Google's calculator and Wolfram Alpha can perform conversions between potrzebies and other units.*Wik

Hat Tip to *Hania Uscka-Wehlou sent this additional information: I was intrigued by the Polish word "potrzebie" (funnily, not in its basic form [nominative]: "potrzeba", but in locative) and I have found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potrzebie.

  

Just wondering what percent of readers actually ever read a Mad Magazine,

---

In 1965, A. Penzias and R. Wilson detected a 3 degree kelvin primordial background radiation using a horn reflector antenna built for radio astronomy. The Big Bang description of the origin of the universe took place 15 to 20 billion years ago in an explosion from a hot dense state. The high energy radiation produced when the universe was very young and very hot would have been absorbed and degraded as the universe expanded and cooled. The microwave background radiation first observed by Penzias and Wilson is thought to be a relic of this very early state, when the universe was only about a million years old. The uniformity of microwave background indicates that the universe was homogeneous until it was a few million years old.*TIS

---

1966 Surveyor I was launched. It was the first American spacecraft to make a soft landing on the Moon. Curiously, the word “spaceship” was defined by the 1958 edition of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary as “An imaginary aircraft of the future for interplanetary travel outside the earth’s atmosphere.” *VFR

---

2003  Jean-Pierre Serre became the first recipient of the Abel Prize. The ceremony was held at the Abel Monument in Slottsparken, Oslo.

BIRTHS

1796 Nicolas-Leonard Sadi Carnot, (1 June 1796 — 24 August 1832) was a French physicist. He became a captain of engineers in the army, and spent much of his life investigating the design of steam engines. His book Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824) contained a theorem which says that a maximum efficiency of heat engine can be obtained by a reversible engine, and that efficiency depends only on the temperatures of the hot and the cool sources of the engine. This theorem played an essential role for the subsequent development of thermodynamics. It was written to promote the construction of steam engines and other heat engines in France, whose industrial development was lagging behind England's. *TIS The name Carnot is listed among the seventy-two names of French scientists, engineers and other notable people On the Eiffel Tower, however it honors the father of Sadi Carnot, Lazare Nicholas Marguerite Carnot.

---

1843 Henry Faulds (1 Jun 1843, 19 Mar 1930 at age 86) Scottish physician who, from 1873, became a missionary in Japan, where he worked as a surgeon superintendent at a Tokyo hospital, taught at the local univeristy, and founded the Tokyo Institute for the Blind. In the late 1870s, his attention was drawn to fingerprints of ancient potters remaining on their work that he helped unearth at an archaeological dig site in Japan. He commenced a study of fingerprints, and became convinced that each individual had a unique pattern. He corresponded on the subject with Charles Darwin, and published a paper about his ideas in Nature (28 Oct 1880). When he returned to Britain in 1886, he unsuccessfully offered his fingerprinting identification scheme for forensic uses to Scotland Yard. Undeserved confusion on priority for the discovery with Francis Galton and Sir William J. Herschel lasted until 1917. *TIS

---

1851 Edwin Bailey Elliott (1 June 1851, Oxford, England - 21 July 1937 in Oxford, England)After outstanding achievements at university, Elliott became a Fellow and Mathematical Tutor of Queen's College, Oxford, in 1874.
In addition to his Fellowship at Queen's College, Elliott was appointed a lecturer in mathematics at Corpus Christi College in Oxford in 1884. These appointments came to an end in 1892 when Elliott became the first Waynflete professor of Pure Mathematics. This chair was named after William of Waynflete, the English lord chancellor and bishop of Winchester who founded Magdalen College in the 15th century. The Waynflete chair came with a Fellowship at Magdalen College so Elliott was again attached to his old College. One year after being appointed to the Waynflete Chair of Pure Mathematics, Elliot married Charlotte Amelia Mawer.
Elliott held the Waynflete chair for 29 years until his retirement in 1921. During this time he was much involved with the London Mathematical Society, being President of the Society from 1896 to 1898. A few years before this, in 1891, he had been honoured by being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. As Chaundy writes-
Elliott's mathematical life circulated round the twin foci of Oxford and London. Besides his work in formal teaching and lecturing at Oxford, he was one of the founders (1888) of the Oxford Mathematical Society, its first secretary, and later its president.
His mathematical work included algebra, algebraic geometry, synthetic geometry, elliptic functions and the theory of convergence. However his most important contribution was the book An introduction to the algebra of quantics which was first published in 1895. This work was a major contribution to invariant theory. *SAU

