Thursday, 24 September 2026

# 6 Fibonacci sequence, & some history,.,… from old math term notes

    Fibonacci's Sequence This sequence is named for Leonardo of Pisa (1175-about 1250). Now he is also called Leonardo Fibonacci, which seems to have been a contraction of Filius Bonacci, son of Bonacci, although the name was never applied during his lifetime. He was one of the three men who are most responsible for introducing the Arabic numerals and methods of algebra to the Western World. In his classic book Liber abaci he poses, and solves the famous rabbit problem which produces the now famous sequence, {0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21...} in which each value is the sum of the two previous values.

Although it is almost certain that he knew, Fibonacci never wrote that each term was found by adding the two previous terms. The first record of such a statement occurred almost 400 years after Fibonacci by Kepler. Almost another hundred years would pass before R. Simson, for whom the Simson line is mis-named, recognized that each term was the convergent of the continued fraction


. Since all the partial quotients are one, this is the simplest, and therefore slowest to converge, of all the infinite continued fractions. Yet another 150 years would pass before the explicit formula for fn would be found by J. Binet. Letting the golden ratio be represented by  he was able to express the Nth term of the series as . 

It is not clear when we began to call it the Fibonacci sequence. As late as the mid-1800's French Mathematician Gabrielle Lame' proved that the number of n-digit Fibonacci numbers is at least 4 and at most 5; but Lame' did not use the name "Fibonacci numbers". In fact, they were often called Lame's numbers because of his proof. Lame also contributed to the story of Fermat's Last Theorem in 1839 when he confirmed that there could be no integer values for which x7 + y7 = z7

According to Paul J. Nahin, author of AN IMAGINARY TALE, the name Fibonacci was not common until centuries after Leonardo's death, and during his lifetime he was called Bigollo, a slang term for a loafer drawn from the word bighellone. Julio Gonzalez Cabillon has written, "The name 'Fibonacci' most probably originated with the historian of mathematics Guillaume Libri (1803-1869)."

In September of 2001, Heinz Lueneburg posted a note that seemed to suggest that there may have been earlier uses than Julio suggested. He writes (with some editing by me):

I was in Rome and checked the Boncompagni paper
I quoted in my posting of August 28. The paper starts with the diskussion of what is known of persons of the Bonacci family other than Leonardo: One Matteo Bonacci is known because he is mentioned as a witness of the treaty Pisa and Genova signed on February 13, 1188.
Then he lists the names of authors who use the name "Leonardo Pisano".
Then he lists the names of authors who use the name "Fibonacci".
John Leslie 1820
Cossali 1797-99
Giovanni Gabriello Grimaldi 1790-1792
Libri 1838-1841
Chasles 1837
Nicollet 1811-1818
S. Ersch & I. G. Gruber 1818 and subsequent years
August de Morgan 1847. He also uses Bonacci.

Then he lists the names of authors who explain "Fibonacci = filio Bonacci"
Flaminio dal Borgo 1765
Tiraboschi 1822-1828
Ranieri Tempesti 1787
Giovanni Andres 1808-1817
Grimaldi 1790-1792
Libri 1838-1841

Then his arguments for Fibonacci = de filiis Bonacci follow.
Then he discusses the sobriquet Bigollone, Bigollo, Bigoloso.
Finally, in the major part of the paper, he discusses the various manuscripts of the various works of Fibonacci still in existence.
The question "who gets the credit?" is still open.
Regards, Heinz Lueneburg 

Those interested in learning more about the sequence may find a good reference at the Dr. Math Faq page. And there is a large body of information related to the Fibonacci sequence and the Golden Ratio at this page from England. The page is also the source of the photo at right of the statue to Fibonacci in the cemetary at the Duomo (Cathedral) in Pisa. 

A nice biorgraphy of Leonardo of Pisa can be found at a page by Clark Kimberling. The page shows an earlier picture of the same statue prior to its restoration when it stood on the street named for Fibonacci. My thanks to Gian Marco Rinaldi who corrected a previous mistake about the statue. He also introduced me to a web page where Alberto Rodríguez Santos maintains a site which has a history of the many moves of the statue around the city over the years. On my last day of my first visit to Pisa I missed a turn and came upon the Via Fibonacci quite by accident.

Wednesday, 23 September 2026

On This Day in Math - September 24

   


Scipio Ferro of Bologna well-nigh thirty years ago discovered this rule and handed it on to Antonio Maria Fior of Venice, whose contest with Niccolo Tartaglia of Brescia gave Niccolo occasion to discover it. He [Tartaglia] gave it to me in response to my entreaties, though withholding the demonstration. Armed with this assistance, I sought out its demonstration in [various] forms. This was very difficult.
~Girolamo Cardano


This is the 267th Day of the Year
267 = 46^2 - 43^2, and also 134^2 - 133^2

267 is the smallest number n such that n+ a googol is prime. (anyone want to find the next one? A quick mental problem for students, How do you know that 269+Googol will not be prime?))

267 can be written as the sum of five cubes in two ways, \( 267 = 1^3 + 2^3 + 2^3 + 5^3 + 5^3 = 2^3 + 2^3 + 2^3 + 3^3 + 6^3 \) 

Gauss proved that all numbers are the sum of, at most, three triangular numbers. (see July 10, events 1796) Can you find three triangular numbers that sum to 267?, can you find a sum with two? How many can you find in two or less?

Many people know that N! has N digits for N= 22, 23, and 24.  Surprisingly, to me, there are also three consecutive numbers for which N! has 2N digits, 266, 267, and 268. (this means 266! has 2*266 or 532 digits)  
 For N! has 3N digits, only two consecutive numbers, 2712 and 2713.For N! having 4N digits, there are again two consecutive  occurrences,  27175 and 27176. For 5N we go back to three consecutive digits,  271819, 271820, 271821  Note the increase by a power of ten as a limit, and the higher you go, the closer they approach  e * 10^n. It has been conjectured that there are always at two or three consecutive numbers for every digit, but never more. The first 100 such numbers are found at A058814 - OEIS Thanks to Derek Orr and Frank Kampas for some help and direction on this.  




EVENTS


1846 Neptune First observed… “It was on that date, back in 1846, that German Astronomer Johann Galle, assisted by graduate student Heinrich Louis d’Arrest, trained the 24 centimeter (9 inch) Fraunhofer Refractor of the Berlin Observatory on a patch of sky near the Aquarius-Capricorn border (see illustration below) and observed the small, blue disk of Neptune. On July 12th, 2011 Neptune completed exactly one orbit since its discovery. One hundred and sixty five years ago a series of events played out in France, England and Germany that would culminate in a watershed moment in the history science and astronomy, a discovery that would prove to be unique and unrepeatable. These events were rife with centuries-old rivalries, political conspiracy and intrigue, all mixed together with good mathematics, some good science, some bad science, some luck and much mayhem.” 



