On This Day in Math - February 27

 

Andromeda Galaxy which Hubble measured to be 300,000 parsecs away.

Mathematical Knowledge adds a manly Vigour to the Mind, frees it from Prejudice, Credulity, and Superstition.
~John Arbuthnot

The 58th day of the year; 58 is  the sum of the first seven prime numbers.

It is the fourth smallest Smith Number. (Find the first three. A Smith number is a composite number for which the sum of its digits equals the sum of the digits in its prime factorization, including repetition. 58 = 2*29, and 5+8= 2+2+9.) Smith numbers were named by Albert Wilansky of Lehigh University. He noticed the property in the phone number (493-7775) of his brother-in-law Harold Smith.

If you take the number 2, square it, and continue to take the sum of the squares of the digits of the previous answer, you get the sequence 2, 4, 16, 37, 58, 89, 145, 42, 20, 4, and then it repeats.  See what happens if you start with other values than 2, and see if you can find one that doesn't produce 58.  

The Greeks knew 220 and 284 were Amicable in 300 BCE. By 1638 two more pairs had been added. Then, in two papers in 1747 and 1750 in a single paper, Euler added 58 more.  He, and everyone else, missed the second smallest, (1184, 1210), was discovered in 1867 by 16-year-old B. Nicolò I. Paganini.

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EVENTS

425 "University" or Pandidakterion of Constantinople Founded on this date by Theodosius II. It is described as "the first deliberate effort of the Byzantine state to impose its control on matters relating to higher education." *Wik *Medieval History ‏@medievalhistory

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1477 Founding of the University of Uppsala. A research university in Uppsala, Sweden, and is the oldest university in Sweden and Northern Europe. It ranks among the best universities in Northern Europe and is generally considered one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in Europe. Prominent students include Carolus Linnaeus , the father of taxonomy; Anders Celsius, inventor of the centigrade scale, and Niklas Zennström, co-founder of KaZaA and Skype. *Wik

The University celebrates the 300th anniversary of its reopening in 1893.

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In 1611, Johannes Fabricius, a Dutch astronomer, observed the rising sun through his telescope, and observed several dark spots on it. This was one of the earliest observation of sunspots through a telescope. (Harriot, Galileo, and Christoph Scheiner all observed sunspots in the 1610-1611 period) . He called his father to investigate this new phenomenon with him. The brightness of the Sun's center was very painful, and the two quickly switched to a projection method by means of a camera obscura. Johannes was the first to publish information on such observations. He did so in his Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione. ("Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun"), the dedication of which was dated 13 Jun 1611. *TIS  "One irony of the history of astronomy is that Kepler, the only person to acknowledge Johann’s priority in publication had himself observed a large sunspot in 1607 with a camera obscura, a name that he coined, but mistakenly thought he was observing a transit of Mercury." *The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie 

monument  churchyard at Osteel

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1665 Huygens writes letter to Robert Moray at the Royal Society asking him to pass on his "miraculous" observation of a synchronizing of his pendulum clocks. *Steven Strogatz, Synch

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1753 James Sadler (Baptized 27 Feb 1753; died 26 Mar 1828 at age 75.)British balloonist, self educated pastry chef, and chemist who was the first English aeronaut, whose first successful ascent was on 4 Oct 1784, in a hot-air balloon, from Christ Church Meadow, Oxford. He rose to an estimated 3600 feet and travelled six miles. He made a 20-minute hydrogen balloon flight the next month, on 12 Nov 1784. By the time he attempted a crossing of St. George's Channel from Ireland, on 1 Oct 1812, he had made about sixty ascents. Almost reaching land, success eluded him when due to a change of wind he ditched in the sea off Liverpool. After some time in the water, he was rescued by a fishing boat. His two sons, John and Wyndham also took up ballooning. Wyndham successfully made the Irish Sea crossing from Dublin to Holyhead on 22 Jul 1817. (He fell from his balloon 29 Sep 1824, and died the next day.) *TIS

A view of the balloon of Mr. Sadler's ascending. Print illustrating Sadler's ascent on 12 August 1811.

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1851 George Merriweather gave a nearly three-hour essay to members of the Philosophical Society entitled "Essay explanatory of the Tempest Prognosticator." The tempest prognosticator, also known as the leech barometer, is a 19th-century invention by Merryweather in which leeches are used in a barometer. The twelve leeches are kept in small bottles inside the device; when they become agitated by an approaching storm they attempt to climb out of the bottles and trigger a small hammer which strikes a bell. The likelihood of a storm is indicated by the number of times the bell is struck.
Merriweather was inspired by two lines from Edward Jenner's poem Signs of Rain: "The leech disturbed is newly risen; Quite to the summit of his prison." Merryweather spent much of 1850 developing his ideas and came up with six designs, the most expensive design, which took inspiration from the architecture of Indian temples, was made by local craftsmen and shown in the 1851 Great Exhibition at The Crystal Palace in London. Merryweather stated in his essay the great success that he had had with the device. It was never very popular, although on its centennial there was a brief rush of renewed interest. *Wik

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1890 Dedekind’s second letter to Keferstein. Hans Keferstein had published a paper on the notion of number with comments and suggestions for change of Dedekind's 1888 book. Dedekind first responded on February 9, and on February 14 and announced that he would push the publication by the "Society". It was in the letter of February 27 that Dedekind gives what is called, "a brilliant presentation of the development of his ideas on the notion of natural number." *Jean Van Heijenoort, From Frege to Gödel: a source book in mathematical logic, 1879-1931, pg 98 The text of the letter is available on-line at Google Books

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1919  Ramanujan sailed to India on 27 February 1919 arriving on 13 March. However his health was very poor and, despite medical treatment, he died there the following year.

