On This Day in Math - August 23

 

 

The laws of nature are but the mathematical thoughts of God.

~Euclid

The 235th day of the year; 235 is the number of trees with 11 vertices.
(Counting the number of unlabeled free trees is still an open problem in math. No closed formula for the number of trees with n vertices up to graph isomorphism is known.)

235, like all numbers ending in 5 that are greater than 25, is the difference of two squares of integers that differ by five, 26^2 - 21^2 = 235. Like all odd numbers, it is the difference of two consecutive squares, 235 = 118^2 - 117^2.

235 is a semi-prime (5 x 47) that is the concatenation of the first three Fibonacci primes

235 is a palindrome in base 4 (32234), 7 (4547), and 8 (3538),

U-235 is the fissile isotope of uranium used in the first atomic bombs.
If you build an equilateral triangle with nine matchsticks on each side, then subdivide into additional equilateral triangles, there will be a total of 235 triangles of several different sizes. The image shows the subdivision of a equilateral triangle with three matchsticks on a side. Can you find the thirteen triangles in it?

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EVENTS

1638 Descartes, in a letter to Mersenne, proposed his folium (x³ + y³ = 2axy) as a test case to challenge Fermat’s differentiation techniques. To Descartes’ embarrassment, Fermat’s method worked better than his own. *VFR

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1735 Abraham deMoivre elected to the Berlin Academy after Philipp Naud´e (1684–1747) presented a copy of deMoivre’s Miscellanea analytica of 1730. Among other things this book contains work on the Fibonacci sequence. See “Abraham deMoivre” by Helen M. Walker, Scripta Mathematica, 2(1933), 316–333. *VFR

In a historical note by Karl Pearson in 19241, evidence was presented which shows that Abraham De Moivre (1667–1754) invented the normal curve and the normal probability integral about 1721. The name of Gauss is usually attached to the normal curve, although it is not uncommon to find it more correctly attributed to Laplace. But as Pearson shows, De Moivre ante-dated both Laplace and Gauss in this by many years. “The matter is,” Pearson says, “a very singular one historically. De Moivre published in 1730 his Miscellanea AnalyticaMany copies of this work have attached to them a Supplementum with separate pagination, ending in a table of 14 figure logarithms of factorials from 10! to 900! by differences of 10. But only a very few copies have a second supplement, also with separate pagination (pp. 1–7) and dated Nov. 12, 1733.” The title of the second supplement is “Approximatio ad Summam Terminorum Binomii (a + b)n in Seriem expansi”, and it contains not only the first use of the normal curve, but also the first use of the approximation for large factorials commonly but improperly known as Stirling's. It is also clear that herein occurred the first correct use of the law of large numbers, usually attributed to Jacques Bernoulli (1654–1705) and often called Bernoulli's theorem. *W. EDWARDS DEMING in Nature, 04 November, 1933

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1811 The aged Thomas Jefferson, confined to his room due to rheumatism, amuses him self with mathematical pursuits by calculating the lines for a sun-dial, as he reports in a letter to Charles Clay, "I have amused myself with calculating the hour lines of an horizontal dial for the latitude of this place, which I find to be 37^o 22' 26". The calculations are for every five minutes of time, and are always exact to within less than half a second of a degree. " *John Fauval, From a lecture at the Univ of Va.

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1993  Nintendo agreed to use Silicon Graphics Inc. technology in a video game player it was developing. The move came as SGI entered a struggle that would continue to sustain its business in designing machines and software for graphics-intensive computer work. Partnerships such as the one with Nintendo didn't stop SGI's decline as it struggled with decreasing revenues and leadership changes.

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In 1966, the Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of the Earth from the Moon.*TIS

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1977 Dr. Paul MacCready’s Gossamer Condor, powered only by the pilot, Bryan Allen, completed a 800-yard figure-8 flight to win the Kremer Prize.  [Air & Space] *VFR  

The MacCready Gossamer Condor was the first human-powered aircraft capable of controlled and sustained flight; as such, it won the Kremer prize in 1977. Its design was led by Paul MacCready of AeroVironment, Inc.