1852 The steam powered airship was made by Baptiste Jules Henri Jacques Giffard His airship, powered with a steam engine, and weighing over 180 kg (400 lb), it was the world's first passenger-carrying airship (then known as a dirigible, which was French ). Both practical and steerable, the hydrogen-filled airship was equipped with a 3 hp steam engine that drove a propeller. The engine was fitted with a downward-pointing funnel. The exhaust steam was mixed in with the combustion gases and it was hoped by these means to stop sparks rising up to the gas bag; he also installed a vertical rudder.
On 24 September 1852 Giffard made the first powered and controlled flight traveling 27 km from Paris to Élancourt. The wind was too strong to allow him to make way against it, so he was unable to return to the start. However, he was able to make turns and circles,[citation needed] proving that a powered airship could be steered and controlled. *Wik



1940 Westinghouse patent application for the Nimatron, a machine to play the game of Nim, is approved. Created by Eduard Condon, Edgewood Tawney, Gerald Tawney, and Willard Dorr, the machine would be featured in the Westinghouse exhibit at the 1940 World's Fair. The machine played 100,000 games at the fair, winning about 90,000. Most of its defeats were apparently administered by attendants to demonstrate that possibility. When the machine did lose it would "present its opponent with a token coin stamped with the words 'Nim Champ'" *historyofinformation.com


Do kids in math classrooms still learn and play Nim today?  someone in the classroom from grade 7-12 who would survey a class and tell me if any recognize the name or the game.





On this day in 2017, Maryna Viazovska was given a Clay Research Award in recognition of her groundbreaking work on sphere-packing problems in eight and twenty-four dimensions. In particular, she proved that the \(E_8\) lattice is an optimal solution in eight dimensions.

Maryna Sergiivna Viazovska is a Ukrainian mathematician known for her work in sphere packing. She is full professor and Chair of Number Theory at the Institute of Mathematics of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022

*Wik




BIRTHS


1501 Girolamo Cardano (24 Sep 1501; 21 Sep 1576) Famous for his Ars magna of 1545, which contained detailed and systematics algebraic solutions to cubic and quartic equations. He was one of the most colorful figures in the whole history of mathematics, as is well illustrated in his autobiography, The Book of My Life. *VFR
Italian physician, mathematician, and astrologer who was the first to give a clinical description of typhus fever. His book, Ars magna ("Great Art," 1545) was one of the great achievements in the history of algebra, in which he published the solutions to the cubic and quartic equations. His mechanical inventions included the combination lock, the compass gimbal consisting of three concentric rings, and the universal joint to transmit rotary motion at various angles (as used in present-day vehicles). He contributed to hydrodynamics and held that perpetual motion is impossible, except in celestial bodies. He published two encyclopedias of natural science and introduced the Cardan grille, a cryptographic tool (1550). *TIS
His gambling led him to formulate elementary rules in probability, making him one of the founders of the field.
One story says that it was by his own hand so as to fulfill his earlier astrological prediction of of his death on this date. *H. Eves, Introduction to the History of Mathematics, Pg 221...



1625 Jan de Witt (September 24, 1625, Dordrecht - August 20, 1672) murdered by a mob from the (William of) Orange faction. For the previous twenty years he served as grand pensionary in Holland, essentially the prime minister of the Netherlands. Consequently this talented mathematician had little time to devote to mathematics. He wrote the first systematic account of the analytic geometry of the straight line and conics. It was published in Van Schooten’s second Latin edition of Descartes’ Geometrie *VFR de Witt and his brother were both killed by a mob which was probably supported by William III of Orange. At the very least, as the Wikipedia articles states, "he protected and rewarded the killers." After a previous attempt on his life, he was lured by a forged letter to the cell where his brother was held, and both were hanged and then their bodies were mutilated. The story of their deaths are a critical element in the plot of Alexander Dumas' "The Black Tulip". *Wik




1766 John Farey, Sr. (1766 – January 6, 1826) was an English geologist and writer. However, he is better known for a mathematical construct, the Farey sequence named after him.
Farey's most famous work is General View of the Agriculture and Minerals of Derbyshire (3 volumes 1811-17) for the Board of Agriculture. In the first of these volumes (1811) he gave an able account of the upper part of the British series of strata, and a masterly exposition of the Carboniferous and other strata of Derbyshire. In this classic work, and in a paper published in the Philosophical Magazine, vol. 51, 1818, p. 173, on 'Mr Smith's Geological Claims stated', he zealously called attention to the importance of the discoveries of William Smith.
As well as being remembered by historians of geology, his name is more widely known by the Farey sequence which he noted as a result of his interest in the mathematics of sound (Philosophical Magazine, vol. 47, 1816, pp 385-6).
Farey died in London. Subsequently his widow offered his geological collection to the British Museum, which rejected it, and it was dispersed.*Wik
Farey diagram to F9 represented with circular arcs. In the SVG image, hover over a curve to highlight it and its terms.*Wik



1844 Max Noether born (24 September 1844 – 13 December 1921) . One of the leaders of nineteenth century algebraic geometry. Although himself a very distinguished mathematician  (He has been called "one of the finest mathematicians of the nineteenth century").  his daughter Emmy Noether was to bring greater innovation to mathematics than did her father. *SAU

Brill and Max Noether developed alternative proofs using algebraic methods for much of Riemann's work on Riemann surfaces. Brill–Noether theory went further by estimating the dimension of the space of maps of given degree d from an algebraic curve to projective space Pn. In birational geometry, Noether introduced the fundamental technique of blowing up in order to prove resolution of singularities for plane curves.

Noether made major contributions to the theory of algebraic surfaces. Noether's formula is the first case of the Riemann-Roch theorem for surfaces. The Noether inequality is one of the main restrictions on the possible discrete invariants of a surface. *Wik



1862 Winifred Edgerton Merrill​  (September 24, 1862 – September 6, 1951) made a vast impact on the male orientated world of mathematics. She left behind the Victorian ideal that a wellborn woman should stay at home, and went about continuing her education in mathematics to Ph.D. level. This was a fantastic achievement and Merrill became the first American woman to obtain a Ph.D. in mathematics. *SAU

She earned her B.A. degree from Wellesley College in 1883, and taught for a time at Sylvanus Reed's School. She continued her interest in astronomy by independently using data from the Harvard observatory to calculate the orbit of the Pons-Brooks comet of 1883. She then appealed to Columbia University for permission to use their telescope. On February 4, 1884 the members of the board of trustees agreed, considering her an "exceptional case" and cautioning her "not to disturb the male students." She was required to work as a laboratory assistant to the director of the observatory.

She studied math and astronomy at Columbia which at the time was an all-male institution. Her teachers included Professor John Krom Rees, Professor J. Howard Van Amringe and Professor William Guy Peck. After her first appeal to receive a degree was rejected by the trustees, she was advised by President Frederick A. P. Barnard to speak to each of the trustees individually. At the next meeting, she was awarded the PhD with high honors from Columbia University in 1886, by a unanimous vote.