 Ramanujan had sailed from India on 17 March 1914. It was a calm voyage except for three days on which Ramanujan was seasick. Ramanujan fell seriously ill in 1917 and his doctors feared that he would die. He did improve a little by September but spent most of his time in various nursing homes. After a brief improvement, his illness rebounded and it was decided to return to India.  Not quite five years in England.  *MacTutor

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1924, Harlow Shapley replied to a letter from Edwin Hubble which presented the measurement of 300,000 parsecs as the distance to the Andromeda nebula. That was the first proof that the nebula was far outside the Milky Way, in fact, a separate galaxy. When Shapley had debated Heber Curtis on 26 Apr 1920, he presented his firm, life-long conviction that all the Milky Way represented the known universe (and, for instance, the Andromeda nebula was part of the Milky Way.) On receipt of the letter, Shapley told Payne-Gaposchkin and said “Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe.” In his reply, Shapley said sarcastically that Hubble's letter was “the most entertaining piece of literature I have seen for a long time.” Hubble sent more data in a paper to the AAS meeting, read on 1 Jan 1925. *TIS

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1936 France issued a stamp with a portrait (by Louis Boilly) of Andr´e-Marie Amp`ere (1775–1836) to honor the centenary of his death. [Scott #306] *VFR

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1940 Carbon-14 was discovered on 27 February 1940, by Martin Kamen and Sam Ruben at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley, California. Its existence had been suggested by Franz Kurie in 1934. There are three naturally occurring isotopes of carbon on Earth: 99% of the carbon is carbon-12, 1% is carbon-13, and carbon-14 occurs in trace amounts, i.e., making up about 1 or 1.5 atoms per 1012 atoms of the carbon in the atmosphere. The half-life of carbon-14 is 5,730±40 years.
Radiocarbon dating is a radiometric dating method that uses (14C) to determine the age of carbonaceous materials up to about 60,000 years old. The technique was developed by Willard Libby and his colleagues in 1949. Wik

Ruben and Kamen

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1942, J.S. Hey discovered radio emissions from the Sun. *TIS Several prior attempts were made to detect radio emission from the Sun by experimenters such as Nikola Tesla and Oliver Lodge, but those attempts were unable to detect any emission due to technical limitations of their instruments. Jansky first thought the radio signals he picked up from space were from the sun. *Wik

Hey used radar to track the paths of V-2 rockets approaching London at about 100 miles high, aiming to be able to predict their point of impact. He noticed spasmodic transient radar echoes at heights of about 60 miles, arriving at a rate of five to 10 per hour. When the V-2 attacks ceased, the echoes did not; Hey concluded that meteor trails were responsible and that radar could be used to track meteor streams, and could of course do so by day as well as by night. When he tried to increase the sensitivity of his radar in order to track V-2s from a greater distance, he rediscovered the cosmic radio noise that Karl Jansky and Grote Reber had found in the 1930s.

Hey's results of 1942 and 1944 could not be published until after the war. From 1945 to 1947, Hey used AORG's radars in Richmond Park to research his wartime radio astronomical discoveries further. The Richmond Park installation thus effectively became the first radio observatory in Britain.

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1989 In a review of Einstein–Bessso correspondence in the New Yorker, Jeremy Bernstein wrote: “In 1909, Einstein accepted a job as an associate professor at the University of Zurich, ... Einstein makes a familiar academic complaint—that because of his teaching duties he has less free time than when he was examining patents for eight hours a day.” *VFR

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BIRTHS

1547 Baha' ad-Din al-Amili (27 Feb 1547 in Baalbek, now in Lebanon - 30 Aug 1621 in Isfahan, Iran) was a Lebanese-born mathematician who wrote influential works on arithmetic, astronomy and grammar. Perhaps his most famous mathematical work was Quintessence of Calculation which was a treatise in ten sections, strongly influenced by The Key to Arithmetic (1427) by Jamshid al-Kashi. *SAU

Manuscript of The Summa of Arithmetics

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1881 L(uitzen) E(gbertus) J(an) Brouwer (27 Feb 1881, 2 Dec 1966) was a Dutch mathematician who founded mathematical Intuitionism (a doctrine that views the nature of mathematics as mental constructions governed by self-evident laws). He founded modern topology by establishing, for example, the topological invariance of dimension and the fixpoint theorem. (Topology is the study of the most basic properties of geometric surfaces and configurations.) The Brouwer fixed point theorem is named in his honor. He proved the simplicial approximation theorem in the foundations of algebraic topology, which justifies the reduction to combinatorial terms, after sufficient subdivision of simplicial complexes, the treatment of general continuous mappings. *TIS He denies the law of the excluded middle. *VFR