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BIRTHS

1683 Giovanni Poleni ( 23 Aug, 1683;Venice,- 14 Nov, 1761; Padua) was an Italian mathematician who worked on hydraulics, physics, astronomy and archaeology *SAU He was the son of Marquess Jacopo Poleni and studied the classics, philosophy, theology, mathematics, and physics at the School of the Padri Somaschi, Venice. He was appointed, at the age of twenty-five, professor of astronomy at Padua. In 1715 he was assigned to the chair of physics, and in 1719 he succeeded Nicholas II Bernoulli as professor of mathematics. As an expert in hydraulic engineering he was charged by the Venetian Senate with the care of the waters of lower Lombardy and with the constructions necessary to prevent floods. He was also repeatedly called in to decide cases between sovereigns whose states were bordered by waterways.
Poleni was the first to build a calculator that used a pinwheel design. Made of wood, his calculating clock was built in 1709; he destroyed it after hearing that Antonius Braun had received 10,000 Guldens for dedicating a pinwheel machine of his own design to the emperor Charles VI of Vienna. Poleni described his machine in his Miscellanea in 1709, but it was also described by Jacob Leupold in his Theatrum Machinarum Generale ("The General Theory of Machines") which was published in 1727. In 1729, he also built a tractional device that enabled logarithmic functions to be drawn.
Poleni's observations on the impact of falling weights (similar to William 's Gravesande's) led to a controversy with Samuel Clarke and other Newtonians that became a part of the so-called "vis viva dispute" in the history of classical mechanics.
His knowledge of architecture caused Benedict XIV to call him to Rome in 1748 to examine the cupola of St. Peter's, which was rapidly disintegrating. He promptly indicated the repairs necessary. He also wrote a number of antiquarian dissertations. In 1710 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, in 1739 the French Academy of Sciences made him a member and later the societies of Berlin and St. Petersburg did the same. The city of Padua elected him as magistrate, and after his death erected his statue by Canova. Venice also honoured him by striking a medal.
He married Orsola Roberti of Bassano della Grappa. *Wik

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1778 Josef-Maria Hoëné de Wronski (23 August 1776 – 9 August 1853) wrote on the philosophy of mathematics. *SAU He wrote exclusively in French, desirous that his ideas, of whose immortality he was convinced, should be accessible to all; he worked, he said, "through France for Poland." He published over a hundred works, and left many more in manuscript. When dying in the seventy-fifth year of his life, he exclaimed: "God Almighty, there's still so much more I wanted to say!"
In science, Hoene-Wroński set himself maximal tasks: the complete reform of philosophy and of mathematics, astronomy, technology. He not only elaborated a system of philosophy, but applications to politics, history, economics, law, psychology, music, pedagogy. It was his aspiration to reform human knowledge in an "absolute, that is, ultimate" manner.
Though during his lifetime nearly all his work was dismissed as nonsense, some of it has come in later years to be seen in a more favorable light. Although nearly all his grandiose claims were in fact unfounded, his mathematical work contains flashes of deep insight and many important intermediary results. Most significant was his work on series. He had strongly criticized Lagrange's use of infinite series, introducing instead a novel series expansion for a function. His criticisms of Lagrange were for the most part unfounded, but the coefficients in Wroński's new series were found to be important after his death, forming the determinants now known as the Wronskians (the name was given them by Thomas Muir in 1882).
The level of Wroński's scientific and scholarly accomplishments, and the amplitude of his objectives, placed Wroński in the first rank of European metaphysicians in the early 19th century. But the abstractness, formalism and obscurity of his thought, the difficulty of his language, his boundless self-assurance, his uncompromising judgments of others—alienated. He was perhaps the most original of the Polish metaphysicians, but others were more representative of the Polish outlook. *Wik

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1797 Adhémar Jean Claude Barré de Saint-Venant (August 23, 1797, Villiers-en-Bière, Seine-et-Marne – January 1886, Saint-Ouen, Loir-et-Cher) was a mechanician and mathematician who contributed to early stress analysis and also developed the one-dimensional unsteady open channel flow shallow water equations or Saint-Venant equations that are a fundamental set of equations used in modern hydraulic engineering. Although his surname was Barré de Saint-Venant in non-French mathematical literature he is known simply as Saint-Venant. His name is also associated with Saint-Venant's principle of statically equivalent systems of load, Saint-Venant's theorem and for Saint-Venant's compatibility condition, the integrability conditions for a symmetric tensor field to be a strain.
In 1843 he published the correct derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations for a viscous flow and was the first to "properly identify the coefficient of viscosity and its role as a multiplying factor for the velocity gradients in the flow". Although he published before Stokes the equations do not bear his name.
Barré de Saint-Venant developed a version of vector calculus similar to that of Grassmann (now understood as exterior differential forms) which he published in 1845. A dispute arose between Saint-Venant and Grassmann over priority for this invention. Grassmann had published his results in 1844, but Barré de Saint-Venant claimed he had developed the method in 1832. *Wik