1870 Georges Claude (24 Sep 1870; 23 May 1960) The French engineer, chemist, and inventor of the neon light, Georges Claude, was born in Paris. He invented the neon light, which was the forerunner of the fluorescent light. Claude was the first to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas, around 1902 and make a neon lamp ("Neon" from Greek "neos," meaning "new gas.") He first publicly displayed the neon lamp on 11 Dec 1910 in Paris. His French company Claude Neon, introduced neon signs to the U.S. with two "Packard" signs for a Packard car dealership in Los Angeles, purchased by Earle C. Anthony for $24,000. *TIS



1891 William F. Friedman (24 Sep 1891; 12 Nov 1969) one of the world's greatest cryptologists, who helped decipher enemy codes from World War I to World War II. He was born as Wolfe Friedman.in Kishinev, Russia. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1893. Originally trained as an agricultural geneticist, he had become interested in cryptology. During World War I, with his wife Elizebeth, he set up a cryptology school for military personnel, which led to appointment by the U.S. as head of the Signal Intelligence Service (1930). He broke the Japanese "Purple" code (1937-40), thus allowing Americans to read much of Japan's secret messages during World War II. *TIS There is a bust of him at the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade Maryland on which he is identified as the "Dean of American Cryptology". 


William and Elizabeth around 1917







1896 Tadeusz Ważewski (24 September 1896 – 5 September 1972) was a Polish mathematician.
Ważewski made important contributions to the theory of ordinary differential equations, partial differential equations, control theory and the theory of analytic spaces. He is most famous for applying the topological concept of retract, introduced by Karol Borsuk to the study of the solutions of differential equations. *Wik
Ważewski studied at the Jagiellonian University in 1914–1920. He started from physics but very quickly turned to mathematics. Ważewski was a pupil of Zaremba.
He spent three years in Paris and got a doctoral diploma from Sorbona.
Ważewski’s research started from topology. In his doctoral dissertation he obtained interesting results on dendrites (locally connected continua not containing simple closed curves). *Ciesielski & Pogoda, EMS Newsletter December 2012



1898 Charlotte Moore Sitterly (24 Sep 1898; 3 Mar 1990) astrophysicist who organized, analyzed, and published definitive books on the solar spectrum and spectral line multiplets. From 1945 to age 90, she conducted this work at the U.S. National Bureau of Standards and the Naval Research Laboratory. She detected that technetium, an unstable element (previously known only as a result of laboratory experiments with nuclear reactions) exists in nature. She made major contributions to the compilation of tables for atomic-energy levels associated with optical spectra, which are now standard reference material. As instruments carried in space rockets provided new data in the ultraviolet, she extended these tables beyond the optical range. She was awarded the Bruce Medal in 1990.*TIS

Inscription.   Prominent authority on astronomy and author of more than one hundred books and articles. Sitterly was a career physicist with the Bureau of Standards, U.S. Department of Commerce. She received the American Astronomical Society award in 1937 and was the first woman elected to the Royal Astronomical Society of Great Britain, 1949. Born here in Ercildoun, Dr. Sitterly was a lifelong Quaker and attended Fallowfield Friends Meeting nearby. Erected 2005 by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.





1904 Evan T Davies graduated from the University of Wales at Aberystwyth and then studied in Rome and Paris. After lecturing at King's College London he was appointed to a professorship in Southampton. He worked in Differential Geometry and the Calculus of Variations.*SAU


1906 Pol(idore) Swings, (24 Sep 1906; 28 Oct, 1983) Belgian astrophysicist, made spectroscopic studies to identify elements and structure of stars and comets. He discovered the first interstellar molecule, the CH radical (1937). In comet atmospheres he studied the "Swings bands" - certain carbon emission lines. In 1941, with a slit spectrograph he identified a "Swings effect" in the violet CN bands (3875 A) - a fluorescence partly due to solar radiation that shows emmission line excitation differences dependant on the Doppler shift caused by a comet's motion relative to the Sun. He co-authored an Atlas of Cometary Spectra with Leo Haser in 1956. *TIS



1923 Raoul Bott,(September 24, 1923 – December 20, 2005) was a Hungarian mathematician known for numerous basic contributions to geometry in its broad sense. He is best known for his Bott periodicity theorem, the Morse–Bott functions which he used in this context, and the Borel–Bott–Weil theorem. *Wik

In mathematics, the Bott periodicity theorem describes a periodicity in the homotopy groups of classical groups, discovered by Raoul Bott (1957, 1959), which proved to be of foundational significance for much further research, in particular in K-theory of stable complex vector bundles, as well as the stable homotopy groups of spheres. Bott periodicity can be formulated in numerous ways, with the periodicity in question always appearing as a period-2 phenomenon, with respect to dimension, for the theory associated to the unitary group. 



1925  Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge  (24 September 1925 – 26 January 2010), an English/American astronomer and astrophysicist, was born in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire . Burbidge earned his PhD from University College London. He met there Margaret Burbidge, an observational astronomer, and they were married. Eventually both moved to the United States and taught and worked at Mount Wilson Observatories and Caltech, before they both accepted permanent positions at the University of California, San Diego, where Geoffrey taught from 1962 until his retirement. He was director of Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona from 1978 to 1984.

Before they moved to the United States, Geoffrey and Margaret worked at Cambridge University with Fred Hoyle and an American physicist, Willy Fowler. This was not long after the cosmogonical wars had begun, with George Gamow championing the Big Bang hypothesis, while Hoyle was in favor of a steady-state theory, which did not require a Big Bang to explain the expansion of the universe. Gamow’s Big Bang proposal also sought to explain the origin of the elements as byproducts of the Big Bang, so that heavier elements were cooked up in rapid succession by the addition of protons and neutrons in a process now known as nucleosynthesis. Since steady-state advocates had no Big Bang to serve as a cosmic cooker, they needed to explain nucleosynthesis some other way.




The two Burbidges, Fowler, and Hoyle worked on the problem in Cambridge in 1954-55, and published a now-famous paper in 1957 which put forward the idea of stellar nucleosynthesis. Elements, they argued, are slowly built up by fusion in the cores of stars, so that hydrogen fuses to helium, then to carbon, oxygen, silicon, all of the elements up to iron. The remaining elements are byproducts of the energy released in supernova explosions, which not only produce the rest of the elements up to uranium, but explode them out into the interstellar medium, where they become the building blocks for future stars.





The paper was written at Caltech in 1956, primarily by the Burbidges and Fowler, and published in Reviews of Modern Physics in 1957. It was over 100 pages long, with lots of supporting data to show that chemical abundances in the universe have changed over time (which should not happen according to Gamow). The paper was called “Synthesis of the elements in stars,” and the authors were listed, in order, as E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and F. Hoyle (second image). This was almost immediately abbreviated to B2FH by readers (pronounced B-squared-F-H), and the paper is usually referred to as the B2FH paper. I don’t know if Geoffrey ever did so, but if asked which author he was, he could have responded: “I was the square” (or, less dramatically, “I was the 2”).


The authors of B2FH, left to right: Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge, Willy Fowler, and Fred Hoyle, photograph, 1971, exhibition at St. John’s College, Cambridge, 1971, photo by Don Clayton (joh.cam.ac.uk)



The paper has become a milestone paper because B2FH were right – only hydrogen and helium were byproducts of the Big Bang; all of the 90 other elements were made in stars – normal stars, red giants, white dwarfs, and supernovas. Nearly all nucleosynthesis in the cosmos is stellar nucleosynthesis. Gamow turned out to be right about the Big Bang, but not about the origin of the elements. Credit for that goes to the Burbidges, Hoyle, and Fowler. We include a group photo of the four, 14 years after B2FH, on the occasion of Fowler’s birthday.  *William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. 