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1897 Bernard(-Ferdinand) Lyot (27 Feb 1897; 2 Apr 1952 at age 55) French astronomer who invented the coronagraph (1930), an instrument which allows the observation of the solar corona when the Sun is not in eclipse. Earlier, using his expertise in optics, Lyot made a very sensitive polariscope to study polarization of light reflected from planets. Observing from the Pic du Midi Observatory, he determined that the lunar surface behaves like volcanic dust, that Mars has sandstorms, and other results on the atmospheres of the other planets. Modifications to his polarimeter created the coronagraph, with which he photographed the Sun's corona and its analyzed its spectrum. He found new spectral lines in the corona, and he made (1939) the first motion pictures of solar prominences.*TIS

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1910 Joseph Doob (27 Feb 1910 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA - 7 June 2004 in Clark-Lindsey Village, Urbana, Illinois, USA) American mathematician who worked in probability and measure theory. *SAU After writing a series of papers on the foundations of probability and stochastic processes including martingales, Markov processes, and stationary processes, Doob realized that there was a real need for a book showing what is known about the various types of stochastic processes. So he wrote his famous "Stochastic Processes" book. It was published in 1953 and soon became one of the most influential books in the development of modern probability theory. *Wik

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1910 Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, (February 27, 1910 – December 21, 1990) an American aeronautical engineer, was born Feb. 27, 1910.  Johnson came to head up the "Skunk Works" installation and design team at Lockheed, which was given great autonomy in designing cutting-edge aircraft.  Johnson is given most of the credit for designing many of Lockheed's famous aircraft, including the SR-71 Blackbird, between 1937 and his retirement in 1975. 

Fresh out of the University of Michigan in 1933, he was asked by Lockheed to do wind-tunnel tests on their new twin-engine Model 10 Electra, the first all-metal aircraft (second image).  Johnson found the aircraft unstable and recommended that a double-tail be substituted.  Surprisingly, Lockheed agreed, and Johnson’s career was off and running. In 1937, Amelia Earhart posed with Johnson and then took off in her twin-tailed Electra for her ill-fated flight around the world. The crash and disappearance of her plane is believed to be the result of fuel shortage and unrelated to the aircraft’s design.

Johnson's first real challenge came in 1937 when he was asked to design a fighter aircraft for the U.S. Army Air Corps, with the war impending.  The first Lockheed P-38 Lightning rolled off the lines in 1939, with twin booms and twin stabilizers, the two engines on the booms and the crew and the guns in a separate nacelle between. With this unusual configuration, the P-38 proved adept as a fighter, a fighter bomber, and an aerial reconnaissance aircraft. Over 10,000 were built before the end of the War in 1945.

Another superlative aircraft that Johnson designed was the Lockheed P-104, soon relabeled the F-104 Starfighter.  Introduced in 1958, it was intended to be more worthy rival for the Soviet MIG-15, and it was.  The F-104, powered by a single turbojet engine, was highly maneuverable and capable of reaching extreme altitude and supersonic speeds.  It is also a beautiful machine.  Lockheed built more than 2500 of them for a dozen different air forces.  Many are still flying.

The most famous aircraft that Johnson designed were the U-2 and the SR-71.  The U-2 was designed for just one purpose - to cruise at 70,000 feet, where no aircraft has any business flying, and take pictures.  To achieve this, many sacrifices were made, so that the aircraft was very difficult to fly, especially at lower altitudes, and safety margins were very slim.  But it was a great spy plane, until Gary Powers and his U-2 were shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960.  Lockheed continued producing U-2s until 1989, and they are still flying.  Or so they tell me.

 Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird is, in most expert's opinion, the finest design of Johnson's career, and perhaps of anyone’s career.  Even it if didn't fly at all, it would be spectacular, because it looks like it is doing Mach 2 just sitting on the runway.  The SR-71 was a reconnaissance aircraft, capable of flying at high altitude, but unlike the U-2, it was supersonic and maneuverable.  You couldn’t shoot it down, even if you could find it on radar, because it could outrun anything you fired at it.  To many aficionados, it is the Jaguar XK-E of aircraft – the most beautiful airplane ever built. Johnson must have had considerable chutzpah, for he decided to build the SR-71 out of titanium, a rare metal, of which Russia had almost all of the world’s supply. Somehow, he made that work. *Linda Hall Org

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1942 Robert (Bob) Howard Grubbs (b. 27 February 1942 near Possum Trot, Kentucky, – December 19, 2021) ) is an American chemist and Nobel laureate. Grubbs's many awards have included: Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1974–76), Camille and Henry Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1975–78), Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1975), ACS Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry (2000), ACS Herman F. Mark Polymer Chemistry Award (2000), ACS Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2001), the Tolman Medal (2002), and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2005). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 and a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1994. Grubbs received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Richard R. Schrock and Yves Chauvin, for his work in the field of olefin metathesis. *Wik

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2010 Gavin Brown AO FAA CorrFRSE (27 February 1942 – 25 December 2010) was a Scottish-born mathematician and long-serving Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney between 1996 and 2008.

After attending secondary school at Madras College in St Andrews, Brown graduated with a Master of Arts degree (1st Class Honours and the Duncan Medal) from the University of St Andrews (1963), and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1966). His academic career began at the University of Liverpool, where he became a senior lecturer in mathematics.

Brown accepted the Chair of Pure Mathematics at the University of New South Wales in 1975 and he and his family emigrated to Australia. At the University of New South Wales, Brown held a number of academic administrative posts, including Head of the Department of Pure Mathematics, Head of the School of Mathematics, and Dean of the Faculty of Science. During this time, he was awarded the Sir Edmund Whittaker Memorial Prize and the Australian Mathematical Society Medal.