---

1866 Charles Benedict Davenport (1 Jun 1866, 18 Feb 1944 at age 77) American zoologist who contributed substantially to the study of eugenics (the improvement of populations through breeding) and heredity and who pioneered the use of statistical techniques in biological research. Partly as a result of breeding experiments with chickens and canaries, he was one of the first, soon after 1902, to recognize the validity of the newly discovered Mendelian theory of heredity. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), he compiled evidence concerning the inheritance of human traits, on the basis of which he argued that the application of genetic principles would improve the human race. These data were at the heart of his lifelong promotion of eugenics, though he muddled science with social philosophy. *TIS

---

1868  Annie Louise MacKinnon Fitch (June 1, 1868 – September 12, 1940) was a Canadian-born American mathematician who worked with Felix Klein and became a professor of mathematics at Wells College. She was the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate at an American university.

She graduated in 1889, and remained at the University of Kansas for graduate study in mathematics, becoming the third mathematics graduate student at the university and the first woman. She earned a master's degree in 1891, remaining one more year at the university to work there with Henry Byron Newson.

In 1892, MacKinnon transferred to Cornell University. She finished her doctorate there in 1894, supported as an Erastus Brooks fellow. Her dissertation, Concomitant Binary Forms in Terms of the Roots, was supervised by James Edward Oliver, and also thanked James McMahon as a faculty mentor. This made her the third woman to earn a mathematics doctorate at an American university, following Winifred Edgerton Merrill in 1886 at Columbia University in 1886 and Ida Martha Metcalf at Cornell in 1893.

MacKinnon taught high school mathematics in Lawrence, Kansas from 1890 to 1892. After her return from Europe in 1896, she became professor of mathematics at Wells College, a women's college in Aurora, New York; she was the only mathematician on the faculty. She also served as registrar for the college for 1900–1901.

In 1901, MacKinnon married Edward Fitch, an American classics scholar who had been at Göttingen at roughly the same time as MacKinnon, and later taught at Hamilton College. After marrying, she gave up her mathematical career.

She died on September 12, 1940, in Clinton, New York. A scholarship in mathematics at Hamilton College was established in her name by her husband.

---

1899 Edward Charles Titchmarsh (1 June 1899 in Newbury, -  died 18 January 1963 at Oxford) English mathematician whose contributions to analysis placed him in the forefront of his profession. His contributions helped resolve the differences between the general theory of quantum mechanics and the methods used to solve particular problems in quantum theory. All Titchmarsh's work is in analysis. His early studies were on Fourier series, Fourier integrals, functions of a complex variable, integral equations and the Riemann zeta function. From 1939, Titchmarsh concentrated on the theory of series expansions of eigenfunctions of differential equations, work which helped to resolve problems in quantum mechanics. His work on this topic occupied him for the last 25 years of his life. *TIS

---

DEATHS

1815  James Gillray, a British caricaturist and etcher, died June 1, 1815, at age 58.  In the opinion of many modern political cartoonists, Gillray was the father of their craft,  outdistancing other worthy candidates such as William Hogarth and George Cruickshank by his composition, his satirical wit, and his skill at portraiture.  His primary targets were the Royal family (that of King George III), political figures, the excesses of the British peerage, and Napoleon, who crowned himself Emperor when Gillray was at the height of his powers. *Linda Hall Org

Image:  Detail of the laughing gas demonstration depicted in the fifth image, caricaturing (right to left) Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford; Humphry Davy; Thomas Garnett or James Watt; and James Coxe Hippisley (npg.uk.org)

---

1861 Kurt Hensel  (29 December 1861 – 1 June 1941) He is best known for his work on p-adic numbers. *VFR  First described by Kurt Hensel in 1897, the p-adic numbers were motivated primarily by an attempt to bring the ideas and techniques of power series methods into number theory. Their influence now extends far beyond this. For example, the field of p-adic analysis essentially provides an alternative form of calculus.