1930 John Watts Young (September 24, 1930 – January 5, 2018) astronaut who was the commander of the first ever Space Shuttle mission (STS-1, 12 Apr 1981), walked on the Moon during the Apollo 16 mission (21 Apr 1972), made the first manned flight of the Gemini spacecraft with Virgil Grissom. *TIS

 He is the only astronaut to fly on four different classes of spacecraft: Gemini, the Apollo command and service module, the Apollo Lunar Module and the Space Shuttle.




1945 Ian Nicholas Stewart FRS (24 September, 1945 - ) is an Emeritus Professor   Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England, and a widely known popular-science and science-fiction writer.
While in the sixth form at school, Stewart came to the attention of the mathematics teacher. The teacher had Stewart sit mock A-level examinations without any preparation along with the upper-sixth students; Stewart placed first in the examination. This teacher arranged for Stewart to be admitted to Cambridge on a scholarship to Churchill College, where he obtained a BA in mathematics. Stewart then went to the University of Warwick for his doctorate, on completion of which in 1969 he was offered an academic position at Warwick, where he presently professes mathematics. He is well known for his popular expositions of mathematics and his contributions to catastrophe theory.
While at Warwick he edited the mathematical magazine Manifold. He also wrote a column called "Mathematical Recreations" for Scientific American magazine for several years.
Stewart has held visiting academic positions in Germany (1974), New Zealand (1976), and the U.S. (University of Connecticut 1977–78, University of Houston 1983–84). *Wik






DEATHS


1054 Hermann of Reichenau (1013 July 18 – 1054 September 24), was a German mathematician who important for the transmission of Arabic mathematics, astronomy and scientific instruments into central Europe. Hermann introduced three important instruments into central Europe, knowledge of which came from Arabic Spain. He introduced the astrolabe, a portable sundial and a quadrant with a cursor.
His works include De Mensura Astrolabii and De Utilitatibus Astrolabii (some parts of these works may not have been written by Hermann).
Hermann's contributions to mathematics include a treatise dealing with multiplication and division, although this book is written entirely with Roman numerals. He also wrote on a complicated game based on Pythagorean number theory which was derived from Boethius. 

The game was played with counters on a board; capture of the opponent's pieces was dependent on the determination of arithmetical ratios and arithmetic, geometrical, and harmonic progressions. This game, which enjoyed a considerable vogue during the Middle Ages, has been attributed to Pythagoras, Boethius, and Gerbert.*SAU




1651 Etienne Pascal died (Clermont, May 2, 1588 - Paris, September 24, 1651). The Pascal limacon is named after him, and not after his famous son who later came blazing on the scene. *VFR Étienne is famed as the discoverer of the curve the Limaçon of Pascal. The curve, so named by Roberval, can be used to trisect an angle. He discovered the curve in around 1637. (Limacon is from the Latin word for a snail the curve is a roulette formed when a circle rolls around the outside of another circle.) In a letter (see Lettre d'Étienne Pascal et Roberval à Fermat, samedi 16 août 1636) he actively argued in favour of Fermat's De maximis et minimis in opposition to Descartes who viewed the work in a very negative light. *SAU




1938 Lev Genrikhovich Schnirelman ( 2 ​​January 1905 in Gomel ; 24 September 1938 in Moscow )  He was a Belarussian mathematician who made important contributions to the Goldbach conjecture. Using these ideas of compactness of a sequence of natural numbers he was able to prove a weak form of the Goldbach conjecture showing that every number is the sum of ≤ 20 primes.*SAU

On 7 June 1742, the Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach wrote a letter to Leonhard Euler (letter XLIII), in which he proposed the following conjecture: Every integer that can be written as the sum of two primes can also be written as the sum of as many primes as one wishes, until all terms are units.

Goldbach was following the now-abandoned (mostly) convention of considering 1 to be a prime number, so that a sum of units would be a sum of primes. He then proposed a second conjecture in the margin of his letter, which implies the first: Every integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of three primes.



1945 Hans (Wilhelm) Geiger (30 Sep 1882, 24 Sep  1945) was a German physicist who introduced the Geiger counter, the first successful detector of individual alpha particles and other ionizing radiations. After earning his Ph.D. at the University of Erlangen in 1906, he collaborated at the University of Manchester with Ernest Rutherford. He used the first version of his particle counter, and other detectors, in experiments that led to the identification of the alpha particle as the nucleus of the helium atom and to Rutherford's statement (1912) that the nucleus occupies a very small volume in the atom. Geiger returned to Germany in 1912 and continued to investigate cosmic rays, artificial radioactivity, and nuclear fission. *TIS




1885 Pauline Sperry (March 5, 1885 – September 24, 1967)  born in Peabody, Massachusetts. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College in 1906 she taught several years before doing graduate work at the University of Chicago under the projective differential geometer Ernest Julius Wilczynski (1876–1932). Her doctoral thesis, "Properties of a certain projectively defined two-parameter family of curves on a general surface", drew on his work as the founder of the American school of projective differential geometry. After receiving her Ph.D. in 1916 she taught at the University of California at Berkeley, becoming the first woman to be promoted to assistant professor in mathematics (in 1923). In 1950 she was fired for refusing to sign a loyalty oath.  

At the height of McCarthyism, the Board of Regents required university employees to sign a loyalty oath. Sperry, Hans Lewy, and others who refused were barred from teaching without pay in 1950. In the case Tolman v. Underhill, the California Supreme Court ruled in 1952 the loyalty oath unconstitutional and reinstated those who refused to sign. Sperry was reinstated with the title emeritus associate professor and later awarded back pay. *Wik



1999 Anneli Cahn Lax (23 Feb 1922 in Katowice, Poland - 24 Sept 1999 in New York City, New York, USA) Anneli Cahn was born in Katowice, then a German city, but now part of Poland, on February 23, 1922. Her family fled Hitler’s regime in 1935 and settled in New York. She married Peter Lax, a fellow mathematician, in 1948. Their lives together included a shared love for mathematics. Perhaps her most important contribution to mathematics was as editor of the New Mathematics Library. The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 was a shock to the American scientific community, a shock felt on every level. Much thought was devoted to the education of a new generation who would accelerate the pace of American scientific productivity. Out of this endeavor grew the New Mathematical Library. The notion was to make accessible to interested high school students, and to a more general public, deep results in mathematics described by research mathematicians. (This sort of work had long been going on in Eastern Europe.) Lax was asked to take over as general editor for this series, and under her guidance it grew to be the foremost mathematical expository series in the language. Upon her death it was renamed in her honor. *Mark Saul, Obituary for the AMS VOl 47,#7





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

Tuesday, 22 September 2026

On This Day in Math - September 23

   



We have a habit in writing articles published in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about the blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn't any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get to do the work.
~Feynman, Richard Philips Nobel Lecture, 1966.

The 266th day of the year; 266 can be expressed as 222 in base 11.