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1811 Auguste Bravais (23 Aug 1811; 30 Mar 1863) French physicist and mineralogist, best remembered for his work on the lattice theory of crystals. Bravais lattices are named for him. In 1850, he showed that crystals could be divided into 14 unit cells for which: (a) the unit cell is the simplest repeating unit in the crystal; (b) opposite faces of a unit cell are parallel; and (c) the edge of the unit cell connects equivalent points. These unit cells fall into seven geometrical categories, which differ in their relative edge lengths and internal angles. In 1866, he elaborated the relationships between the ideal lattice and the material crystal. Sixty years later, Bravais' work provided the mathematical and conceptual basis for the determination of crystal structures after Laue's discovery of X-ray diffraction in 1911. *TIS Auguste Bravais is best known for pointing out that there are in total 14 types of crystallographic lattices. His ordering and denomination of lattices is still in use today. *Arjen Dijksman, commonsensequantum.blogspot.fr

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1817 Sarah Frances Whiting (August 23, 1847 – September 12, 1927), American physicist and astronomer, was the instructor to several astronomers, including Annie Jump Cannon.
Whiting graduated from Ingham University in 1865.
She was appointed by Wellesley College president Henry Fowle Durant, one year after the College's 1875 opening, as its first professor of physics. She established its physics department and the undergraduate experimental physics lab at Wellesley, the second of its kind to be started in the country. At the request of Durant, she attended lectures at MIT given by Edward Charles Pickering. He invited Whiting to observe some of the new techniques being applied to astronomy, such as spectroscopy. In 1880, Whiting started teaching a course on Practical Astronomy at Wellesley.
In 1895, as told by biographer Annie Jump Cannon,

An especially exciting moment came when the Boston morning papers reported the discovery of the Rontgen or X-rays in 1895. The advanced students in physics of those days will always remember the zeal with which Miss Whiting immediately set up an old Crookes tube and the delight when she actually obtained some of the very first photographs taken in this country of coins within a purse and bones within the flesh.

Between 1896 and 1900, Whiting helped Wellesley College trustee Sarah Elizabeth Whitin to establish the Whitin Observatory, of which Whiting became the first director.
Tufts College bestowed an honorary doctorate on Whiting in 1905. She was also known for supporting prohibition.
Whiting retired from Wellesley in 1916 and was a Professor Emeritus until her death in 1927. She is buried in Machpelah Cemetery in Le Roy, New York, near her now-defunct alma mater.*Wik

Whitin Observatory

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1829 Birthdate of Moritz Cantor, (23 Aug 1829;10 Apr 1920)
German historian of mathematics, one of the greatest of the 19th century. He is best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume (published 1880) traces the general history of mathematics up to 1200. The second volume traces the history up to 1668 (the year Newton and Leibniz were just about to embark on their mathematicalresearches). The third volume continues up to 1758 (Lagrange's work began shortly after this date). Cantor then, at the age of 69, as editor-in-chief, organised a team with nine further contributors to collaborate on the fourth volume (published 1908), continuing to 1799, the year of Gauss's doctoral thesis. *TIS

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1842 Osborne Reynolds (23 Aug 1842 in Belfast, Ireland - 21 Feb 1912 in Watchet, Somerset, England) was an Irish mathematician best known for introducing the Reynolds number classifying fluid flow.*SAU

 British innovator in the understanding of fluid dynamics. Separately, his studies of heat transfer between solids and fluids brought improvements in boiler and condenser design. He spent his entire career at what is now the University of Manchester. *Wik

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1875 William Henry Eccles (23 Aug 1875; 29 Apr 1966); British physicist who pioneered in the development of radio communication. Eccles was an early proponent of Oliver Heaviside's theory that an upper layer of the atmosphere reflects radio waves, thus enabling their transmission over long distances. He also suggested in 1912 that solar radiation accounted for the differences in wave propagation during the day and night. He experimented with detectors and amplifiers for radio reception, coined the term "diode," and studied atmospheric disturbances of radio reception. After WW I, he made many contributions to electronic circuit development*, including the Eccles-Jordan "flip-flop" patented in 1918 and used in binary counters (working with F.W. Jordan).*TIS

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1893 Joseph Fels Ritt (August 23, 1893–January 5, 1951) was an American mathematician at Columbia University in the early 20th century.
He is known for his work on characterizing the indefinite integrals that can be solved in closed form, for his work on the theory of ordinary differential equations and partial differential equations, for beginning the study of differential algebraic groups, and for the method of characteristic sets used in the solution of systems of polynomial equations.*Wik

