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| Archimedes *http://www.w-volk.de/museum |
Technical skill is mastery of complexity while creativity is mastery of simplicity.
~ Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman
The 35th day of the year; There are 35 hexominos, the polyominoes made from 6 squares. *Number Gossip
(I only recently learned that, Although a complete set of 35 hexominoes has a total of 210 squares, which offers several possible rectangular configurations, it is not possible to pack the hexominoies into a rectangle.)
and another gem from Jim, @wilder that is .
For days 34 & 35:
3435 = 3³+4⁴+3³+5⁵ *@wilderlab
The longest open uncrossed (dosn't cross it's own path) knight's path on an 8x8 chessboard is 35 moves. (longest cycle(end where you start) is only 32 moves)
In Base 35 (A=10, B=11, etc) NERD is Prime, \(23*35^3+14*35^2+27*35+13 = 1,004,233 \)
1751 Franklin electrocutes a turkey, opines culinary improvement:
1753 Writing about his Experiments and Observations on Electricity made at Philadelphia in America, a work Diderot called the best example of the experimental art with which he was acquainted, Benjamin Franklin (in a letter to John Perkins) boasted that he had “not, with some of our learned moderns, disguised [his] nonsense in Greek, clothed it in algebra, or adorned it with fluxions.” *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d’Alembert, p 4 (via VFR) (This is in contrast to the quote by Lelande that d'Alembert "had never held a prism in his hand.")
1841 First recorded reference to "Groundhog Day" in America:
In 1868, Charles Darwin began writing his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. He was now 69 years old, working in his home in Downe, England. *TIS
1883 Feb. 4, 1883: Heard from Mr. Caldecott, who would like to draw for me, but is too deeply engaged to undertake anything at present. I must try to engage him for some future time, and could then feel encouraged to work definitely at a new book. Apparently he never did. Does anyone have information that Dodgson was disappointed with his illustrators? *Lewis Carroll’s Diaries @DodgsonDiaries, *Greg Priest @greg_m_priest
1967 U.S. launches Lunar Orbiter 3. It was designed primarily to photograph areas of the lunar surface for confirmation of safe landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. It was also equipped to collect selenodetic, radiation intensity, and micrometeoroid impact data.<
In Base 35 (A=10, B=11, etc) NERD is Prime, \(23*35^3+14*35^2+27*35+13 = 1,004,233 \)
*Chaw wrote to suggest 36 as a more natural base for letters and numbers combined, and added that "Nerdiest" is prime in that base.
1703 46 of the 47 Ronin commit seppuku (ritual suicide) as recompense for avenging their master's death. . This I mention here because one of the 47, was the greatest Asian mathematician of his age, Shigekiyo Matsumura, who among other things, approximated the value of pi as 3.141592648, which is accurate to eight significant figures..."
More of the story here.
EVENTS
1600 Johannes Kepler arrives at Benatek Castle near Prague, where Tycho Brahe had moved his observatory, and retinue, after his benefactor King Frederick drank himself to death. *Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way Thony Christie wrote in response to the quote above that, "I suspect Timothy Ferris is making shit up. Frederick didn't drink himself to death." Great to have an accomplished historical scholar on my reading list who can keep me straight. Thanks Thony.
1703 46 of the 47 Ronin commit seppuku (ritual suicide) as recompense for avenging their master's death. . This I mention here because one of the 47, was the greatest Asian mathematician of his age, Shigekiyo Matsumura, who among other things, approximated the value of pi as 3.141592648, which is accurate to eight significant figures..."
More of the story here.
I received a correction from a commenter that "The mathematician's name was Muramatsu Shigekiyo (村松 茂清, 1608 – 1695); he was not in the Ako incident, his son in law apparently was one of the 47 samurai, though.
The very kind Arjen Dijksman connected me with Japanese Physicist Tasuo Tabata who gave me some detail. It seems that Matsumura might be more appropriately called Shigekiyo Muramatsu. He did write the sanso, and all the math things described seem to be a modest description of his contributions. However, Professor Tabata tells me that he was NOT one of the 47 Ronin. He is, however, connected to the story. The professor says, "Shigekiyo had only a daughter. Her husband Hidenao and their son Takanao joined the 47 ronin. --"... So now, I guess I'm down to wanting a picture of the 47 Ronin from Sengakuji Temple. And if anyone knows where the grave of Shigekiyo Muramatsu is located, and/or has a picture I would love to have one.