In 1992, Brown became the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at the University of Adelaide. Later, in 1994, he became the Vice-Chancellor. He took up the position of Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Sydney in 1996 and retired from the post in 2008.

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1943 Steven Alan Orszag (February 27, 1943 – May 1, 2011) was an American mathematician.  In 1962, at the age of 19, he graduated with a B.S. in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was a member of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.  He did post graduate study at Cambridge University and in 1966 graduated with a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Princeton University. His thesis adviser was Martin David Kruskal. In 1967, Orszag was appointed as a professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he collaborated with Carl M. Bender, and was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1984, he was appointed Forrest E Hamrick Professor of Engineering at Princeton University. In 1988, he accepted a position at Yale University and in 2000, he was named the Percey F. Smith Professor of Mathematics at Yale University from 2000 until his death in 2011.

Orszag has won numerous awards including Sloan Fellowship and Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Fluid and Plasmadynamics Award, the Otto Laporte Award of the American Physical Society, and the Society of Engineering Science's G. I. Taylor Medal.

Orszag specialized in fluid dynamics, especially turbulence, computational physics and mathematics, electronic chip manufacturing, computer storage system design, and other topics in scientific computing. His work included the development of spectral methods, pseudo-spectral methods, direct numerical simulations, renormalization group methods for turbulence, and very-large-eddy simulations. He was the founder of and/or chief scientific adviser to a number of companies, including Flow Research, Ibrix (now part of HPQ), Vector Technologies, and Exa Corp. 

With Carl M. Bender he wrote Advanced Mathematical Methods for Scientists and Engineers: Asymptotic Methods and Perturbation Theory, a standard text on mathematical methods for scientists. Orszag has been listed as an ISI Highly Cited Author in Engineering by the ISI Web of Knowledge, Thomson Scientific Company.

 At MIT he was a colleague of Carl M Bender and together they collaborated on a graduate level mathematics course for seven years. Bender said: [The course] was so popular that a lot of students from Harvard came to take it as well. A course that good really wasn't offered at Harvard.

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DEATHS

1735 John Arbuthnot (baptized 29 Apr 1667, 27 Feb 1735 at age 67), fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. In 1710, his paper “An argument for divine providence taken form the constant regularity observ’s in the bith of both sexes” gave the first example of statistical inference. In his day he was famous for his political satires, from which we still know the character John Bull. *VFR
He inspired both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. He also translated Huygens' "De ratiociniis in ludo aleae " in 1692 and extended it by adding a few further games of chance. This was the first work on probability published in English.*SAU A nice blog about Arbuthnot and his work is at this post by *RMAT.

"It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art ... ."

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1867 James Dunwoody Brownson DeBow (1820 – February 27, 1867) was an American publisher and statistician, best known for his influential magazine DeBow's Review, who also served as head of the U.S. Census from 1853-1857.*Wik

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1906 Samuel Pierpont Langley, (22 Aug 1834; 27 Feb 1906)American astronomer, physicist, and aeronautics pioneer who built the first heavier-than-air flying machine to achieve sustained flight. He launched his Aerodrome No.5 on 6 May 1896 using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. He also researched the relationship of solar phenomena to meteorology. *TIS

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1915 Nikolay Yakovlevich Sonin (February 22, 1849 – February 27, 1915) was a Russian mathematician.
Sonin worked on special functions, in particular cylindrical functions. He also worked on the Euler–Maclaurin summation formula. Other topics Sonin studied include Bernoulli polynomials and approximate computation of definite integrals, continuing Chebyshev's work on numerical integration. Together with Andrey Markov, Sonin prepared a two volume edition of Chebyshev's works in French and Russian. He died in St. Petersburg.*Wik

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1975 Hyman Levy (28 Feb 1889 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 27 Feb 1975 in Wimbledon, London, England )graduated from Edinburgh and went on to study in Göttingen. He was forced to leave Germany on the outbreak of World War II and returned to work at Oxford and at the National Physical Laboratory. He held various posts in Imperial College London, finishing as Head of the Mathematics department. His main work was in the numerical solution of differential equations. he published Numerical Studies in Differential Equations (1934), Elements of the Theory of Probability (1936), and Finite Difference Equations (1958). However, Levy was more than a mathematician. He was a philosopher of science and also a political activist. *SAU

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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

On This Day in Math - February 26

   

Euler calculated without effort,
just as men breathe,
as eagles sustain themselves in the air.

~Francois Arago

The 57th day of the year; 57(base ten) is written with all ones in base seven. It is the last day this year that can be written in base seven with all ones.(What is the last day of the year that can be written with all ones in base two,... base three?)

57 is the maximum number of regions inside a circle formed by chords connecting 7 points on the circle. Students might ask themselves why this is the same as the first five numbers in the sixth row of Pascal's triangle.

57 is the number of permutations of the numbers 1 to 6 in which exactly 1 element is greater than the previous element (called a permutations with 1 "ascents").

57 is the maximum number of possible interior regions formed by 8 intersecting circles.

57 letters and spaces (not counting commas) are required to write the famous prime number 6700417 in English. The number was one of the factors of \(F(5)=2^{2^5}+1 \) Fermat had conjectured that all such "Fermat Numbers" were prime. In 1732, Euler showed that F(5) was the product or 641 times 6700417. Euler never stated that both numbers were prime, and historians still disagree about whether he knew, or even suspected, that it was. 