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1909 Florence Nightingale David, also known as F. N. David (August 23, 1909 - July 23, 1993) was an English statistician, born in Ivington, Herefordshire, England. She was named after Florence Nightingale, who was a friend of her parents.
David read mathematics at Bedford College for Women in London. After graduation, she worked for the eminent statistician Karl Pearson​ at University College, London as his research student. She calculated the distribution of correlation coefficients, producing in 1938 her first book, Tables of the correlation coefficient.
After Karl Pearson died in 1934, she returned to the Biometrics laboratory to work with Jerzy Neyman where she submitted her last four published papers as her PhD thesis. During World War II, David worked for the Ministry of Home Security. In late 1939 when war had started but England had not yet been attacked, she created statistical models to predict the possible consequences of bombs exploding in high density populations such as the big cities of England and especially London. From these models, she determined estimates of harm to humans and damage to non-humans This included the possible numbers living and dead, the reactions to fires and damaged buildings as well as damages to communications,utilities such as phones, water, gas, electricity and sewers. As a result when the Germans bombed London in 1940 and 1941, vital services were kept going and her models were updated and modified with the evidence from the real harms and real damage.
David became head of the Statistics Department at the University of California at Riverside in 1970.*Wik

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1919 Dirk Polder (August 23, 1919, The Hague — March 18, 2001, Iran) was a Dutch physicist who, together with Hendrik Casimir, first predicted the existence of what today is known as the Casimir-Polder force, sometimes also referred to as the Casimir effect or Casimir force. He also worked on the similar topic of radiative heat transfer at nanoscale. 

In quantum field theory, the Casimir effect (or Casimir force) is a physical force acting on the macroscopic boundaries of a confined space which arises from the quantum fluctuations of a field. It is named after the Dutch physicist Hendrik Casimir, who predicted the effect for electromagnetic systems in 1948.

In the same year, Casimir together with Dirk Polder described a similar effect experienced by a neutral atom in the vicinity of a macroscopic interface, which is called the Casimir–Polder force. Their result is a generalization of the London–van der Waals force and includes retardation due to the finite speed of light. The fundamental principles leading to the London–van der Waals force, the Casimir force, and the Casimir–Polder force can be formulated on the same footing.*Wik

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1923 Edgar Frank "Ted" Codd (19 August 1923 – 18 April 2003). His main achievement besides many contributions to computer science was the invention of the relational model for database management, the theoretical basis for relational databases.

“At the time, Nixon was normalizing relations with China. I figured that if he could normalize relations, then so could I.”

When you talk about databases today, usually you are referring to relational databases that store their data within tables, interconnected via so-called keys. Of course there are also modern alternatives such as e.g. graph based databases, but relational databases are widespread and rather common today. And this is also thanks to E.F. Codd and his relational algebra.
*/scihi.org/

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1928 Israel Gohberg ( 23 August 1928 – 12 October 2009) was a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Israeli mathematician, most known for his work in operator theory and functional analysis, in particular linear operators and integral equations.

He studied at the Kyrgyz Pedagogical Institute in Bishkek and at Moldova State University in Chișinău, completed his doctorate at Leningrad State University on a thesis advised by Mark Krein (1954), and attended Moscow State University for his habilitation degree.

Gohberg joined the faculty at the Teacher's college in Soroca and the Teachers college in Bălți before returning to Chișinău where he was elected into the Academy of Sciences and also being appointed head of functional analysis at Moldova State University (1964–73). After moving to Israel, he joined Tel Aviv University (1974) and was at the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot. Since then he also had positions at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (1983), as well as at the University of Calgary and the University of Maryland, College Park.

He founded the Integral equations and operator theory journal (1983).

Gohberg was the visionary and driving force of the International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications, or IWOTA, starting with its first meeting on August 1, 1981. He became a lifetime president of the IWOTA Steering Committee and a founder of the Springer / Birkhäuser Verlag book series Operator Theory: Advances and Applications (OTAA).

Gohberg was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 1992. He received honorary doctorates from the Darmstadt University of Technology in 1997; from the Vienna University of Technology in 2001; from West University of Timișoara in 2002; from Moldova State University, Chișinău, Moldova in 2002; from Alecu Russo State University, Bălți, Moldova in 2002; and from Technion, June 2008. He also was awarded the M.G. Krein Prize of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 2008, and was elected SIAM Fellow in 2009.

He died in Ra'anana in 2009.