1751 Franklin electrocutes a turkey, opines culinary improvement:
My Respects to Mr. Watson. He desir’d you to enquire what Success we had in our Attempts to kill a Turkey by the Electrical Strokes. Please to acquaint him, that we made several Experiments on Fowls this Winter; That we found two large thin glass Jars, gilt (holding each about 6 Gallons, and taking 2000 Turns of a Globe of 9 Inches Diameter to charge them full, when the Globe works very well, and will charge a common half pint Vial with 50 Turns) were sufficient to kill common Hens outright; but the Turkies, tho’ thrown into violent Convulsions, and then lying as dead for some Minutes, would recover in less than a quarter of an Hour. However, having added Mr. Kinnersley’s Jarrs and mine together, in all 5, tho’ not fully charg’d, we kill’d a Turky with them of about 10 lb.wt. and suppose they would have kill’d a much larger. I conceit that the Birds kill’d in this Manner eat uncommonly tender.*Franklin papers
1753 Writing about his Experiments and Observations on Electricity made at Philadelphia in America, a work Diderot called the best example of the experimental art with which he was acquainted, Benjamin Franklin (in a letter to John Perkins) boasted that he had “not, with some of our learned moderns, disguised [his] nonsense in Greek, clothed it in algebra, or adorned it with fluxions.” *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d’Alembert, p 4 (via VFR) (This is in contrast to the quote by Lelande that d'Alembert "had never held a prism in his hand.")
1824, J.W. Goodrich introduced rubber galoshes to the public and little boys and girls discovered the joy of splashing through mud puddles and keeping their shoes dry. *Twisted History (or as they say across the pond, Wellies) I find it a little strange that Macintosh developed his waterproof raincoat in exactly the same year (but don't know what month).
1841 First recorded reference to "Groundhog Day" in America:
*Stormfax.comWhen German settlers arrived in the 1700s, they brought a tradition known as Candlemas Day, which has an early origin in the pagan celebration of Imbolc. It came at the mid-point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. Superstition held that if the weather was fair, the second half of Winter would be stormy and cold. For the early Christians in Europe, it was the custom on Candlemas Day for clergy to bless candles and distribute them to the people in the dark of Winter. A lighted candle was placed in each window of the home. The day's weather continued to be important. If the sun came out February 2, halfway between Winter and Spring, it meant six more weeks of wintry weather.
The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College:
February 4, 1841 - from Morgantown, Berks County (Pennsylvania) storekeeper James Morris' diary..."Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate."
According to the old English saying:
If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.
In 1868, Charles Darwin began writing his book The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. He was now 69 years old, working in his home in Downe, England. *TIS
1884 On this day in 1884, the minutes of the Committee on the Course and Statutes of Columbia College record that Winifred Edgerton Merrill was to be allowed to use their telescope:
... access to the Observatory and the use of its instruments ... with the understanding that she will render, from time to time, such assistance in the practical work of the Observatory as may be in her power.
Later Merrill told her son:-
... that a condition of her admission was to dust the astronomical instruments and so comport herself as not to disturb the men students. *SAU (More about her here)
1961 Sputnik 7 launches into Earth orbit. This was the first Soviet attempt at a Venus probe. The probe was successfully launched into Earth orbit with a SL-6/A-2-e (Molniya 8K78) launcher. The launch payload consisted of an Earth orbiting launch platform (Tyazheliy Sputnik 4) and the Venera probe. The fourth stage (a Blok L Zond rocket) was supposed to launch the Venera probe towards a landing on Venus after one Earth orbit but ignition failed, probably due to a fault in the power supply to the guidance system, the PT-200 DC transformer had not been designed to work in a vacuum. *NASA
1967 U.S. launches Lunar Orbiter 3. It was designed primarily to photograph areas of the lunar surface for confirmation of safe landing sites for the Surveyor and Apollo missions. It was also equipped to collect selenodetic, radiation intensity, and micrometeoroid impact data.
1995 The Connect Four game was mathematically solved first by James D. Allen (Oct 1, 1988), and independently by Victor Allis (Oct 16, 1988). First player can force a win. Strongly solved by John Tromp's 8-ply database (Feb 4, 1995). Weakly solved for all boardsizes where width+height is at most 15 (Feb 18, 2006). *Wik
*Gamehouse cafe
1896 Friedrich (Hermann) Hund (4 Feb 1896 - 31 Mar 1997) was a German physicist known for his work on the electronic structure of atoms and molecules. He introduced a method of using molecular orbitals to determine the electronic structure of molecules and chemical bond formation. His empirical Hund's Rules (1925) for atomic spectra determine the lowest energy level for two electrons having the same n and l quantum numbers in a many-electron atom. The lowest energy state has the maximum multiplicity consistent with the Pauli exclusion principle. The lowest energy state has the maximum total electron orbital angular momentum quantum number, consistent with rule. They are explained by the quantum theory of atoms by calculations involving the repulsion between two electrons. *TIS
1903 Sir Oliver Graham Sutton CBE FRS (4 February 1903 – 26 May 1977) was a Welsh mathematician and meteorologist, notable particularly for theoretical work on atmospheric diffusion, boundary layer turbulence, and for his direction of the UK Meteorological Office.