The number of ways of coloring the faces of a cube with 3 different colors is 57. For coloring a cube with n colors, the number of possible colorings is given by

57, is sometimes known as Grothendieck's prime.  The explanation is given in Amir D. Aczel's last book, Finding Zero.  Grothendieck had used primes as a framework on which to build some more general result when:

EVENTS

1616 Galileo is warned to abandon Copernican views. On February 19, 1616, the Inquisition had asked

Costa San Giorgio, near Ponte Vecchio ...

a commission of theologians, known as qualifiers, about the propositions of the heliocentric view of the universe after Nicollo Lorin had accused Galileo of Heretical remarks in a letter to his former student, Benedetto Castelli. On February 24 the Qualifiers delivered their unanimous report: the idea that the Sun is stationary is "foolish and absurd in philosophy, and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of Holy Scripture..."; while the Earth's movement "receives the same judgement in philosophy and ... in regard to theological truth it is at least erroneous in faith."At a meeting of the cardinals of the Inquisition on the following day, Pope Paul V instructed Bellarmine to deliver this result to Galileo, and to order him to abandon the Copernican opinions; should Galileo resist the decree, stronger action would be taken. On February 26, Galileo was called to Bellarmine's residence, and accepted the orders. *Wik A transcript filed by the 1633 Inquisition indicates he was also enjoined from either speaking or writing about his theory. Yet Galileo remained in conflict with the Church. He was eventually interrogated by the Inquisition in Apr 1633. On 22 Jun 1633, Galileo was sentenced to prison indefinitely, with seven of ten cardinals presiding at his trial affirming the sentencing order. Upon signing a formal recantation, the Pope allowed him to live instead under house-arrest. From Dec 1633 to the end of his life on 8 Jan 1641, he remained in his villa at Florence.*TIS In 1992, the Vatican officially declared that Galileo had been the victim of an error.

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1665 A letter from Christiaan Huygens to his father, Constantyn Huygens describes the discovery of synchronization between two pendulum clocks in his room.

While I was forced to stay in bed for a few days and made observations on my two clocks of the new workshop, I noticed a wonderful effect that nobody could have thought of before. The two clocks, while hanging [on the wall] side by side with a distance of one or two feet between, kept in pace relative to each other with a precision so high that the two pendulums always swung together, and never varied. While I admired this for some time, I finally found that this happened due to a sort of sympathy: when I made the pendulums swing at differing paces, I found that half an hour later, they always returned to synchronism and kept it constantly afterwards, as long as I let them go.

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1849 Prince Albert visited the RI  for the 1st time to hear a lecture by Faraday. *Royal Institution ‏@ri_science 

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1855 Carl F. Gauss' body lay in state under the dome in the rotunda of the observatory in Gottingen two days after his death.  At nine o'clock a group of 12 students of science and mathematics, including Dedikind, carried the coffin out of the observatory and to his final resting place in St. Alben's Church Cemetery. After the casket was lowered it was covered with  covered with palms and laurel .

Gauss' Headstone *Wik

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1885 “The Burroughs Company brought out their first adding machine and announced that it would sell for \( $27.75 \) plus \($1.39 \) shipping charges, for a total of whatever that came to.” *Tom Koch, 366 Dumb Days in History by Tom Koch  

After posting this, I was informed by *Keenan Patterson that "William Burroughs lived in St. Louis when he designed his calculating machine. His namesake grandson was a novelist ." And Thony Christie sites the younger as " one of the great authors of the second half of the twentieth century "

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In 1896, Henri Becquerel stored a wrapped photographic plate in a closed desk drawer, and a phosphorescent uranium compound laid on top, awaiting a bright day to test his idea that sunlight would make the phosphorescent uranium emit rays. It remained there several days. Thus by sheer accident, he created a new experiment, for when he developed the photographic plate on 1 Mar 1896, he found a fogged image in the shape of the rocks. The material was spontaneously generating and emitting energetic rays totally without the external sunlight source. This was a landmark event. The new form of penetrating radiation was the discovery of the effect of radioactivity. He had in fact reported an earlier, related experiment to the French Academy on 24 Feb 1896, though at that time he thought phosphorescence was the cause.*TIS   The Image of Becquerel's photographic plate which has been fogged by exposure to radiation from a uranium salt. The shadow of a metal Maltese Cross placed between the plate and the uranium salt is clearly visible.*Wik

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1935 The first test of the ideas presented in Robert Watson-Watt's earlier memo, "Detection and location of aircraft by radio methods", were conducted on this date in a field near Upper Stowe, about three miles south of Weedon Bec in Northamptonshire. The tests were successful and on several occasions a clear signal was seen on the oscilloscopes hidden in the back of  an ambulance  from a Handley Page Heyford bomber being flown around the site by Bobby Blucke, who would later become Air Vice-Marshal Blucke. The tests were so secret that only three people were allowed to witness them, Watson-Watt, his colleague Arnold Wilkins, and a single member of the Air Ministry, A. P. Rowe

*Wik

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1962 A new teaching method based on “how and why things happen in mathematics rather than on traditional memorization of rules” is announced by the Educational Research Council of Greater Cleveland. This became the Cleveland Program of the New Math.*VFR