266 is the sum of four cubes,  266=2^3+2^3+5^3+5^3 

It is also the index of the largest proper subgroups of the sporadic group known as the Janko group J1 

266 is the sum of fseven consecutive Triangular numbers.  15 + 21 + 28 + 36 + 45 + 55 + 66. 

 On Sept , 1796 Gauss's entry "EγPHKA! num=Δ+Δ+Δ" in his scientific diary, recording his discovery that every positive integer is the sum of (at most) three triangular numbers. Can you find three for 266?  Can you find three or less in more than one way?

266 has a digit sum of 12, a divisor of 266, so it is a Joy-Giver number.

Many people know that N! has N digits for N= 22, 23, and 24. (22 ! = 1124000727777607680000) 
 Surprisingly, to me, there are also three consecutive numbers for which N! has 2N digits, 266, 267, and 268.  For emphasis for the student, 266! has 2x266 or 532 digits, 

For N! has 3N digits, only two consecutive numbers, 2712 and 2713.For N! having 4N digits, there are again two consecutive  occurrences,  27175 and 27176. For 5N we go back to three consecutive digits,  271819, 271820, 271821  Note the increase by a power of ten as a limit, and the higher you go, the closer they approach  e * 10^n. It has been conjectured that there are always at two or three consecutive numbers for every digit, but never more. The first 100 such numbers are found at A058814 - OEIS Thanks to Derek Orr and Frank Kampas for some help and direction on this.  






EVENTS

1574 Tycho Brahe's rising fame while he lived in Copenhagen brings unwanted lecturing demands. In the capital his rising fame had attracted considerable attention, and some young nobles who were studying at the University requested him to deliver a course of lectures on some mathematical subject on which there were no lectures being given at that time. His friends Dancey and Pratensis urged him to consent to this proposal, but Tycho was not inclined to do so, until the King had also requested him to gratify the wishes of the students. He then yielded, and the lectures were commenced on the 23rd of September 1574, with an oration on the antiquity and importance of the mathematical sciences. *TYCHO BRAHE, A PICTURE OF SCIENTIFIC LIFE AND WORK IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY BY J. L. E. DREYER


*MAA




1647 Descartes, on a visit on September 23-24 to France from Holland, met with Pascal. On this occasion Descartes may have recommended the experiment of noting the variation in the height of the barometer with altitude. [J. F. Scott, The Scientific Work of Ren´e Descartes, p. 6] *VFR
His visit only lasted two days and the two argued about the vacuum which Descartes did not believe in. Pascal had done a series of experiments on atmospheric pressure and proved to his satisfaction that a vacuum existed.Descartes wrote, rather cruelly, in a letter to Huygens after this visit that Pascal, " ...has too much vacuum in his head. " *SAU
Also present were Professor Roberval, of the College de France, a voluble anti-Cartesian, and Pascal's younger sister Jacqueline. Pascal brought out a calculating machine, his recent invention, and demonstrated its ability to add and subtract. Descartes was impressed. The talk turned to the vacuum. Pascal described his experiment; Descartes expressed doubt - a polite skirmish that might have ended there. But Roberval injected his opinion, and a heated argument ensued. Descartes took his leave.

The next morning, however, he returned - not Descartes the philosopher this time, but Descartes the physician. He sat for three hours by his patient's side, listened to his complaints, examined him, prescribed soups and rest. When Pascal was sick of staying in bed, Descartes said, he would be nearly well. Their views would remain opposed, but it was the supreme rationalist in his role as kindly doctor whom Pascal would later remember, and who may have been in his mind when he observed, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of"
*The Independent UK, Saturday 15 June 1996
The Pascaline, also called Arithmetic Machine, the first calculator or adding machine to be produced in any quantity and actually used. It was built by Blaise Pascal between 1642 and 1644. It could only do addition and subtraction, with numbers being entered by manipulating its dials. Pascal invented the machine for his father, a tax collector, so it was the first business machine too (if one does not count the abacus). He built 50 of them over the next 10 years.






1673 Hooke in his diary, "bought Pappus in Cornhill for 11sh. at ye crown." *Robert Hooke ‏@HookesLondon
Suspect but am not sure that this was Commandino's translation of Pappus's Mathematicae Collectiones

A 1589 copy was sold at Swan Galleries, but I can not find the date or price..... Anyone????  Bueller??

1763 The Princess Louise sailed for Barbados on 23 September. During the voyage Maskelyne and Charles Green took many lunar-distance observations (with Maskelyne later claiming that his final observation was within half of degree of the truth) and struggled a couple of times with the marine chair. Maskelyne’s conclusion was that the Jupiter’s satellites method of finding longitude would simply never work at sea because the telescope magnification required was far too high for use in a moving ship.
On 29 December 1763 he wrote his brother Edmund, reporting his safe arrival on 7 November after “an agreeable passage of 6 weeks”. He noted that he had been “very sufficiently employed in making the observations recommended to me by the Commissioners of Longitude” and that it was at times “rather too fatiguing”. *Board of Longitude project, Greenwich
 A marine chair made by Christopher Irwin that was intended to steady an observer to allow him to measure the positions of Jupiter's satellites at sea. (Eclipses of Jupiter's moons were already used as a celestial timekeeper to determine longitude on land: these were the observations Maskelyne made at Barbados.)


1740 In a letter to Euler dated August 29th, 1740, Philippe Naudé (the Younger) asked Euler in how many ways a number n can be written as a sum of positive integers. In his answer written on September 12th (23rd), Euler explained that if we denote
this “partition number” by p(n), then

*Correspondence of Leonhard Euler with Christian Goldbach, Springer


1793 The new decimalized calendar was presented to the Jacobin-controlled National Convention on 23 September 1793, which adopted it on 24 October 1793 and also extended it proleptically to its epoch of 22 September 1792. The French Republican Calendar was a calendar created and implemented during the French Revolution, and used by the French government for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and for 18 days by the Paris Commune in 1871. There were twelve months (??? Why, with all this decimalation, not go all the way with ten months), each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the solar or tropical year were placed after the months at the end of each year. The new system was designed in part to remove all religious and royalist influences from the calendar, and was part of a larger attempt at decimalisation in France. *Wik
The Months of the French Decimal Calendar

Autumn:
Vendémiaire (from French vendange, derived from Latin vindemia, "vintage"), starting 22, 23, or 24 September
Brumaire (from French brume, "mist", from Latin brūma, "winter solstice; winter; winter cold"), starting 22, 23, or 24 October
Frimaire (from French frimas, "frost"), starting 21, 22, or 23 November

Winter:
Nivôse (from Latin nivosus, "snowy"), starting 21, 22, or 23 December
Pluviôse (from French pluvieux, derived from Latin pluvius, "rainy"), starting 20, 21, or 22 January
Ventôse (from French venteux, derived from Latin ventosus, "windy"), starting 19, 20, or 21 February

Spring:
Germinal (from French germination), starting 21 or 22 March
Floréal (from French fleur, derived from Latin flos, "flower"), starting 20 or 21 April
Prairial (from French prairie, "meadow"), starting 20 or 21 May

Summer:
Messidor (from Latin messis, "harvest"), starting 19 or 20 June
Thermidor (or Fervidor*) (from Greek thermon, "summer heat"), starting 19 or 20 July
Fructidor (from Latin fructus, "fruit"), starting 18 or 19 August




1815 The Great September Gale of 1815 came ashore in New England on this date. This was the first hurricane, although the word had not been created yet, to hit New England in 180 yrs. In the aftermath of the Great Gale, the concept of a hurricane as a "moving vortex" was presented by John Farrar, Hollis Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University. In an 1819 paper he concluded that the storm "appears to have been a moving vortex and not the rushing forward of a great body of the atmosphere". The word "hurricane" comes from Spanish huracán, from the Taino hurakán, “god of the storm.” While the Taino have been essentially wiped out by disease brought by the Spanish, there are still several words from the language remaining in English. Two of my favorites, Barbecue and Hammock. *Assorted sources (The Merriem Webster gives the first use of Hurricane in 1555, the same year as another Taino word, Yuca,  was first used in English.)
Engraving: The Great Storm of 1815 strikes Providence, Rhode Island. From an old painting in possession of the Rhode Island Historical Society.