From 1926 to 1928 he was a lecturer at University College of Wales in Aberystwyth before joining the UK Meteorological Office as an assistant. He was seconded to Shoeburyness to work on the meteorological effects on gunnery practices and then transferred to Porton Down. There he undertook a project on atmospheric turbulence and diffusion which quantified the effect of meteorological conditions on the distribution of gas at ground level, findings which could not be released until after the war. Whilst working at Porton Down he was put in charge of tests related to Operation Vegetarian, which involved the release of anthrax spores over the uninhabited Gruinard Island as part of a biological warfare project.
When the war ended, he was made Chief Superintendent of the Radar Research and Development Establishment, Malvern, a position he held until 1947, when he was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the Royal Military College of Science, Shrivenham, Wiltshire. He was Director-General of the UK Met Office from 1953 to 1965 and Vice-President of the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth from 1967.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1949. He was awarded CBE in 1950 for his distinguished scientific services to the government.
He was elected president of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1953 to 1955 and awarded their Symons Gold Medal for 1959. He was knighted in 1955.
In 1958 Sutton was invited to co-deliver the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture. In 1968 he was awarded the prestigious International Meteorological Organization Prize from the World Meteorological Organization *Wik
1906 Clyde William Tombaugh (4 Feb 1906 on Ranch near Streator, Illinois - 17 Jan 1997) was an American astronomer who discovered what was then recognized as the planet Pluto, which he photographed on 23 Jan 1930, the only planet discovered in the twentieth century, after a systematic search instigated by the predictions of other astronomers. Tombaugh was 24 years of age when he made this discovery at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. He also discovered several clusters of stars and galaxies, studied the apparent distribution of extragalactic nebulae, and made observations of the surfaces of Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon.Born of poor farmers, his first telescope was made of parts from worn-out farming equipment. *TIS
From my personal blog after a visit to Mars Hill, Flagstaff, Az. (much material from Wikipedia)
In the late 19th and early 20th century, observers of Mars drew long straight lines that appeared on the surface between 60 degrees north and south of the martian equator. Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli called these lines canali, which became canals in English. Lowell extended this observation to a theory that Mars had polar ice caps that would melt in the martian spring and fill the canals. He even extended the theory to include intelligent life on Mars that had designed the canals.
Eventually it became clear that there were no martian canals, but Mars hill went on to be the sight where a self educated Kansas schoolboy found his dream of working in astronomy in 1929, when the observatory director, V M Slipher, "handed the job of locating Planet X to Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old Kansas man who had just arrived at the Lowell Observatory after Slipher had been impressed by a sample of his astronomical drawings."
On the nights of Jan 23 and 30th of January, 1830, he found a planet in the images that he thought was the Planet X. "The discovery made front page news around the world. The Lowell Observatory, who had the right to name the new object, received over 1000 suggestions, from "Atlas" to "Zymal". Tombaugh urged Slipher to suggest a name for the new object quickly before someone else did. Name suggestions poured in from all over the world. Constance Lowell proposed Zeus, then Lowell, and finally her own first name. These suggestions were disregarded.
The name "Pluto" was proposed by Venetia Burney (later Venetia Phair), an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name, one of the alternate names of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, a former librarian of Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in America. The object was officially named on March 24, 1930."
Among the many awards Tombaugh received was a scholarship to the Univ of Kansas, where he would eventually earn a Bachelors and Masters Degree. It is said that the Astronomy Dept head refused to allow him to take the introductory astronomy class because it would be undignified for the discoverer of a planet.
Tombaugh died on January 17, 1997, when he was in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at the age of 90. A small portion of his ashes were placed aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. The container includes the inscription: "Interned (sic) herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'. Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh
1925 Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS (born 4 February 1925 – 13 February 2016), is a Japanese-born British mathematician known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory. His main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particularly in knot theory, the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems.