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*Wik 

1996 Silicon Graphics Inc. buys Cray Research for $767 million, becoming the leading supplier of high-speed computing machines in the U.S. Over a forty year career, Cray founder Seymour Cray consistently produced most of the fastest computers in the world-- innovative, powerful supercomputers used in defense, meteorological, and scientific investigations. *CHM

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2012 New world record distance for paper airplane throw: Joe Ayoob, a former Cal Quarterback, throws a John Collins paper airplane design, (which was named Suzanne), officially breaking the world record by 19 feet, 6 inches. The new world record was 226 feet, 10 inches. The previous record is 207 feet and 4 inches set by Stephen Kreiger in 2003. *ESPN  

As happens with records,  after over a decade their had record remained unassailable. But a team of three paper airplane experts worked together to take a shot at the title, and on April 16, 2022, Kim Kyu Tae threw a paper glider 252 feet and 7 inches (77.134 meters), utterly shattering the record that stood for so long. (They said they had done much better in practices, and warned of more to come.)

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BIRTHS

1585 Federico Cesi (26 Feb OR 13 Mar 1585 (sources differ, but Thony Christie did some research to suggest the Feb date is the correct one); 1 Aug 1630 at age 45) Italian scientist who founded the Accademia dei Lincei (1603, Academy of Linceans or Lynxes), often cited as the first modern scientific society, and of which Galileo was the sixth member (1611). Cesi first announced the word telescope for Galileo's instrument. At an early age, while being privately educated, Cesi became interested in natural history and that believed it should be studied directly, not philosophically. The name of the Academy, which he founded at age 18, was taken from Lynceus of Greek mythology, the animal Lynx with sharp sight. He devoted the rest of his life to recording, illustrating and an early classification of nature, especially botany. The Academy was dissolved when its funding by Cesi ceased upon his sudden death(at age 45). *TIS It was revived in its currently well known form of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, by the Vatican, Pope Pius IX in 1847.

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1664 Nicolas Fatio de Duillier (alternative names are Facio or Faccio;) (26 February 1664 – 12 May 1753) was a Swiss mathematician known for his work on the zodiacal light problem, for his very close (some have suggested "romantic" ) relationship with Isaac Newton, for his role in the Newton v. Leibniz calculus controversy , and for originating the "push" or "shadow" theory of gravitation.
[Le Sage's theory of gravitation is a kinetic theory of gravity originally proposed by Nicolas Fatio de Duillier in 1690 and later by Georges-Louis Le Sage in 1748. The theory proposed a mechanical explanation for Newton's gravitational force in terms of streams of tiny unseen particles (which Le Sage called ultra-mundane corpuscles) impacting all material objects from all directions. According to this model, any two material bodies partially shield each other from the impinging corpuscles, resulting in a net imbalance in the pressure exerted by the impact of corpuscles on the bodies, tending to drive the bodies together.]

He also developed and patented a method of perforating jewels for use in clocks.
When Leibniz sent a set of problems for solution to England he mentioned Newton and failed to mention Faccio among those probably capable of solving them. Faccio retorted by sneering at Leibniz as the ‘second inventor’ of the calculus in a tract entitled ‘Lineæ brevissimæ descensus investigatio geometrica duplex, cui addita est investigatio geometrica solidi rotundi in quo minima fiat resistentia,’ 4to, London, 1699. Finally he stirred up the whole Royal Society to take a part in the dispute (Brewster, Memoirs of Sir I. Newton, 2nd edit. ii. 1–5).
In 1707, Fatio came under the influence of a fanatical religious sect, the Camisards, which ruined Fatio's reputation. He left England and took part in pilgrim journeys across Europe. After his return only a few scientific documents by him appeared. He died in 1753 in Maddersfield near Worcester, England. After his death his Geneva compatriot Georges-Louis Le Sage tried to purchase the scientific papers of Fatio. These papers together with Le Sage's are now in the Library of the University of Geneva.
Eventually he retired to Worcester, where he formed some congenial friendships, and busied himself with scientific pursuits, alchemy, and the mysteries of the cabbala. In 1732 he endeavoured, but it is thought unsuccessfully, to obtain through the influence of John Conduitt [q. v.], Newton's nephew, some reward for having saved the life of the Prince of Orange. He assisted Conduitt in planning the design, and writing the inscription for Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey. *Wik

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1786 Dominique François Jean Arago (26 Feb 1786, 2 Oct 1853) was a French physicist and astronomer who discovered the chromosphere of the sun (the lower atmosphere, primarily composed of hydrogen gas), and for his accurate estimates of the diameters of the planets. Arago found that a rotating copper disk deflects a magnetic needle held above it showing the production of magnetism by rotation of a nonmagnetic conductor. He devised an experiment that proved the wave theory of light, showed that light waves move more slowly through a dense medium than through air and contributed to the discovery of the laws of light polarization. Arago entered politics in 1848 as Minister of War and Marine and was responsible for abolishing slavery in the French colonies. *TIS A really great blog about Arago, With the catchy title, "François Arago: the most interesting physicist in the world!" is posted here. Read this introduction, and you will not be able to resist:

When he was seven years old, he tried to stab a Spanish solider with a lance
When he was eighteen, he talked a friend out of assassinating Napoleon
He once angered an archbishop so much that the holy man punched him in the face
He has negotiated with bandits, been chased by a mob, broken out of prison
He is:
François Arago, the most interesting physicist in the world