---

1867 Karl George Christian von Staudt (January 24, 1798 – June 1, 1867) German mathematician who developed the first complete theory of imaginary points, lines, and planes in projective geometry. His early work was on determining the orbit of a comet and, based on this work, he received his doctorate. He showed how to construct a regular inscribed polygon of 17 sides using only compasses. He turned to projective geometry and Bernoulli numbers. An important work on projective geometry, Geometrie der Lage was published in 1847. It was the first work to completely free projective geometry from any metrical basis. He also gave a geometric solution to quadratic equations.*TIS

---

1918 Eduardo Torroja Caballe (February 1, 1847 – June 1, 1918) was a Spaniard mathematician born in the city of Tarragona, Spain. His father was Juan Torroja, a Professor of Geography and History. He continued his studies at Complutense University, where he obtained the degrees of Bachelor of Science (1864), Masters of Science (1866), Architect (1869) and Doctor of Science (1873) in Mathematics.
Very early in his studies he became a disciple of Karl Georg Christian von Staudt (who also died on this same date), whose ideas of Geometry he embraced and promoted among his fellow mathematicians for the rest of his life. The strong presence of Geometry in Spain's mathematical curriculum, even to this day, can be traced back to Torroja's influence. *Wik

---

1997  Robert Serber (March 14, 1909 – June 1, 1997) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project. He gave lectures (5-14 Apr 1943) at Los Alamos, on the design and construction of atomic bombs as background for the Manhattan Project. Notes were typed and mimeographed as The Los Alamos Primer, technical report LA-1, given to scientists newly arriving at the top-secret laboratory. Serber coined the code-names of the three bomb designs: “Little Boy” (uranium gun), “Thin Man” (plutonium gun), and “Fat Man” (plutonium implosion). He helped assemble atomic bombs on Tinian Island that were dropped on Japan. He was part of the first American team visiting to assess their damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After WW II, he returned to academia, and by 1951 was a professor of physics at Columbia University. *TIS

---

2006 Shokichi Iyanaga (April 2, 1906 – June 1, 2006) was a Japanese mathematician. Iyanaga published many papers which arose through several courses such as algebraic topology, functional analysis, and geometry, which he taught. He became Professor at the University of Tokyo in 1942. It was during World War II. Towards the end of the war, many Japanese cities were bombarded and he had to find refuge in the countryside. He was busy in editing textbooks from primary and secondary schools and he continued to give courses and organise seminars.*Wik

---

*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 31

    

Geometry is the science of 

correct reasoning on incorrect figures.

~George Polya

The 151st Day of the Year

151 is the larger of a pair of twin primes

The 151st day of the year; The smallest prime that begins a 3-run of sums of 5 consecutive primes: 151 + 157 + 163 + 167 + 173 = 811; and 811 + 821 + 823 + 827 + 829 = 4111; and 4111 + 4127 + 4129 + 4133 + 4139 = 20639. *Prime Curios... Can you find the smallest 4-run example?

151 is the 36th prime number, and a Palindromic Prime. Did I ever mention that palindrome is drawn almost directly from an Ancient Greek word that literally means "running back again." First used in English in 1636 in "Camdon's Remains Epitaths".

151 is also the mean (and median) of the first five three digit palindromic primes, 101, 131, 151, 181, 191

Thanks to Derek Orr, who also pointed out that any day in May (in non-leap year) 5/d is such that 5! + d = year day, so today, 5/31, is 5!+31=151.

151 is an undulating palindrome in base 3 (12121)

Thanks to Derek Orr, who also pointed out that any day in May (in non-leap year) 5/d is such that 5! + d = year day

In 1927 Babe Ruth hit 60 Home Runs, a long lasting record. He hit them in 151 games.

And from base to torch, Lady Liberty is 151 ft tall.

$151 is the largest prime amount you can make with three distinct US bank notes.

---

EVENTS

1503 Copernicus received a doctoral degree in canon law from the University of Ferrara. *VFR

---

1676 Antonie van Leeuwenhoek describes the little animals he sees through a microscope. "The 31th of May, I perceived in the same water more of those Animals, as also some that were somewhat bigger. And I imagine, that [ten hundred thousand] of these little Creatures do not equal an ordinary grain of Sand in bigness: And comparing them with a Cheese-mite (which may be seen to move with the naked eye) I make the proportion of one of these small Water-creatures to a Cheese-mite, to be like that of a Bee to a Horse: For, the circumference of one of these little Animals in water, is not so big as the thickness of a hair in a Cheese-mite." *The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1957), Vol. 2, 75.