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1929 Anthony James Merrill Spencer (23 August 1929 — 26 January 2008) FRS was an applied mathematician whose main field of research was in understanding and predicting the mechanical behavior of advanced materials.*Wik 

Anthony J. M. Spencer, known to all as Tony, was one of the most outstanding British applied mathematicians of his generation. His main field of research was in understanding and predicting the mechanical behaviour of advanced materials. His insight and skill in formulating constitutive equations enabled him to develop new models of materials and then solve physically significant problems in the fields of composites, granular materials and laminates. He studied at Cambridge, Birmingham and Keele and, after postdoctoral research in the acclaimed Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University in the USA and a short period of employment in government service, moved to Nottingham University and spent the rest of his career there. He soon became Head of the Department of Theoretical Mechanics, which had been formed in 1960 and given responsibility for teaching mathematics to students in the Faculty of Applied Science. Under Tony's guidance and inspirational leadership it gained an unrivalled reputation, by virtue of its productivity in research, the quality of its staff and its innovative approach to undergraduate teaching and graduate training. Although firmly rooted in Nottingham, Tony travelled widely and was very well known. He was an astute and highly proficient research worker whose views were prized by his many collaborators and friends in the solid mechanics community. It is a measure of his intellectual strength and dedication that he published 40 research papers in his 13 years of retirement. *Royal Society Pub

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1933 Robert Floyd Curl Jr. (August 23, 1933 – July 3, 2022) American chemist who with Richard E. Smalley and Sir Harold W. Kroto discovered the first fullerene, a spherical cluster of carbon atoms, in 1985. The discovery opened a new branch of chemistry, and all three men were awarded the 1996 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work. In Sep 1985 Curl met with Kroto of the University of Sussex, Eng., and Smalley, a colleague at Rice, and, in 11 days of research, they discovered fullerenes. They announced their findings to the public in the 14 Nov 1985, issue of the journal Nature.*TIS

Born in Alice, Texas, United States, Curl was the son of a Methodist minister. Due to his father's missionary work, his family moved several times within southern and southwestern Texas, and the elder Curl was involved in starting the San Antonio Medical Center's Methodist Hospital.[Curl attributes his interest in chemistry to a chemistry set he received as a nine-year-old, recalling that he ruined the finish on his mother's porcelain stove when nitric acid boiled over onto it.

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DEATHS

1806 Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (14 June 1736, 23 Aug 1806) French physicist best known for the formulation of Coulomb's law, which states that the force between two electrical charges is proportional to the product of the charges and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Coulombic force is one of the principal forces involved in atomic reactions.*TIS

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1923 Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton (28 April 1854 – 23 August 1923), was a British engineer, mathematician, physicist, and inventor. Known in adult life as Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, she was awarded the Hughes Medal by the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripples in sand and water.
In 1880, Ayrton passed the Mathematical Tripos, but Cambridge did not grant her an academic degree because, at the time, Cambridge gave only certificates and not full degrees to women. Ayrton passed an external examination at the University of London, which awarded her a Bachelor of Science degree in 1881.
In 1899, she was the first woman ever to read her own paper before the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE). Her paper was entitled "The Hissing of the Electric Arc". Shortly thereafter, Ayrton was elected the first female member of the IEE; the next woman to be admitted to the IEE was in 1958. She petitioned to present a paper before the Royal Society but was not allowed because of her sex and "The Mechanism of the Electric Arc" was read by John Perry in her stead in 1901. Ayrton was also the first woman to win a prize from the Society, the Hughes Medal, awarded to her in 1906 in honour of her research on the motion of ripples in sand and water and her work on the electric arc. By the late nineteenth century, Ayrton's work in the field of electrical engineering was recognised more widely, domestically and internationally. At the International Congress of Women held in London in 1899, she presided over the physical science section. Ayrton also spoke at the International Electrical Congress in Paris in 1900. Her success there led the British Association for the Advancement of Science to allow women to serve on general and sectional committees. *Wik

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1973 Helmuth Kneser (April 16, 1898 – August 23, 1973) published on sums of squares in fields, on groups, on non-Euclidean geometry, on Harald Bohr's almost periodic functions, on iteration of analytic functions, on the differential geometry of manifolds, on local uniformisation and boundary values. He succeeded in pushing forward Weierstrass and Hadamard's ideas to open up the area of the value distribution of meromorphic functions. Kneser, writing of his work on this last topic said:"I hope that this theory will also prove fruitful for the special functions used in analysis, this has to be required of a new theory, in particular, if one considers that the general theory of rational functions of one indeterminate came from the treatment of special functions, namely the gamma and sigma functions by Weierstrass and of the Riemann zeta function by Hadamard. " *SAU