1831 Faraday writes to Richard Phillips, “ I am busy just now again on Electro-Magnetism and think I have got hold of a good thing but can't say; it may be a weed instead of a fish that after all my labour I may at last pull up.” (It was a fish Michael!) * Michael Faraday, Bence Jones (ed.), The Life and Letters of Faraday (1870), Vol. 2, 3
One of Faraday's 1831 experiments demonstrating induction. The liquid battery (right) sends an electric current through the small coil (A). When it is moved in or out of the large coil (B), its magnetic field induces a momentary voltage in the coil, which is detected by the galvanometer (G).


*Wik



1846 Neptune first seen. Le Verrier's most famous achievement is his prediction of the existence of the then unknown planet Neptune, using only mathematics and astronomical observations of the known planet Uranus. Encouraged by physicist Arago, Director of the Paris Observatory, Le Verrier was intensely engaged for months in complex calculations to explain small but systematic discrepancies between Uranus's observed orbit and the one predicted from the laws of gravity of Newton. At the same time, but unknown to Le Verrier, similar calculations were made by John Couch Adams in England. Le Verrier announced his final predicted position for Uranus's unseen perturbing planet publicly to the French Academy on 31 August 1846, two days before Adams's final solution, which turned out to be 12° off the mark, was privately mailed to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Le Verrier transmitted his own prediction by 18 September letter to Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory. The letter arrived five days later, and the planet was found with the Berlin Fraunhofer refractor that same evening, 23 September 1846, by Galle and Heinrich d'Arrest within 1° of the predicted location near the boundary between Capricorn and Aquarius. Le Verrier will be known by the phrase attributed to Arago: "the man who discovered a planet with the point of his pen." [Le Verrier also noted that the perihelion of Mercury was advancing more rapidly than Newtonian physics could account for, but he proposed in 1845 that this was due to a planet between Mercury and the sun which he called Vulcan…..oops] *Wik (It is a strange twist of fate that he died on the date on which his most famous prediction was verified, See below under deaths)(Another coincidence is that the Director of the Berlin Observatory where Galle observed the new planet, was Johann Encke, whose birth was on this date.  One story says he wasn't interested in the proposed planet, but yielded to Galle's request to seek it out because Encke was hurrying home for a birthday celebration.)
Within 17 days of the discovery of Neptune, William Lassell of Liverpool would discover the planet's largest moon, to be named Triton, on October 10.



Berlin Fraunhofer refractor




1884 Patent filed for Hollerith tabulating machine. It was used in the 1890 census and became the model for computer cards. *VFR  
The tabulating machine was an electromechanical machine designed to assist in summarizing information stored on punched cards. Invented by Herman Hollerith.  

*Wik *CHM



1983 The Los Angeles Times reported that David Slowinski of Cray research has found the 29th Mersenne prime, 2132,049-1. It turned out that this was actually the 30th, as the 29th would turn out to be 2110,503 -1 found by Walter Colquitt and  Luke Welsh almost five years later on Jan 28, 1988 *VFR & Wik

Luther Welsh remembers vividly the moment his number came up.
On Feb. 1, Welsh received a telephone call at his El Toro home from computer scientist Walter Colquitt in Houston. Colquitt told him that, after a 1 1/2-year search with the help of a huge computer in Houston, they had discovered the 31st known Mersenne prime number.

“When Walter called me . . . I yelled so loudly he could have heard me back in Houston without the telephone,” Welsh recalled in an interview last week.

Within the world of mathematics, Welsh and Colquitt are in select company. “Hey, I’m on the same small list (of discoverers of Mersenne primes) as Euclid,” said Welsh, referring to the ancient Greek scholar.

As of January 2025, there are 52 known Mersenne primes. The most recently discovered Mersenne prime, the 52nd, was found in October 2024. This latest discovery is a number with over 41 million digits. 

and the man they were named for, Marin Mersenne








BIRTHS

1623  Stefano degli Angeli (Venice, September 23, 1623 – Padova, October 11, 1697) was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, and Jesuate.

He was member of the Catholic Order of the Jesuats (Jesuati). In 1668 the order was suppressed by Pope Clement IX. Angeli was a student of Bonaventura Cavalieri. From 1662 until his death he taught at the University of Padua.

From 1654 to 1667 he devoted himself to the study of geometry, continuing the research of Cavalieri and Evangelista Torricelli based on the method of Indivisibles. He then moved on to mechanics, where he often found himself in conflict with Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Giovanni Riccioli.
Showing an early interest in mathematics and the concept of infinitesimals, Angeli studied and wrote on the behavior of various curves and physical applications of mathematics. In his Accessionis ad Stereometriam et Mecanicam (1662), he examined various solids and determined their centers of gravity.






1768 William Wallace  (23 September 1768, Dysart in Fife – 28 April 1843, Edinburgh) was a Scottish mathematician and astronomer who invented the eidograph. (A form of pantograph for reproducing images on a different scale) He mainly worked in the field of geometry and in 1799 became the first to publish the concept of the Simson line, which erroneously was attributed to Robert Simson by Poncelet. In 1807 he proved a result about polygons with an equal area, that later became known as the Bolyai–Gerwien theorem. His most important contribution to British mathematics however was, that he was one of the first mathematicians introducing and promoting the advancement of the continental European version of calculus in Britain.
Wallace's grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard, Edinburgh, 2012
 He was assisted in his studies by John Robison (1739–1805) and John Playfair, to whom his abilities had become known. After various changes of situation, dictated mainly by a desire to gain time for study, he became assistant teacher of mathematics in the academy of Perth in 1794, and this post he exchanged in 1803 for a mathematical mastership in the Royal Military College at Great Marlow (afterwards at Sandhurst with a recommendation by Playfair). In 1819 he was chosen to succeed John Leslie (or John Playfair?) in the chair of mathematics at Edinburgh.
He developed a reputation for being an excellent teacher. Among his students was Mary Somerville. In 1838 he retired from the university due to ill health. He died in Edinburgh and is buried in Greyfriars Churchyard.  *Wik