---

1753 A View of the Relation between the Celebrated. Dr. Halley's Tables, and the Notions of Mr. De Buffon, for Establishing a Rule for the Probable Duration of the Life of Man; By Mr. William Kersseboom, of the Hague. Translated from the French, by James Parsons, M. D. and F. R. S. read by the Royal Society on May 31.  

 Halley made two forays into financial economics, demography, and actuarial science. The second work (1705,1717) was on compound interest. He derived formulae for approximating the annual percentage rate of interest implicit in financial transactions and annuities. His first contribution (1693) was seminal, Halley developed the first life table based on sound demographic data; and he discussed several applications of his life table, including calculations of life contingencies. Halley obtained demographic data for Breslau, a city in Silesia which is now the Polish city Wroclaw. Breslau kept detailed records of births, deaths, and the ages of people when they died. In comparison, when John Graunt (1620-1674) published his famous demographic work (1662), ages of deceased people were not recorded in London and would not be recorded until the 18th century.

---

1764 “I went this far with him: ‘Sir, allow me to ask you one question. If the Church should say to you, ‘two and three make ten,’ what would you do? ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I should believe it, and I should count like this: one, two, three, four, ten.’ I was now fully satisfied.” From Boswell’s Journal as quoted by J. Gallian, Contemporary Abstract Algebra, p. 43. *VFR  (Now you know, It was Boswell who invented Base Five... )

---

1780 Laplace’s “Memoir on Probability” read to the Academy of Sciences on this date.  This and his “Memoir on the Probability of events” are among the most important and the most difficult works in the early history of mathematical probability, and together they are the are the most influential 18th Century on the use of probability in inference. The History of Statistics, S. M. Stigler  (A treasure of a book.)

---

1790 US Copyright law passed. *VFR  the first copyright law is enacted under the new United States Constitution. Modeled off Britain's Statute of Anne, the new law is relatively limited in scope, protecting books, maps, and charts for only fourteen years with a renewal period of another fourteen years.

---

1796 Gauss records in his diary a prime number theorem conjecture. Clifford Pickover, in “The Math Book”, points out that 1796 was “an auspicious year for Gauss, when his ideas gushed like a fountain from a fire hose.” In addition to the construction of the 17-gon in March, and the prime number theorem conjecture, he proved that every positive number could be expressed as the sum of (at most) three triangular numbers in July, and another about solutions of polynomials in October.
On May 31 he conjectured that π(n), the number of primes less than n is approximated (for large n) by the area under the logarithmic integral (from 2 to n I assume).
Based on the tables by Anton Felkel and Jurij Vega, Adrien-Marie Legendre conjectured in the same year that π(x) is approximated by the function x/(ln(x)-1.08),. Gauss considered the same question and he came up with his own approximating function, the logarithmic integral li(x), although he did not publish his results. Both Legendre's and Gauss' formulas imply the same conjectured asymptotic equivalence of π(x) = x / ln(x), although Gauss' approximation is closer in terms of the differences instead of quotients.
Most teachers tell the story of Gauss as a nine-year old summing the digits from 1 to 100 in his head. Here is another nice Gauss anecdote about his ability to do mental calculations: Once, when asked how he had been able to predict the trajectory of Ceres with such accuracy he replied, "I used logarithms." The questioner then wanted to know how he had been able to look up so many numbers from the tables so quickly. "Look them up?" Gauss responded. "Who needs to look them up? I just calculate them in my head!"

---

1813 Louis Poinsot elected to the mathematics section of of the French Acad´emie des Sciences, replacing Lagrange. [DSB 11, 61] *VFR Although little known today, he was a French mathematician and physicist. Poinsot was the inventor of geometrical mechanics, showing how a system of forces acting on a rigid body could be resolved into a single force and a couple. When Gustave Eiffel built the famous tower, he included the names of 72 prominent French scientists on plaques around the first stage, Poinsot was included.*Wik

---

1823 In a letter to a cousin, William Rowan Hamilton disclosed that he had made a “very curious discovery.” It is believed that he was referring to the characteristic function. [Thanks to Howard Eves] *VFR