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1988 Hans Lewy (October 20, 1904 – August 23, 1988) was an American mathematician, known for his work on partial differential equations and on the theory of functions of several complex variables. *Wik

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1907 Gordon Stanley Brown (August 30, 1907 in Australia – August 23, 1996 in Tucson, Arizona) was a professor of electrical engineering at MIT. He originated many of the concepts behind automatic-feedback control systems and the numerical control of machine tools] From 1959 to 1968, he served as the dean of MIT's engineering school. With his former student Donald P. Campbell, he wrote Principles of Servomechanisms in 1948, which is still a standard reference in the field.

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2001 Fred Hoyle (24 Jun 1915, 23 Aug 2001) English astronomer who coined the term "Big Bang." He became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on the nature of the universe. He recalled using "big bang" for the first time in the last of those talks, though he never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe. Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle had proposed the steady state theory in the 1940s, arguing that the universe developed in a process of continuous growth. Over time, his belief in a "steady state" universe was shared by fewer and fewer scientists because of new discoveries. Hoyle also did theoretical work on the formation - in older, hotter stars - of other elements as helium nuclei fuse to produce carbon, oxygen, and eventually elements up to iron. *TIS

I am told he is also the author of Robin Whitty's (Theorem of the Day) favorite sci-fi novel,  The Black Cloud

Hoyle is often confused with the origin of "According to Hoyle" explained in my post, Done Right.

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2016 Reinhard Justus Reginald Selten (5 October 1930 – 23 August 2016) was a German economist, who won the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (shared with John Harsanyi and John Nash). He is also well known for his work in bounded rationality and can be considered one of the founding fathers of experimental economics.

He was a visiting professor at Berkeley and taught from 1969 to 1972 at the Free University of Berlin and, from 1972 to 1984, at the University of Bielefeld. He then accepted a professorship at the University of Bonn. There he built the BonnEconLab, a laboratory for experimental economic research, where he was active even after his retirement.

Selten was professor emeritus at the University of Bonn, Germany, and held several honorary doctoral degrees. He had been an Esperantist since 1959 and met his wife through the Esperanto movement. He was a member and co-founder of the International Academy of Sciences San Marino.

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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 - August 22

   

Only professional mathematicians learn anything from professors.
Other people learn from explanations.

~Ralph Boas

Denise Gaskins commented...

I thought the quote was "Only professional mathematicians learn anything from proofs..."

The 234th day of the year; There are 234 ways of grouping six children into rings of at least two children with one child at the center of each ring.

234 is the 55th abundant number.  It's proper divisors are {1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 13, 18, 26, 39, 78, 117}  and their sum is greater than 234, it is  312.  There are 86 abundant numbers in a non-leap year. 234=6(39) and all multiples two or greater of a perfect number are abundant.

234 begins a string of eight consecutive digits which is a prime number, 23456789.  It is the concatenation of three primes, 23, 4567, and 89.  All the children need to know why there can not be any ordering of all nine digits , 1 to 9 that is prime. Teach one today.  

Casting out nines is as old as Iamblichus, and as new as the youngest kid entering kindergarten

More Number Facts here

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EVENTS
1450 Gutenberg borrowed 800 guilden in gold at 6% interest (a low rate then) to develop his invention of printing from movable metal type. The first book produced was a 42-line Latin Bible, the famous Gutenberg Bible. [G. H. Putnam, Books and Their Makers During the Middle Ages (1896), p. 361]. *VFR

In 1455, Gutenberg completed his 42-line Bible, known as the Gutenberg Bible. About 180 copies were printed, three quarters on paper, and the rest on vellum. 

Some time in 1456, there was a dispute between Gutenberg and Fust, in which Fust demanded his money back, and accused Gutenberg of misusing the funds. Gutenberg's two rounds of financing from Fust, totaling 1,600 guilders at 6% interest, now amounted to 2,026 guilders. Fust sued at the archbishop's court. A legal document, from November 1455, records that there was a partnership for a "project of the books," the funds for which Gutenberg had used for other purposes, according to Fust. The court decided in favor of Fust, giving him control over the Bible printing workshop.

Thus, Gutenberg was effectively bankrupt, but it appears he retained, or restarted, a printing shop and participated in the printing of a Bible in the town of Bamberg around 1459, for which he seems at least to have supplied the type. But since his printed books never carry his name or a date, it is difficult to be certain.