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1799 Benoit Clapeyron (26 Feb 1799, 28 Jan 1864) French engineer who expressed Sadi Carnot's ideas on heat analytically, with the help of graphical representations. While investigating the operation of steam engines, Clapeyron found there was a relationship (1834) between the heat of vaporization of a fluid, its temperature and the increase in its volume upon vaporization. Made more general by Clausius, it is now known as the Clausius-Clapeyron formula. It provided the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. In engineering, Clayeyron designed and built locomotives and metal bridges. He also served on a committee investigating the construction of the Suez Canal and on a committee which considered how steam engines could be used in the navy.*TIS

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1842 Nicolas Camille Flammarion (26 Feb 1842; 3 Jun 1925 at age 83) was a French astronomer who studied double and multiple stars, the moon and Mars. He is best known as the author of popular, lavishly illustrated, books on astronomy, including Popular Astronomy (1880) and The Atmosphere (1871). In 1873, Flammarion (wrongly) attributed the red color of Mars to vegetation when he wrote “May we attribute to the color of the herbage and plants which no doubt clothe the plains of Mars, the characteristic hue of that planet...” He supported the idea of canals on Mars, and intelligent life, perhaps more advanced than earth's. Flammarion reported changes in one of the craters of the moon, which he attributed to growth of vegetation. He also wrote novels, and late in life he turned to psychic research. *TIS

The "Flammarion engraving" first appeared in Flammarion's 1888 edition of L’Atmosphère. In 1907, he wrote that he believed that dwellers on Mars had tried to communicate with Earth in the past. He also believed in 1907 that a seven-tailed comet was heading toward Earth. In 1910, for the appearance of Halley's Comet, he was widely but falsely reported as believing the gas from the comet's tail "would impregnate [the Earth’s] atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet".

In 1862 he published his first book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds, and was dismissed from his position at the Paris Observatory later the same year. It is not quite clear if these two incidents are related to each other.

La Fin du Monde (The End of the World), 1893 (translated into English as Omega: The Last Days of the World in 1894), is a science fiction novel about a comet colliding with the Earth, followed by several million years leading up to the gradual death of the planet, and has recently been brought back into print. It was adapted into a film in 1931 by Abel Gance.

George Gamow cited Flammarion as having had a significant influence on his childhood interest in science.

A traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament in the original (1888) printing of the Flammarion wood engraving. And below "Telefonoscope" from his La Fin du Monde, 1894.  A telephonoscope was an early concept of videophone and television, conceptualized in the late 1870s through the 1890s. It was mentioned in various early science fiction works

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1843 Karl Friedrich Geiser (26 Feb 1843 in Langenthal, Bern, Switzerland, 7 May 1934 in Küsnacht, Zürich, Switzerland) Swiss mathematician who worked in algebraic geometry and minimal surfaces. He organised the first International Mathematical Congress in Zurich.*SAU

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1864 John Evershed (26 Feb 1864, 17 Nov 1956) English astronomer who discovered (1909) the Evershed effect - the horizontal motion of gases outward from the centres of sunspots. While photographing solar prominences and sunspot spectra, he noticed that many of the Fraunhofer lines in the sunspot spectra were shifted to the red. By showing that these were Doppler shifts, he proved the motion of the source gases. This discovery came to be known as the Evershed effect. He also gave his name to a spectroheliograph, the Evershed spectroscope.*TIS 

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics commemorated the discovery with an international conference entitled 'Magnetic Coupling between the Interior and the Atmosphere of the Sun', during Dec 2-5, 2008. To mark the discovery, a commemorative stamp and a first day cover on the Evershed Effect were released in a special function at the Institute on Dec 2, 2008 by Shri M P Rajan, Chief Post Master General, Karnataka. 

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1946 Ahmed Hassan Zewail (February 26, 1946 – August 2, 2016) was an Egyptian-American scientist, known as the "father of femtochemistry". He was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry and became the first Egyptian and the first Arab to win a Nobel Prize in a scientific field. He was the Linus Pauling Chair Professor of Chemistry, Professor of Physics, and the director of the Physical Biology Center for Ultrafast Science and Technology at the California Institute of Technology.
Zewail died aged 70 on the evening of August 2, 2016, after a long battle with cancer. *Wik

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DEATHS

1638 Claude-Gaspar Bachet de M´eziriac (9 Oct 1581, 26 Feb 1638), noted for his work in number theory and mathematical recreations. He published the Greek text of Diophantus’s Arithmetica in 1621. This is the translation that Fermat used and in which he wrote the famous afghan note for FLT. He asked the first ferrying problem: Three jealous husbands and their wives wish to cross a river in a boat that will only hold two persons, in such a manner as to never leave a woman in the company of a man unless her husband is present. (With four couples this is impossible.)*VFR (I admit that I don't know how this differs from the similar river crossings problems of Alcuin in the 800's, Help someone?)His books on mathematical puzzles formed the basis for almost all later books on mathematical recreations.*SAU He was also the first to use continued fractions in the solution of indeterminate equations. Some have given him credit for Bezot's identity (Let a and b be integers with greatest common divisor d. Then there exist integers x and y such that ax + by = d. )

.Title page of the 1621 edition of Diophantus' Arithmetica, translated into Latin by Claude Gaspard Bachet de Méziriac.