---

1859

clockworks for Elizabeth Tower Clock

The Elizabeth Tower, which stands at the north end of the Houses of Parliament, was completed in 1859 and the Great Clock started on 31 May, with the Great Bell's strikes heard for the first time on 11 July and the quarter bells first chimed on 7 September.
The name Big Ben is often used to describe the tower, the clock and the bell but the name was first given to the Great Bell. *parliament.uk

---

1868 During the eclipse of 18 August 1868 from the Red Sea through India to Malaysia and New
Guinea, prominences are first studied with spectroscopes and shown to be composed primarily of hydrogen by James Francis Tennant, John Herschel, George Rayet, Norman Pogson
and others. *NSEC  Also known as "The King of Siam's eclipse".

M. Stephan sketches of the eclipse, Archives des missions scientifiques et littéraires, 1868.

---

 1941, Hugo Steinhaus, who sometimes joined his colleagues in the Scottish Café, contributed the final question to the Scottish Book, only days before the Nazi troops entered the town. In 1935, the first entry was made in The Scottish Book.  

The last item, Item Number 193, contains a rather cryptic set of numerical results, signed by Steinhaus, dealing with the distribution of the number of matches in a box! After the start of war between Germany and Russia, the city was occupied by German troops that same summer and the inscriptions ceased.

The original Szkocka Café (Scottish Café) in Akamemichna in Lwów, Poland

now the Desertniy Bar at T. Shevchenko Prospekt 27, Lviv, Ukraine.

The café was a meeting place for many mathematicians including Banach, Steinhaus, Ulam, Mazur, Kac, Schauder, Kaczmarz and others. Problems were written in a book kept by the landlord and often prizes were offered for their solution.

A collection of these problems appeared later as the Scottish Book.

R D Mauldin, The Scottish Book, Mathematics from the Scottish Café (1981) contains the problems as well as some solutions and commentaries.

*SAU

---

1975 “I had today my virginal experience with the HP [Hewlett-Packard 65 calculator] as a celestial triangle-breaker ... it worked! But I’ll keep plotting the sun to make sure.” William F. Buckley Jr. discussing celestial navigation in his delightful book, Airborn, a Sentimental Journey, about sailing. His caution was justified, for later he learned that the prepackaged program contained errors. *VFR

The HP-65 was the first magnetic card-programmable handheld calculator. Introduced by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 at an MSRP of $795.

---

1985 Marion Tinsley retains the world checker championship by defeating Asa Long 6–1. The one game Long won was the first time in nearly 25 years that anyone has beaten Tinsley in a checkers game. But then perhaps Tinsley had an unfair advantage—a Ph.D. in mathematics from Ohio State with a dissertation in combinatorics directed by Herbert Ryser. [Clipping of June 2, 1985] *VFR
He is considered the greatest checkers player who ever lived. He was world champion from 1955–1958 and 1975–1991. Tinsley never lost a World Championship match, and lost only seven games (two of them to the Chinook computer program) in his entire 45 year career.  He withdrew from championship play during the years 1958–1975, relinquishing the title during that time. (anyone know why?) Tinsley retired from championship play in 1991. In August 1992, he defeated the Chinook computer program 4–2 (with 33 draws) in a match. Chinook had placed second at the U.S. Nationals in 1990, which usually qualifies one to compete for a national title. However, the American Checkers Federation and the English Draughts Association refused to allow a computer to play for the title. Unable to appeal their decision, Tinsley resigned his title as World Champion and immediately indicated his desire to play against Chinook. The unofficial yet highly publicized match was quickly organized, and was won by Tinsley.
In one game, Chinook, playing with white pieces, made a mistake on the tenth move. Tinsley remarked, "You're going to regret that." Chinook resigned after move 36, fully 26 moves later. The ACF and the EDA were placed in the awkward position of naming a new world champion, a title which would be worthless as long as Tinsley was alive. They granted Tinsley the title of World Champion Emeritus as a solution.
In August 1994, a second match with Chinook was organized, but Tinsley withdrew after only six games (all draws) for health reasons. Don Lafferty, rated the number two player in the world at the time, replaced Tinsley and fought Chinook to a draw. Tinsley was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a week later. Seven months later, he died. *Wik