The Gutenberg Bible, now housed at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

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1676 Ole Rømer's conjecture that the speed of light was finite may have appeared in a presentation to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris on August 22, "This second inequality appears to be due to light taking some time to reach us from the satellite; light seems to take about ten to eleven minutes [to cross] a distance equal to the half-diameter of the terrestrial orbit." His final calculations of 220,000 Km/sec were presented to the Academy on 22 November, but the record of that meeting has been lost. The first public notice occurred on Dec 7, 1676 in the Journal des sçavans. *Wik

Rømer moved to Paris in the 1670s, where he worked at the Royal Observatory under Giovanni Domenico Cassini, a key figure in 17th-century astronomy. While observing the eclipses of Jupiter’s moon Io, Rømer noticed a discrepancy in the predicted and observed times of the eclipses. When Earth was moving toward Jupiter, Io’s eclipses seemed to happen sooner than expected; when Earth was moving away, they appeared later. *PBnotes

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1800  On this day in 1800, Georg Vega was given the hereditary title of baron, including the right to his own coat of arms.   Vega wrote about artillery but he is best remembered for his tables of logarithms and trigonometric functions.

Vega's calculating abilities, often carried on during military campaigns, is clear in his remarkable achievement of calculating π to 140 places, a record which stood for over 50 years. This appears in a paper which he published in 1789, the year he was involved in fighting the Turks. Tomaz Pisanski discusses methods for calculating decimal digits of π in . He writes about Vega's achievement:-

We mention the contribution of the Slovenian mathematician Jurij Vega ... not because he worked harder than his contemporaries, but because he had a better algorithm.

What was this better algorithm? He used two formulas, basically using one as a check against the other, 

 

$\frac{4}{\pi }=5arc\tan (\frac{1}{7})+2arc\tan (\frac{3}{79})and\frac{\pi }{4}=2arc\tan (\frac{1}{3})+arc\tan (\frac{1}{7})$.

Logarithmisch trigonometrisches Handbuch Ⓣ was published in 1793 in both German and Latin. This book of 7-figure logarithm tables contained tables of the logarithms of the natural numbers from 1 to 100,000 and the logarithms of the trigonometric functions. This remarkable work, which went through over 100 editions, contained more than just tables, for in it Vega explained the theory of logarithms in the Preface, and then went on to give useful examples of how the tables could be used. In 1794 he went to Stuttgart where he spent two months and, in the same year, he was elected to the Royal Society of Sciences and Humanities in Göttingen. The 10-figure tables Thesaurus logarithmorum completus Ⓣ, based on Adriaan Vlacq's tables, appeared in 1794 and again this was a remarkable work with the 90th edition appearing in 1924.  *SAU

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1850 Michael Faraday in a letter to William Whewell writes, "I have been driven to assume for some time, especially in relation to the gases, a sort of conducting power for magnetism. Mere space is Zero. One substance being made to occupy a given portion of space will cause more lines of force to pass through that space than before, and another substance will cause less to pass. The former I now call Paramagnetic & the latter are the diamagnetic. The former need not of necessity assume a polarity of particles such as iron has with magnetic, and the latter do not assume any such polarity either direct or reverse. I do not say more to you just now because my own thoughts are only in the act of formation, but this I may say: that the atmosphere has an extraordinary magnetic constitution, & I hope & expect to find in it the cause of the annual & diurnal variations, but keep this to yourself until I have time to see what harvest will spring from my growing ideas." * L. P. Williams (ed.), The Selected Correspondence of Michael Faraday (1971), Vol. 2, 589.

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1883 Sylvester writes Cayley that, "I have been recovering my theory of multiple algebras - by slow degrees." Thus begins his first sustained assault on Matrix Theory. *The Emergence of the American Mathematical Research Community, 1876-1900, Parshal & Rowe

J J Sylvester

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In 1893 "An international Congress of Mathematicians is held at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, August 21-26. Felix Klein​ and E.H. Moore occupy center stage. The Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies recommends a year of algebra, followed by two years of plane and solid geometry to be taught side by side with more algebra. The first year's course in algebra is recommended for all students."*from Milestones in (Ohio)Mathematics, by David E. Kullman

I began a search for the history of teaching of spherical geometry in America, and one of the first statementsa I found was this discouraging indictment, " Spherical geometry is not typically covered in a secondary geometry course due to time constraints and teacher knowledge (indicating the lack thereof).