Zeeman is known among the wider scientific public for his contribution to, and spreading awareness of catastrophe theory, which was due initially to another topologist, René Thom, and for his Christmas lectures about mathematics on television in 1978. He was especially active encouraging the application of mathematics, and catastrophe theory in particular, to biology and behavioral sciences.*Wik
1926 Jaroslav Hájek (4 Feb 1926 in Podebrady, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) - 10 June 1974 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) He was among the pioneers of unequal probability sampling. The name "Hájek predictor" now labels his contributions to the use of auxiliary data in estimating population means. In 1967 Hájek published (jointly with Z Sidak) Theory of rank tests but it was a work which had in fact been written four years before in 1963. Their methods use three lemmas of Le Cam in order to treat rank statistics under local alternatives and they established the efficiency of rank tests. *SAU
1927 Rolf William Landauer (4 Feb 1927; 27 Apr 1999) German-born American physicist known for his formulation of Landauer's principle concerning the energy used during a computer's operation. Whenever the machine is resetting for another computation, bits are flushed from the computer's memory, and in that electronic operation, a certain amount of energy is lost. Thus, when information is erased, there is an inevitable "thermodynamic cost of forgetting," which governs the development of more energy-efficient computers. While engineers dealt with practical limitations of compacting ever more circuitry onto tiny chips, Landauer considered the theoretical limit, that if technology improved indefinitely, how soon will it run into the insuperable barriers set by nature?*TIS
1948 Ken Thompson Is Born. Thompson, who with Dennis Ritchie, developed UNIX at AT&T Bell Laboratories, is born. The UNIX operating system combined many of the timesharing and file management features offered by Multics, from which it took its name. (Multics, a projects of the mid - 1960s, represented the first effort at creating a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system.) The UNIX operating system quickly secured a wide following, particularly among engineers and scientists. *CHM
1615 Giambattista della Porta (1 November 1535 Vico Equense (near Naples), Italy
- 4 February 1615 Naples, Italy) was an Italian scholar who worked on cryptography and also on optics. He claimed to be the inventor of the telescope although he does not appear to have constructed one before Galileo.
In 1563, della Porta published De Furtivis Literarum Notis, a work about cryptography. In it he described the first known digraphic substitution cipher. Charles J. Mendelsohn commented, "He was, in my opinion, the outstanding cryptographer of the Renaissance. Some unknown who worked in a hidden room behind closed doors may possibly have surpassed him in general grasp of the subject, but among those whose work can be studied he towers like a giant."
Della Porta invented a method which allowed him to write secret messages on the inside of eggs. During the Spanish Inquisition, some of his friends were imprisoned. At the gate of the prison, everything was checked except for eggs. Della Porta wrote messages on the egg shell using a mixture made of plant pigments and alum. The ink penetrated the egg shell which is semi-porous. When the egg shell was dry, he boiled the egg in hot water and the ink on the outside of the egg was washed away. When the recipient in prison peeled off the shell, the message was revealed once again on the egg white.
Della Porta was the founder of a scientific society called the Academia Secretorum Naturae (Accademia dei Segreti). This group was more commonly known as the Otiosi, (Men of Leisure). Founded sometime before 1580, the Otiosi were one of the first scientific societies in Europe and their aim was to study the "secrets of nature." Any person applying for membership had to demonstrate they had made a new discovery in the natural sciences.
His private museum was visited by travelers and was one of the earliest examples of natural history museums. It inspired the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher to begin a similar, even more renowned, collection in Rome.
*SAU *Wik
1774 Charles-Marie de La Condamine (27 Jan 1701, 4 Feb 1774) French naturalist and mathematician who became particularly interested in geodesy (earth measurement). He was put in charge by the King of France of an expedition to Ecuador to measure a meridional arc at the equator (1735-43). It was wished to determine whether the Earth was either flattened or elongated at its poles. He then accomplished the first scientific exploration of the Amazon River (1743) on a raft, studying the region, and brought the drug curare to Europe. He also worked on establishment of a universal unit of length, and is credited with developing the idea of vaccination against smallpox, later perfected by Edward Jenner. However, he was almost constantly ill and died in 1773, deaf and completely paralyzed.*TIS
1895 Thomas Penyngton Kirkman FRS (31 March 1806 – 3 February 1895) was a British mathematician. Despite being primarily a churchman, he maintained an active interest in research-level mathematics, and was listed by Alexander Macfarlane as one of ten leading 19th-century British mathematicians. Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, an existence theorem for Steiner triple systems that founded the field of combinatorial design theory, is named after him.