---

2008 Buzz Lightyear lifts off the Earth for real. A Buzz Lightyear toy was launched aboard the space shuttle Discovery with mission STS-124 and returned on Discovery 15 months later with STS-128, the 12-inch action figure is the longest-serving toy in space. Disney Parks partnered with NASA to send Buzz Lightyear to the International Space Station and create interactive games, educational worksheets and special messages encouraging students to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The action figure will go on display in the museum’s "Moving Beyond Earth" gallery in the summer. in 2012 the Toy Story character became part of the National Air and Space Museum’s popular culture collection. *http://airandspace.si.edu [I still have a Buzz Lightyear toy on my book case given to me by some students because I used to use his trademark quote in (my very questionable) Latin, "ad infinitum, et ultra." ]

---

2013  At a Harvard seminar on May 13, 2013, the first crack was  produced in solving the twin primes conjecture.  A lecturer from the University of New Hampshire, Yitang Zhang, had proved that there are infinitely many pairs of primes that differ by no ,ore than 70,000,000.  It was a long way from differing by two, but it was an even greater distance from infinity.  He had submitted his paper to the Annals of Mathematics in April, and they had rushed to get reviews, which turned out to be enthusiastically positive. By May 21, 2013, the paper was accepted for publication on the 1st of May 2014.

By the 31st of May 2013, a group led by Scott Morrison and Terry Tao had lowered the gap to 42,342,946; game on!

This work led to a 2013 Ostrowski Prize, a 2014 Cole Prize, a 2014 Rolf Schock Prize, and a 2014 MacArthur Fellowship. Zhang became a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015.

---

BIRTHS

1683 Jean-Pierre Christin (May 31, 1683 – January 19, 1755) was a French physicist, mathematician, astronomer and musician. His proposal to reverse the Celsius thermometer scale (from water boiling at 0 degrees and ice melting at 100 degrees, to water boiling at 100 degrees and ice melting at 0 degrees) was widely accepted and is still in use today.
Christin was born in Lyon. He was a founding member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon and served as its Permanent Secretary from 1713 until 1755. His thermometer was known in France before the Revolution as the thermometer of Lyon. *Wik

---

1847 Egor Ivanovich Zolotarev (March 31, 1847, Saint Petersburg – July 19, 1878, Saint Petersburg) produced fundamental work on analysis and number theory. *SAU

 In 1857 he began to study at the fifth St Petersburg gymnasium, a school which centered on mathematics and natural science. He finished it with the silver medal in 1863. In the same year he was allowed to be an auditor at the physico-mathematical faculty of St Petersburg university.

He had not been able to become a student before 1864 because he was too young. Among his academic teachers were Somov, Chebyshev and Aleksandr Korkin, with whom he would have a tight scientific friendship. In November 1867 he defended his Kandidat thesis “About the Integration of Gyroscope Equations”, after 10 months there followed his thesis pro venia legendi About one question on Minima. With this work he was given the right to teach as a private lecturer at St Petersburg university.

Zolotarev's steep career ended abruptly with his early death. He was on his way to his dacha when he was run over by a train in the Tsarskoe Selo station. On 19 July 1878 he died from blood poisoning.

Yegor Ivanovich is not to be confused with the probabilist Vladimir Mikhaelovich Zolotarev, Kolmogorov's disciple, who worked on stable distributions with well known results on their parametrization.

---

1861 William Peddie FRSE LLD (31 May 1861 – 2 June 1946) was a Scottish physicist and applied mathematician, known for his research on colour vision and molecular magnetism.

He studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Edinburgh graduating BSc in 2022 and gaining a doctorate (DSc) in 1888. He had been assisting in lectures in Natural Philosophy (Physics) since 1883 and became a formal lecturer in 1892. In 1907 he succeeded J. P. Kuenen as Professor of Physics at University College, Dundee, a post he would hold for 35 years.

He wrote numerous scientific papers and several books. He annotated the 5th edition of Tait's Properties of Matter.

In 1887 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Peter Guthrie Tait, Sir Thomas Muir, George Chrystal, and Alexander Crum Brown. He was awarded the Society's Makdougall-Brisbane Prize for 1896–1898, and served as the Society's vice president from 1919 to 1922. He was President of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society 1896/97. He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1912 at Cambridge, UK. 