"There was an especially active period of invention in Scotland in the 1820s when heated controversy surrounded instruments such as Andrew Smith’s apograph and his “new” pantograph, as well as John Dunn’s pantograph. The most successful and long-lived of these new designs was the eidograph devised by the Edinburgh professor of mathematics William Wallace in 1821. Like the pantograph, the eidograph incorporated tracing, drawing, and fixed points, all three of which remained in a single line during operation. However Wallace’s arrangement of these components was novel. The fixed weight was placed centrally and supported a graduated bar at each end of which was a pivoted, adjustable rod, one bearing the tracer and the other the drawing point. A fine chain (later a steel band) was used to link the two rods and ensure that they moved in parallel. Wallace was able to dispense with the pantograph’s castors because his instrument was balanced around the central weight. At the time Wallace was working on the eidograph, Edinburgh was a center for publishing and engraving, and among its characteristic products were multivolume encyclopedias. These were expected to be heavily illustrated with engraved plates whose images would usually be copied from existing publications. Al-though it was never developed commercially, Wallace devised a special form of eidograph to produce reversed images that were engraved directly onto copper plates for printing. The simpler form of eidograph was manufactured by the London maker Robert Bate and then, in a reengineered version, by Alexander Adie. It was further improved by W.F. Stanley in the second half of the nineteenth century and, in parallel with the pantograph, continued to figure in instrument makers’ catalogs into the twentieth century."

(Ref: Bud J. & Warner D.J. (Ed). Instruments of Science – An Historical Encyclopedia. The Science Museum, London and The National Museum of American History, 1998.)
The Eidograph (sometimes ideograph) is from the same Greek root as Idol. The reproduced image is called an eidolan.





1785 Georg Scheutz (1785-1873), who with his son built a commercially available calculator based on Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, is born in Stockholm. After reading about the Difference Engine in 1833, Scheutz and son Edvard worked on a version that could process 15-digit numbers and calculate using fourth-order differences.  In 1851 they obtained funds from government to build an improved model, which was created in 1853 (was roughly the size of a piano), and subsequently demonstrated at the World's Fair in Paris, 1855.  The result won the gold medal at the Paris Exhibition in 1855 and was used by the Dudley Observatory in New York to calculate a few tables. A second copy was used by the British Registrar General to calculate tables for the developing life insurance industry. *CHM




1791 Johann Franz Encke (23 Sep 1791; 26 Aug 1865) German astronomer who in 1819 established the period of the comet now known by as Encke's Comet. At at 3.3 years it has the shortest period of any known. *TIS It was first recorded by Pierre Méchain in 1786, but it was not recognized as a periodic comet until 1819 when its orbit was computed by Encke. Comet Encke is believed to be the originator of several related meteor showers known as the Taurids (which are encountered as the Northern and Southern Taurids across November, and the Beta Taurids in late June and early July). Near-Earth object 2004 TG10 may be a fragment of Encke. Some also think it may have already had a part of it break off and hit the earth. "In 1908 Comet Encke was making a close pass near the Earth. It is believed that a 100 meter (m) diameter chunk of ice from Encke broke off and plowed into the atmosphere over the Stony Tunguska River in Siberia. The result was an air-burst explosion liberating the equivalent of 600 Hiroshima-size nuclear bombs, so much energy that sensitive instruments around the world recorded the resulting shock waves. Trees in the Siberian forests were leveled for dozens of miles around, and horses 400 miles away were knocked from their feet. There was no known loss of human life, but this is only because the impact site was so isolated. If the same ice chunk had, by chance, struck over a major population center, Tokyo, or New York, or Bombay, mega-deaths would have resulted. " *greatdreams.com

Encke might well have been the first to observe Neptune, but it was his birthdate, and so he left it to Galle to seek it out and went home to a birthday celebration.




1819 Armand-Hippolyte-Louis Fizeau (23 Sep 1819; 18 Sep 1896) French physicist who was the first to measure the speed of light successfully without using astronomical calculations (1849). Fizeau sent a narrow beam of light between gear teeth on the edge of a rotating wheel. The beam then traveled to a mirror 8 km/5 mi away and returned to the wheel where, if the spin were fast enough, a tooth would block the light. Knowing this time from the rotational speed of the wheel, and the mirror's distance, Fizeau directly measured the speed of light. He also found that light travels faster in air than in water, which confirmed the wave theory of light, and that the motion of a star affects the position of the lines in its spectrum. With Jean Foucault, he proved the wave nature of the Sun's heat rays by showing their interference (1847).*TIS






1851 Ellen Amanda Hayes (September 23, 1851 – October 27, 1930) was an American mathematician and astronomer. Born in Granville, Ohio (pop 1,127 in the 1880 census) she graduated from Oberlin College in 1878 and began teaching at Adrian College. From 1879 to her 1916 retirement, she taught at Wellesley College, where she became head of the mathematics department in 1888 and head of the new department in applied mathematics in 1897.Hayes was also active in astronomy, determining the orbit of newly discovered 267 Tirza while studying at the Leander McCormick Observatory at the University of Virginia.
She wrote a number of mathematics textbooks. She also wrote Wild Turkeys and Tallow Candles (1920), an account of life in Granville, and The Sycamore Trail (1929), a historical novel.
Hayes was a controversial figure not just for being a rare female mathematics professor in 19th century America, but for her embrace of radical causes like questioning the Bible and gender clothing conventions, suffrage, temperance, socialism, the 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, and Sacco and Vanzetti. She was the Socialist Party candidate for Massachusetts Secretary of State in 1912, the first woman in state history to run for statewide office. She did not win the race, but did receive more votes than any Socialist candidate on the ballot, including 2500 more than their gubernatorial candidate.
Hayes was concerned about under-representation of women in mathematics and science and argued that this was due to social pressure and the emphasis on female appearance, the lack of employment opportunities in those fields for women, and schools which allowed female students to opt out of math and science courses.
Her will left her brain to the Wilder Brain Collection at Cornell University. Her ashes were buried in Granville, Ohio. *Wik



1869 Typhoid Mary Mallon (23 Sep 1869; 11 Nov 1938) famous typhoid carrier in the New York City area in the early 20th century. Fifty-one original cases of typhoid and three deaths were directly attributed to her (countless more were indirectly attributed), although she herself was immune to the typhoid bacillus (Salmonella typhi). The outbreak of Typhus in Oyster Bay, Long Island, in 1904 puzzled the scientists of the time because they thought they had wiped out the deadly disease. Mallon's case showed that a person could be a carrier without showing any outward signs of being sick, and it led to most of the Health Code laws on the books today. She died not from typhoid but from the effects of a paralytic stroke dating back to 25 Dec 1932.*TIS



1921 Albert Messiah (23 September 1921, Nice – 17 April 2013, Paris) was a French physicist.
He spent the Second World War in the French Resistance: he embarked June 22, 1940 in Saint-Jean-de-Luz to England and participated in the Battle of Dakar with Charles de Gaulle in September 1940. He joined the Free French Forces in Chad, and the 2nd Armored Division in September 1944, and participated in the assault of Hitler's Eagle's nest at Berchtesgaden in 1945.
After the war, he went to Princeton to attend the seminar of Niels Bohr on quantum mechanics. He returned to France and introduced the first general courses of quantum mechanics in France, at the University of Orsay. His textbook on quantum mechanics (Dunod 1959) has trained generations of French physicists.
He was the director of the Physics Division at the CEA and professor at the Pierre and Marie Curie University. *Wik