Kirkman's first mathematical publication was in the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal in 1846, on a problem involving Steiner triple systems that had been published two years earlier in the Lady's and Gentleman's Diary by Wesley S. B. Woolhouse. Despite Kirkman's and Woolhouse's contributions to the problem, Steiner triple systems were named after Jakob Steiner who wrote a later paper in 1853. Kirkman's second research paper paper, in 1848, concerned hypercomplex numbers.
In 1850, Kirkman observed that his 1846 solution to Woolhouse's problem had an additional property, which he set out as a puzzle in the Lady's and Gentleman's Diary:
1928 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (18 Jul 1853 - 4 Feb 1928) Dutch physicist who shared (with Pieter Zeeman) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1902 for his theory of the influence of magnetism upon electromagnetic radiation phenomena. The theory was confirmed by findings of Zeeman and gave rise to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. From the start, Lorentz made it his task to extend James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electricity and of light. Already in his doctor's thesis, he treated the reflection and refraction phenomena of light from this new standpoint. His fundamental work in the fields of optics and electricity revolutionized conceptions of the nature of matter. In 1878, he published an essay relating the velocity of light in a medium, to its density and composition. *TIS.jpg)
1974 Satyendra Nath Bose (1 Jan 1894; 4 Feb 1974) Indian physicist and mathematician who collaborated with Albert Einstein to develop a theory of statistical quantum mechanics, now called Bose-Einstein statistics. In his early work in quantum theory (1924), Bose wrote about the Planck black-body radiation law using a quantum statistics of photons, Plank's Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis. Bose sent his ideas to Einstein, who extended this technique to integral spin particles. Dirac coined the name boson for particles obeying these statistics. Among other things, Bose-Einstein statistics explain how an electric current can flow in superconductors forever, with no loss. Bose also worked on X-ray diffraction, electrical properties of the ionosphere and thermoluminescence. *TIS
2003 Jean Brossel ( 15 August 1918 in Périgueux , France - 4 February 2003 in France)developed with Alfred Kastler the technique of optical pumping at origin of lasers. *Arjen Dijksman @materion
2010 Daniel Jay Rudolph (Oct 3, 1949–Feb 4, 2010) was a mathematician who was considered a leader in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. He studied at Caltech and Stanford and taught postgraduate mathematics at Stanford University, the University of Maryland and Colorado State University, being appointed to the Albert C. Yates Endowed Chair in Mathematics at Colorado State in 2005. He jointly developed a theory of restricted orbit equivalence which unified several other theories. He founded and directed an intense preparation course for graduate math studies and began a Math circle for middle-school children. Early in life he was a modern dancer. He died in 2010 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neuron disease.
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
Eventually it became clear that there were no martian canals, but Mars hill went on to be the sight where a self educated Kansas schoolboy found his dream of working in astronomy in 1929, when the observatory director, V M Slipher, "handed the job of locating Planet X to Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old Kansas man who had just arrived at the Lowell Observatory after Slipher had been impressed by a sample of his astronomical drawings."
On the nights of Jan 23 and 30th of January, 1830, he found a planet in the images that he thought was the Planet X. "The discovery made front page news around the world. The Lowell Observatory, who had the right to name the new object, received over 1000 suggestions, from "Atlas" to "Zymal". Tombaugh urged Slipher to suggest a name for the new object quickly before someone else did. Name suggestions poured in from all over the world. Constance Lowell proposed Zeus, then Lowell, and finally her own first name. These suggestions were disregarded.
The name "Pluto" was proposed by Venetia Burney (later Venetia Phair), an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name, one of the alternate names of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, a former librarian of Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in America. The object was officially named on March 24, 1930."
Among the many awards Tombaugh received was a scholarship to the Univ of Kansas, where he would eventually earn a Bachelors and Masters Degree. It is said that the Astronomy Dept head refused to allow him to take the introductory astronomy class because it would be undignified for the discoverer of a planet.
Tombaugh died on January 17, 1997, when he was in Las Cruces, New Mexico, at the age of 90. A small portion of his ashes were placed aboard the New Horizons spacecraft. The container includes the inscription: "Interned (sic) herein are remains of American Clyde W. Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto and the solar system's 'third zone'. Adelle and Muron's boy, Patricia's husband, Annette and Alden's father, astronomer, teacher, punster, and friend: Clyde W. Tombaugh
1925 Sir Erik Christopher Zeeman FRS (born 4 February 1925 – 13 February 2016), is a Japanese-born British mathematician known for his work in geometric topology and singularity theory. His main contributions to mathematics were in topology, particularly in knot theory, the piecewise linear category, and dynamical systems.