He retired in 1942 and died at Ninewells Hospital on 2 June 1946. *Wik

---

1872 Charles Greeley Abbot (31 May 1872; 17 Dec 1973 at age 101) was an American astrophysicist who is thought to have been the first scientist to suspect that the radiation of the Sun might vary over time. In 1906, Abbot became director of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and, in 1928, fifth Secretary of the Smithsonian. To study the Sun, SAO established a network of solar radiation observatories around the world-- usually at remote and desolate spots chosen primarily for their high percentage of sunny days. Beginning in May 1905 and continuing over decades, his studies of solar radiation led him to discover, in 1953, a connection between solar variations and weather on Earth, allowing general weather patterns to be predicted up to 50 years ahead. *TIS

---

1912 Martin Schwarzschild (31 May 1912; 10 Apr 1997 at age 84) German-born American astronomer who in 1957 introduced the use of high-altitude hot-air balloons to carry scientific instruments and photographic equipment into the stratosphere for solar research.*TIS

---

1912 Chien-Shiung Wu (simplified Chinese: 吴健雄; traditional Chinese: 吳健雄; pinyin: Wú Jiànxióng, May 31, 1912 – February 16, 1997) was a Chinese American experimental physicist who made significant contributions in the field of nuclear physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion. She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics, and also earned Wu the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include "the First Lady of Physics", "the Chinese Madame Curie", and the "Queen of Nuclear Research".*Wik

---

1926 John Kemeney  (May 31, 1926 – December 26, 1992) born in Budapest, Hungary. He worked on logic with Alonzo Church at Princeton, was Einstein’s assistant at the IAS, developed the computer language BASIC, and served as President of Dartmouth College. To learn more about him, see the interview in Mathematical People. Profiles and Interviews (1985), edited by Donald J. Albers and G. L. Alexanderson. *VFR
  In his 66-year life, Kemeny had a significant impact on the history of computers, particularly during his years at Dartmouth College, where he worked with Thomas Kurtz to create BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language for his computer students. Kemeny earlier had worked with John von Neumann in Los Alamos, N.M., during the Manhattan Project years of World War II. *CHM

---

1930 Ronald Valentine Toomer (31 May 1930; 26 Sep 2011 at age 81) was an American engineer who was a legendary creator of steel roller coasters. His early career, was in the aerospace industry, where he helped design the heat shield for Apollo spacecraft and was also involved with NASA's first satellite launches. In 1965, he joined the Arrow Development Company to apply tubular steel technology to the design the Runaway Mine Ride, the world's first all-steel roller coaster. It opened the following year at Six Flags over Texas. By 1975, he designed the Roaring 20's Corkscrew for Knott's Berry Farm, introducing first 360° looping rolls, in fact two of them. Later, his design included seven inversions in the Shockwave roller coaster for Six Flags Great America. He produced over 80 roller coasters before retiring.in 1998. *TIS

---

1931 John Robert Schrieffer (May 31, 1931 – July 27, 2019 )  John Robert Schrieffer is an American physicist who shared (with John Bardeen and Leon N. Cooper) the 1972 Nobel Prize for Physics for developing the BCS theory (for their initials), the first successful microscopic theory of superconductivity. Although first described by Kamerlingh Onnes (1911), no theoretical explanation had been accepted. It explains how certain metals and alloys lose all resistance to electrical current at extremely low temperatures. The insight of the BCS theory is that at very low temperatures, under certain conditions, electrons can form bound pairs (Cooper pairs). This pair of electrons acts as a single particle in superconductivity. Schrieffer continued to focus his research on particle physics, metal impurities, spin fluctuations, and chemisorption. *TIS

---

DEATHS

1832 Evariste Galois (25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) died of peritonitis from a gunshot wound of the previous day. He died in the Cochin Hospital – this is now at 27 Rue du Faubourg St. Jacques,in the 14th district of Paris. He was buried in a common grave at Montparnasse Cemetery, but no trace of the grave remains.

Galois was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

Galois was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, (many stories refer to a woman of romantic interest was Stéphanie-Félicie Poterin du Motel, the daughter of the physician at the hostel where Galois stayed during the last months of his life. Fragments of letters from her, copied by Galois himself, with many portions, such as her name, either obliterated or deliberately omitted, are available. The letters hint that Poterin du Motel had confided some of her troubles to Galois, and this might have prompted him to provoke the duel himself on her behalf. shortly after his release from prison, ) Galois fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered.