1968 Wendelin Werner (September 23, 1968 - ) is a German-born French mathematician working in the area of self-avoiding random walks, Schramm-Loewner evolution, and related theories in probability theory and mathematical physics. In 2006, at the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, Spain he received the Fields Medal. He is currently Rouse Ball professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. 
Werner has received several awards besides the Fields Medal, including the Rollo Davidson Prize in 1998, the Prix Paul Doistau–Émile Blutet in 1999, the Fermat Prize in 2001, the Grand Prix Jacques Herbrand of the French Academy of Sciences in 2003, the Loève Prize in 2005, the 2006 SIAM George Pólya Prize with his collaborators Gregory Lawler and Oded Schramm, and the Heinz Gumin Prize (de) in 2016.*Wik





DEATHS

1657 Joachim Jungius was a German mathematician who was one of the first to use exponents to represent powers and who used mathematics as a model for the natural sciences. *SAU
In 1669,  Jungius demonstrated that the form adopted by the chain wasn’t a parabola and one year later, Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705) proposed a contest looking for the first mathematician who could find out the real forma of a hanging chain. The problem was solved by Johann Bernoulli (1667-1748), Christiann Huygens (1629-1695) and Gottfried W. Leibnitz (1646-1717) each independently.




1877 Urbain-Jean-Joseph Le Verrier (11 Mar 1811; 23 Sep 1877 at age 66) French astronomer who predicted by mathematical means the existence of the planet Neptune. He switched from his first subject of chemistry to to teach astronomy at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1837 and worked at the Paris Observatory for most of his life. His main activity was in celestial mechanics. Independently of Adams, Le Verrier calculated the position of Neptune from irregularities in Uranus's orbit. As one of his colleagues said, " ... he discovered a star with the tip of his pen, without any instruments other than the strength of his calculations alone. In 1856, the German astronomer Johan G. Galle discovered Neptune after only an hour of searching, within one degree of the position that had been computed by Le Verrier, who had asked him to look for it there. In this way Le Verrier gave the most striking confirmation of the theory of gravitation propounded by Newton. Le Verrier also initiated the meteorological service for France, especially the weather warnings for seaports. Incorrectly, he predicted a planet, Vulcan, or asteroid belt, within the orbit of Mercury to account for an observed discrepancy (1855) in the motion in the perihelion of Mercury. *TIS

This statue depicts Le Verrier, who was well known for discovering Neptune, this sculpture created by Henri Michel Antoine Chapu and can be found in front of Observatoire de Paris.




1822 Joseph-Louis-François Bertrand (11 Mar 1822; 5 Apr 1900 at age 78) was a French mathematician and educator and educator remembered for his elegant applications of differential equations to analytical mechanics, particularly in thermodynamics, and for his work on statistical probability and the theory of curves and surfaces. In 1845 Bertrand conjectured that there is at least one prime between n and (2n-2) for every n>3, as proved five years later by Chebyshev. In 1855 he translated Gauss's work on the theory of errors and the method of least squares into French. He wrote a number of notes on the reduction of data from observations. *TIS At age 11 he started to attend classes at the Ecole Polytechnique, where his Uncle Duhamel was a well-known professor of mathematics. At 17 he received his doctor of science degree. *VFR



1897 “Bourbaki is a pen name of a group of younger French mathematicians who set out to publish an encyclopedic work covering most of modern mathematics.” So wrote Samuel Eilenberg in Mathematical Reviews, 3(1942), 55–56. He was the first to reveal in print that Bourbaki was a pseudonym—but the name was appropriated from a real general, Charles Denis Sauter Bourbaki, who died on this date at the age of 81. See Joong Fang, Bourbaki, Paideia Press, 1970, pp. 24, *VFR



1919 Heinrich Bruns was interested in astronomy, mathematics and geodesy and worked on the three body problem.*SAU

1971 James Waddell Alexander (19 Sept 1888, 23 Sept 1971) In a collaboration with Veblen, he showed that the topology of manifolds could be extended to polyhedra. Before 1920 he had shown that the homology of a simplicial complex is a topological invariant. Alexander's work around this time went a long way to put the intuitive ideas of Poincaré on a more rigorous foundation. Also before 1920 Alexander had made fundamental contributions to the theory of algebraic surfaces and to the study of Cremona transformations.
Soon after arriving in Princeton, Alexander generalised the Jordan curve theorem and continued his work, now exclusively on topology, with an important paper on the Jordan-Brouwer separation theorem. This latter paper contains the Alexander Duality Theorem and Alexander's lemma on the n-sphere. In 1924 he introduced the now famous Alexander horned sphere.
In 1928 he discovered the Alexander polynomial which is much used in knot theory. In the same year the American Mathematical Society awarded Alexander the Bôcher Prize for his memoir, Combinatorial analysis situs published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society two years earlier. Knot theory and the combinatorial theory of complexes were the main topics on which he worked over the following few years.
The theory which is now called the Alexander-Spanier cohomology theory, was introduced in 1935 by Alexander but was generalised by Spanier in 1948 to the form seen today. Also around 1935 Alexander discovered cohomology theory, at essentially the same time as Kolmogorov, and the theory was announced in the 1936 Moscow Conference. *SAU



2004 Bryce Seligman DeWitt (January 8, 1923 – September 23, 2004) was a theoretical physicist who studied gravity and field theories.
He approached the quantization of general relativity, in particular, developed canonical quantum gravity and manifestly covariant methods that use the heat kernel. B. DeWitt formulated the Wheeler–DeWitt equation for the wave function of the Universe with John Archibald Wheeler and advanced the formulation of the Hugh Everett's many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. With his student Larry Smarr he originated the field of numerical relativity.
He received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University. His Ph.D. (1950) supervisor was Julian S. Schwinger. Afterwards he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Texas at Austin. He was awarded the Dirac Prize in 1987, the American Physical Society's Einstein Prize in 2005, and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He was born Carl Bryce Seligman but he and his three brothers added "DeWitt" from their mother's side of the family, at the urging of their father, in 1950. This is similar to Spanish naming customs, where a person bears two surnames, one being from their father and the other from their mother. Twenty years later this change of name so angered Felix Bloch that he blocked DeWitt's appointment to Stanford University and DeWitt instead moved to Austin, Texas. He served in World War II as a naval aviator. He was married to mathematical physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette. He died September 23, 2004 from pancreatic cancer at the age of 81. He is buried in France, and was survived by his wife and four daughters. *Wik
Bryce with his wife Cécile



2018 The Honorable Sir Charles Kuen Kao,(November 4, 1933 – September 23, 2018) is a Chinese-born American and British physicist who pioneered in the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. Kao, known as the "Godfather of Broadband", "Father of Fiber Optics" or "Father of Fiber Optic Communications", was awarded half of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication". Kao holds dual citizenship in Great Britain and the United States. *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