Zeeman is known among the wider scientific public for his contribution to, and spreading awareness of catastrophe theory, which was due initially to another topologist, René Thom, and for his Christmas lectures about mathematics on television in 1978. He was especially active encouraging the application of mathematics, and catastrophe theory in particular, to biology and behavioral sciences.*Wik
1926 Jaroslav Hájek (4 Feb 1926 in Podebrady, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) - 10 June 1974 in Prague, Czechoslovakia) He was among the pioneers of unequal probability sampling. The name "Hájek predictor" now labels his contributions to the use of auxiliary data in estimating population means. In 1967 Hájek published (jointly with Z Sidak) Theory of rank tests but it was a work which had in fact been written four years before in 1963. Their methods use three lemmas of Le Cam in order to treat rank statistics under local alternatives and they established the efficiency of rank tests. *SAU
1927 Rolf William Landauer (4 Feb 1927; 27 Apr 1999) German-born American physicist known for his formulation of Landauer's principle concerning the energy used during a computer's operation. Whenever the machine is resetting for another computation, bits are flushed from the computer's memory, and in that electronic operation, a certain amount of energy is lost. Thus, when information is erased, there is an inevitable "thermodynamic cost of forgetting," which governs the development of more energy-efficient computers. While engineers dealt with practical limitations of compacting ever more circuitry onto tiny chips, Landauer considered the theoretical limit, that if technology improved indefinitely, how soon will it run into the insuperable barriers set by nature?*TIS
1948 Ken Thompson Is Born. Thompson, who with Dennis Ritchie, developed UNIX at AT&T Bell Laboratories, is born. The UNIX operating system combined many of the timesharing and file management features offered by Multics, from which it took its name. (Multics, a projects of the mid - 1960s, represented the first effort at creating a multi-user, multi-tasking operating system.) The UNIX operating system quickly secured a wide following, particularly among engineers and scientists. *CHM
1948 Irena Lasiecka (February 4, 1948 - ) is a Polish-American mathematician, a Distinguished University Professor of mathematics and chair of the mathematics department at the University of Memphis. She is also co-editor-in-chief of two academic journals, Applied Mathematics & Optimization and Evolution Equations & Control Theory.
Lasiecka earned her Ph.D. in 1975 from the University of Warsaw under the supervision of Andrzej Wierzbicki. In 2014, she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society "for contributions to control theory of partial differential equations, mentorship, and service to professional societies."
Her specific areas of study are partial differential equations and related control theory, non-Linear PDEs, the optimization theory, calculus of variations, and boundary stabilization.
Irena Lasiecka was born and raised in Poland, where she received her initial background in mathematics. She studied math for many years at the University of Warsaw, where she earned her Master of Science degree in applied mathematics in 1972. A few years later, she received her PhD from the same university in the same field of study.
After receiving her PhD, Lasiecka started to transfer her knowledge of Applied Mathematics to others in addition to more personal studying and research. Her first teaching job was at the Polish Academy of Sciences in 1975, and she later ventured to the United States a few years later, teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been teaching in the US ever since.
Optimization is the mathematical practice of finding the maximum or minimum values for a specific function. It has many real-world uses, and is a common practice for people of many different professions.
The work of Lasiecka involves the optimization differential systems. These involve an optimization problems over functions, with a constraint that relates a function to its derivatives. She has written extensively about this topic in her collaborative work Optimization Methods in Partial Differential Equations.
DEATHS
1615 Giambattista della Porta (1 November 1535 Vico Equense (near Naples), Italy
- 4 February 1615 Naples, Italy) was an Italian scholar who worked on cryptography and also on optics. He claimed to be the inventor of the telescope although he does not appear to have constructed one before Galileo.
In 1563, della Porta published De Furtivis Literarum Notis, a work about cryptography. In it he described the first known digraphic substitution cipher. Charles J. Mendelsohn commented, "He was, in my opinion, the outstanding cryptographer of the Renaissance. Some unknown who worked in a hidden room behind closed doors may possibly have surpassed him in general grasp of the subject, but among those whose work can be studied he towers like a giant."
Della Porta invented a method which allowed him to write secret messages on the inside of eggs. During the Spanish Inquisition, some of his friends were imprisoned. At the gate of the prison, everything was checked except for eggs. Della Porta wrote messages on the egg shell using a mixture made of plant pigments and alum. The ink penetrated the egg shell which is semi-porous. When the egg shell was dry, he boiled the egg in hot water and the ink on the outside of the egg was washed away. When the recipient in prison peeled off the shell, the message was revealed once again on the egg white.