---

1841 George Green (14 July 1793 – 31 May 1841) British mathematical physicist who wrote An Essay on the Application of Mathematical Analysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism (Green, 1828). The essay introduced several important concepts, among them a theorem similar to the modern Green's theorem, the idea of potential functions as currently used in physics, and the concept of what are now called Green's functions. George Green was the first person to create a mathematical theory of electricity and magnetism and his theory formed the foundation for the work of other scientists such as James Clerk Maxwell, William Thomson, and others. His work ran parallel to that of the great mathematician Gauss (potential theory).

Green's life story is remarkable in that he was almost entirely self-taught. He was born and lived for most of his life in the English town of Sneinton, Nottinghamshire, nowadays part of the city of Nottingham. His father (also named George) was a baker who had built and owned a brick windmill used to grind grain. The younger Green only had about one year of formal schooling as a child, between the ages of 8 and 9.
Self taught at a reading library while working full time as the manager of the family mill, He wrote a pivotal paper in applied calculus. George Green is buried in the family grave in the north east corner of St Stephens churchyard, just across the road from Green's Mill and car park. After his death the plaque below was placed in Westminster Abbey near the memorial to Newton. There are also memorials to Faraday, and Lord Kelvin. The Green Family mill has been completely restored and is now a Science center.

---

1931 Eugène Maurice Pierre Cosserat (4 March 1866 in Amiens, France - 31 May 1931 in Toulouse, France) Cosserat studied the deformation of surfaces which led him to a theory of elasticity. *SAU

---

1986 (Leo) James Rainwater (9 Dec 1917, 31 May 1986 at age 68)was an American physicist who won a share of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1975 for his part in determining the asymmetrical shapes of certain atomic nuclei. During WW II, Rainwater worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. In 1949 he began formulating a theory that not all atomic nuclei are spherical, as was then generally believed. The theory was tested experimentally and confirmed by Danish physicists Aage N. Bohr(4th son of Niels Bohr) and Ben R. Mottelson. For their work the three scientists were awarded jointly the 1975 Nobel Prize for Physics. He also conducted valuable research on X rays and took part in Atomic Energy Commission and naval research projects. *TIS

---

1998 Michio Suzuki (October 2, 1926 – May 31, 1998) was a Japanese mathematician who studied group theory.
A Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1953 until his death. 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.
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

---

2000 Erich Kähler (16 January 1906, Leipzig – 31 May 2000, Wedel) was a German
Kähler was born in Leipzig, and studied there.
As a mathematician he is known for a number of contributions: the Cartan–Kähler theorem on singular solutions of non-linear analytic differential systems; the idea of a Kähler metric on complex manifolds; and the Kähler differentials, which provide a purely algebraic theory and have generally been adopted in algebraic geometry. In all of these the theory of differential forms plays a part, and Kähler counts as a major developer of the theory from its formal genesis with Élie Cartan.
His earlier work was on celestial mechanics; and he was one of the forerunners of scheme theory, though his ideas on that were never widely adopted. *Wik

---

2019 Margaret Eva Rayner CBE (21 August 1929 – 31 May 2019) was a British mathematician who became vice principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford and president of the Mathematical Association. She was known for her research on isoperimetric inequalities, her work in mathematics education, and her publications on the history of mathematics and of St Hilda's College.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s she worked on isoperimetric inequalities with American mathematician Lawrence E. Payne, beginning with a 1965 research visit to the University of Maryland and Cornell University, where Payne worked. Their work resulted in the Payne–Rayner inequality, a type of Reverse Hölder inequality for the eigenvalues of the Laplace operator.

In 1980 she was a speaker at the Fourth International Congress on Mathematical Education in Berkeley, California; her talk was entitled Is calculus essential?. Her work in mathematics education also included being chief examiner for the International Baccalaureate, participating in the Secondary Examinations Council and School Examinations and Assessment Council, and working through the Mathematical Association, which she served as president in 1987. She also chaired the board of governors of what is now Oxford Brookes University.

She became vice-principal of St Hilda's in 1981, stepping down in 1988. She retired in 1989. After her retirement, her interests shifted to history, and her publications in this period included a chapter on Oxford mathematics in a book on the history of mathematics, and the book Centenary History of St. Hilda's College (1993) *Wik

---

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