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1693 Sir Charles Scarborough MP FRS FRCP (19 December 1615 – 26 February 1693) was an English physician and mathematician.
He was born in St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, London in 1615, the son of Edmund Scarburgh, and was sent to St. Paul's School, whence he proceeded to Caius College, Cambridge, and educated at St Paul's School, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, 1637, MA, 1640) and Merton College, Oxford (MD, 1646). While at Oxford he was a student of William Harvey, and the two would become close friends. Scarborough was also tutor to Christopher Wren, who was for a time his assistant.

While at Cambridge, Scarburgh became acquainted with Seth Ward (1617–1689), who shared his interest in mathematics. Ward would later go on to become the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, as well as the Bishop of Exeter. Both Ward and Scarburgh taught mathematics classes, and one mathematics textbook that we know they both used was Clavis mathematicae (The Key to Mathematics), first published in 1631 by William Oughtred , who was perhaps most famous for constructing the first slide rule. Clavis mathematicae was written while Oughtred was serving as the tutor to the son of a nobleman, and it included algorithms and problem solving in arithmetic, algebra and geometry

In order to ask questions about the text, Ward and Scarburgh actually visited Oughtred in Albury, which is located southwest of London and about 100 miles from Cambridge. Oughtred mentioned both of them in the 1652 edition of his work, and he particularly praised Scarburgh’s skill in mathematics as well as his mastery of the work of Euclid and Archimedes. 

The relationship between Oughtred and Scarburgh continued throughout their lives, and Scarburgh completed the posthumous revision and publication of Oughtred’s remaining papers in a single volume in 1676. While these last manuscripts were not considered to be major works, Oughtred still must have had a high opinion of Scarburgh’s scholarship to entrust him with the task 

Following the Restoration in 1660, Scarborough was appointed physician to Charles II, who knighted him in 1669; Scarborough attended the king on his deathbed, and was later physician to James II and William and Mary. During the reign of James II, Scarborough served (from 1685 to 1687) as Member of Parliament for Camelford in Cornwall.
Scarborough was an original fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, author of a treatise on anatomy, Syllabus Musculorum, which was used for many years as a textbook, and a translator and commentator of the first six books of Euclid's Elements (published in 1705). He also was the subject of a poem by Abraham Cowley, An Ode to Dr Scarborough.
Scarborough died in London in 1693. He was buried at Cranford, Middlesex, where there is a monument to him in the parish church erected by his widow. *Wik

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On this day in 1765, Nevil Maskelyne was appointed the fifth Astronomer Royal to succeed Nathaniel Bliss who had only held the post for two years.  Bliss was successor to Edmund Halley in the position.

Bliss studied at Oxford University and later became the Savilian Professor of Geometry. He made important meridian observations of a comet and a solar eclipse visible from Greenwich, and many of his observations proved useful in solving the longitude problem, and were bought by the Board of Longitude after his death. *Wik

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1878 Pietro Angelo Secchi (18 Jun 1818, 26 Feb 1878 at age 59) Italian Jesuit priest and astrophysicist, who made the first survey of the spectra of over 4000 stars and suggested that stars be classified according to their spectral type. He studied the planets, especially Jupiter, which he discovered was composed of gasses. Secchi studied the dark lines which join the two hemispheres of Mars; he called them canals as if they where the works of living beings. (These studies were later continued by Schiaparelli.) Beyond astronomy, his interests ranged from archaeology to geodesy, from geophysics to meteorology. He also invented a meteorograph, an automated device for recording barometric pressure, temperature, wind direction and velocity, and rainfall.*TIS

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1985 Tjalling Charles Koopmans (August 28, 1910 – February 26, 1985) was the joint winner, with Leonid Kantorovich, of the 1975 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Koopmans' early works on the Hartree–Fock theory are associated with the Koopmans' theorem, which is very well known in quantum chemistry. Koopmans was awarded his Nobel prize (jointly with Leonid Kantorovich) for his contributions to the field of resource allocation, specifically the theory of optimal use of resources. The work for which the prize was awarded focused on activity analysis, the study of interactions between the inputs and outputs of production, and their relationship to economic efficiency and prices.*SAU

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2017  Ludvig Dmitrievich Faddeev ( 23 March 1934 – 26 February 2017) was a Soviet and Russian mathematical physicist. He is known for the discovery of the Faddeev equations in the quantum-mechanical three-body problem and for the development of path-integral methods in the quantization of non-abelian gauge field theories, including the introduction of the Faddeev–Popov ghosts (with Victor Popov). He led the Leningrad School, in which he along with many of his students developed the quantum inverse scattering method for studying quantum integrable systems in one space and one time dimension. This work led to the invention of quantum groups by Drinfeld and Jimbo.

Faddeev was born in Leningrad to a family of mathematicians. His father, Dmitry Faddeev, was a well-known algebraist, professor of Leningrad University and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His mother, Vera Faddeeva,(20 Sept, 1906 - 15 April, 1983) was known for her work in numerical linear algebra. Faddeev attended Leningrad University, receiving his undergraduate degree in 1956. He enrolled in physics, rather than mathematics, "to be independent of [his] father". Nevertheless, he received a solid education in mathematics as well "due to the influence of V. A. Fock and V. I. Smirnov". His doctoral work on scattering theory was completed in 1959 under the direction of Olga Ladyzhenskaya

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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