Della Porta was the founder of a scientific society called the Academia Secretorum Naturae (Accademia dei Segreti). This group was more commonly known as the Otiosi, (Men of Leisure). Founded sometime before 1580, the Otiosi were one of the first scientific societies in Europe and their aim was to study the "secrets of nature." Any person applying for membership had to demonstrate they had made a new discovery in the natural sciences.
His private museum was visited by travelers and was one of the earliest examples of natural history museums. It inspired the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher to begin a similar, even more renowned, collection in Rome.
*SAU *Wik
1774 Charles-Marie de La Condamine (27 Jan 1701, 4 Feb 1774) French naturalist and mathematician who became particularly interested in geodesy (earth measurement). He was put in charge by the King of France of an expedition to Ecuador to measure a meridional arc at the equator (1735-43). It was wished to determine whether the Earth was either flattened or elongated at its poles. He then accomplished the first scientific exploration of the Amazon River (1743) on a raft, studying the region, and brought the drug curare to Europe. He also worked on establishment of a universal unit of length, and is credited with developing the idea of vaccination against smallpox, later perfected by Edward Jenner. However, he was almost constantly ill and died in 1773, deaf and completely paralyzed.*TIS
1895 Thomas Penyngton Kirkman FRS (31 March 1806 – 3 February 1895) was a British mathematician. Despite being primarily a churchman, he maintained an active interest in research-level mathematics, and was listed by Alexander Macfarlane as one of ten leading 19th-century British mathematicians. Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, an existence theorem for Steiner triple systems that founded the field of combinatorial design theory, is named after him.
Kirkman's first mathematical publication was in the Cambridge and Dublin Mathematical Journal in 1846, on a problem involving Steiner triple systems that had been published two years earlier in the Lady's and Gentleman's Diary by Wesley S. B. Woolhouse. Despite Kirkman's and Woolhouse's contributions to the problem, Steiner triple systems were named after Jakob Steiner who wrote a later paper in 1853. Kirkman's second research paper paper, in 1848, concerned hypercomplex numbers.
In 1850, Kirkman observed that his 1846 solution to Woolhouse's problem had an additional property, which he set out as a puzzle in the Lady's and Gentleman's Diary:
Fifteen young ladies in a school walk out three abreast for seven days in succession: it is required to arrange them daily, so that no two shall walk twice abreast.This problem became known as Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, subsequently to become Kirkman's most famous result. He published several additional works on combinatorial design theory in later years. Kirkman also studied the Pascal lines determined by the intersection points of opposite sides of a hexagon inscribed within a conic section. Any six points on a conic may be joined into a hexagon in 60 different ways, forming 60 different Pascal lines. Extending previous work of Steiner, Kirkman showed that these lines intersect in triples to form 60 points (now known as the Kirkman points), so that each line contains three of the points and each point lies on three of the lines. *Wik
1928 Hendrik Antoon Lorentz (18 Jul 1853 - 4 Feb 1928) Dutch physicist who shared (with Pieter Zeeman) the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1902 for his theory of the influence of magnetism upon electromagnetic radiation phenomena. The theory was confirmed by findings of Zeeman and gave rise to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. From the start, Lorentz made it his task to extend James Clerk Maxwell's theory of electricity and of light. Already in his doctor's thesis, he treated the reflection and refraction phenomena of light from this new standpoint. His fundamental work in the fields of optics and electricity revolutionized conceptions of the nature of matter. In 1878, he published an essay relating the velocity of light in a medium, to its density and composition. *TIS
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1974 Satyendra Nath Bose (1 Jan 1894; 4 Feb 1974) Indian physicist and mathematician who collaborated with Albert Einstein to develop a theory of statistical quantum mechanics, now called Bose-Einstein statistics. In his early work in quantum theory (1924), Bose wrote about the Planck black-body radiation law using a quantum statistics of photons, Plank's Law and the Light Quantum Hypothesis. Bose sent his ideas to Einstein, who extended this technique to integral spin particles. Dirac coined the name boson for particles obeying these statistics. Among other things, Bose-Einstein statistics explain how an electric current can flow in superconductors forever, with no loss. Bose also worked on X-ray diffraction, electrical properties of the ionosphere and thermoluminescence. *TIS
2003 Jean Brossel ( 15 August 1918 in Périgueux , France - 4 February 2003 in France)developed with Alfred Kastler the technique of optical pumping at origin of lasers. *Arjen Dijksman @materion
Brossel is known for his work on optical pumping with Alfred Kastler, with whom he founded in 1951 the spectroscopic laboratory at ENS (Laboratoire de Spectroscopie Hertzienne), which now is called the Laboratoire Kastler-Brossel. Brossel was the co-director and then in 1972 after Kastler's resignation the director.
In his hometown of Périgueux a square is named after him. *Wik
2004 Valentina Mikhailovna Borok (9 July 1931, Kharkiv, Ukraine, USSR–4 February 2004, Haifa, Israel) was a Soviet Ukrainian mathematician. She is mainly known for her work on partial differential equations.
Valentina Borok had a talent for math even in her high school years. So in 1949, with the advice of her high school teachers Borok started to study Mathematics at Kyiv State University. There she met Yakov Zhitomirskii, who would be her husband until her death. During her stay at Kyiv State University, Borok, along with her future husband, started her research in the field of mathematics under the supervision of the mathematics department supervisor, Georgii Shilov. Her undergraduate thesis on distribution theory and the applications to the theory of systems of linear partial differential equations was found to be extraordinary and was published in a top Russian journal. This thesis was later selected in 1957 to be part of the first volumes of American Mathematical Society translations.*Wik
2010 Daniel Jay Rudolph (Oct 3, 1949–Feb 4, 2010) was a mathematician who was considered a leader in ergodic theory and dynamical systems. He studied at Caltech and Stanford and taught postgraduate mathematics at Stanford University, the University of Maryland and Colorado State University, being appointed to the Albert C. Yates Endowed Chair in Mathematics at Colorado State in 2005. He jointly developed a theory of restricted orbit equivalence which unified several other theories. He founded and directed an intense preparation course for graduate math studies and began a Math circle for middle-school children. Early in life he was a modern dancer. He died in 2010 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative motor neuron disease.
He founded and directed the SPIRAL program at Maryland, an intensive six-week preparation for graduate studies in mathematical sciences. It was acknowledged by the American Mathematical Society with an award for "Mathematics Programs That Make a Difference" in 2008. *Wik
2018 Alan Baker FRS (19 August 1939 – 4 February 2018) was an English mathematician, known for his work on effective methods in number theory, in particular those arising from transcendental number theory.
His interests were in number theory, transcendence, linear forms in logarithms, effective methods, Diophantine geometry and Diophantine analysis.
Baker generalised the Gelfond–Schneider theorem, which itself is a solution to Hilbert's seventh problem.
In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He has also been made a foreign fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India.
2025 William Browder (January 6, 1934 – February 4, 2025) was an American mathematician, who specialized in algebraic topology, differential topology and differential geometry. He served as president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.
William Browder was born in Harlem, New York City on January 6, 1934, the son of Raisa (née Berkmann), a Russian Jewish woman from Saint Petersburg, and American Communist Party leader Earl Browder, from Wichita, Kansas. His father had moved to the Soviet Union in 1927, where he met and married Raisa. Their first two sons, Felix and Andrew, were born in Moscow in 1931. William attended local public schools in Yonkers for early schooling and graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. degree in 1954. He was a instructor at the University of Rochester from 1957 to 1958 and at Cornell University from 1958 until 1963. In August 1957, his original thesis fell apart when his advisor, John Coleman Moore, found an issue with the idea. However, William came up with a new idea which was titled Homology of Loop Spaces. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1958, using the dissertation.
From 1964 onwards, Browder was a professor at Princeton University; he was chair of the mathematics department at Princeton from 1971 to 1973. He was editor of the journal Annals of Mathematics from 1969 to 1981, and president of the American Mathematical Society from 1989 to 1991.
Browder was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1980, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1984, and the Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters in 1990. In 1994, a conference was held at Princeton in celebration of his 60th birthday. A conference was held at Princeton on the occasion of his retirement in 2012. Browder advised 30 Ph.D. students in his career as well as multiple undergraduate students. *Wik
An Oft-told story about him at Princeton is:
As a young faculty member at Princeton in the early 1960s, Browder quickly developed a reputation for intellectual intensity and uncompromising standards. One story often told by his former students concerns a graduate seminar where a student proudly presented what seemed to be a new result in homotopy theory.
The student finished the talk to polite applause. After a short pause, Browder quietly said something like:
“Yes, that’s interesting. But it isn’t a theorem yet.”
When the student asked what was missing, Browder pointed to a subtle gap—an implicit assumption about a map being smoothable that looked completely harmless, and that everyone else in the room had missed. Browder then sketched, on the spot, a counterexample showing that the argument failed unless an additional condition was imposed.
What impressed people was not just that he found the gap, but how quickly he located it, and how deeply it cut into the foundations of the argument. The student later said that moment permanently changed how he read papers and wrote proofs. *PB notes
*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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