Klein

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1900 It seems that Henry Ernest Dudeney may have been the first person to explore the use of primes to create a magic square. He gave the problem of constructing a prime magic square in The Weekly Dispatch, 22nd July and 5th August 1900. At that time, 1 was sometimes (often?) considered as a prime number. His magic square gives the lowest possible sum for a 3x3 using primes (assuming one is prime)

The smallest magic square with true primes (not using one) has a magic constant of 177

 The left square is the 3×3 prime magic square (containing a 1) having the smallest possible magic constant, and was discovered by Dudeney in 1917 (Dudeney 1970; Gardner 1984, p. 86). The second square is the 3×3 magic square consisting of primes only having the smallest possible magic constant (Madachy 1979, p. 95; attributed to R. Ondrejka). The third square is the 3×3 prime magic square consisting of primes in arithmetic progression (199+210n) having the smallest possible magic constant of 3117 (Madachy 1979, p. 95; attributed to R. Ondrejka). The 4×4 prime magic square on the right was found by A. W. Johnson, Jr. (Dewdney 1988). *Wolfram MathWorld

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1955 The first computer User Group is founded. SHARE was founded by users of IBM's Model 704 computer, ... in order for the growing community of IBM computer users (mainly aerospace companies on the U.S. West Coast) to exchange information and programs. The first meeting included scientists and engineers whose companies had ordered IBM's newest computer, the 704. Sparked by quick growth and the fact that its members were some of IBM's largest customers, the group had significant influence over IBM designs and customer support. *CHM

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Aug 22-26,  1989, the first complete ring around Neptune was discovered in photographs transmitted by Voyager 2 to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the U.S. Dusty debris was seen to form a tenuous but complete ring about 17,000 miles above Neptune's clouds. The material in the ring appeared be distributed uniformly through the dark circle, though whether fine or large particles was undetermined. The ring lies just outside the orbit of one of the planet's small moons, designated then as 1989 N3, also newly discovered by Voyager 2. Only arcs - fragments of rings around Neptune, had previously viewed from Earth-based observations, which were also shown as arcs in photographs taken by Voyager 2 eleven days earlier.

*NASA

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On August 22, 2006, four Fields Medals were awarded at the opening ceremonies of the Inter-
national Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in Madrid, Spain. The medalists are ANDREI O KOUNKOV, GRIGORY PERELMAN, TERENCE TAO, and WENDELIN WERNER.
During the award ceremony, John Ball, president of the International Mathematical
Union, announced that Perelman declined to accept. Tao became one of the youngest persons, the first Australian, and the first UCLA faculty member ever to be awarded a Fields Medal. *AMS Notices

Dr. Perelman, 40, is known not only for his work on the Poincaré conjecture, among the most heralded unsolved math problems, but also because he has declined previous mathematical prizes and has turned down job offers from Princeton, Stanford and other universities. He has said he wants no part of $1 million that the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Mass. has offered for the first published proof of the conjecture.

*NY Times

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BIRTHS
1638  Georg Christoph Eimmart, a German astronomer and artist, was born Aug. 22, 1638.  In 1678, Eimmart founded an astronomical observatory in the Vestnertorbastei, a garden area within a low wall just north of Nuremberg Castle.  Unlike Tycho Brahe's pioneer observatory at Hven in Denmark, where each instrument was protected by a conical dome, Eimmart's observatory appears to have been an open-air affair.  Several images survive of Eimmert's garden of sextants and transit circles; the one we have in our collection is an inset on a large star map that was included in Johann Doppelmayr's Atlas coelestis (1742; first image).  Doppelmayr was a Nuremberger himself and was happy to showcase Eimmart's observatory, along with those at Greenwich, Paris, and Hven.

Being an artist and engraver, Eimmart was naturally drawn to the production of stellar and lunar maps.  Most of the celestial planispheres that survive and bear his name were printed by others in the 18th century, especially by Johann Baptist Homann; there are a moderate number of these that survive.  *Linda Hall Org

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1647 Denis Papin (22 Aug 1647; c1712) French-born British physicist who invented the pressure cooker (1679). He assisted Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens with air-pump experiments, and went to London in 1675 to work with the English physicist Robert Boyle. A few years later, Papin invented his steam digester (pressure cooker), a closed vessel with a tightly fitting lid that confined the steam at a higher pressure, considerably raising the boiling point of the water. A safety valve of his own invention prevented explosions. Observing that the enclosed steam in his cooker tended to raise the lid, Papin conceived of the use of steam to drive a piston in a cylinder, the basic design for early steam engines. He never built an engine of his own, but his idea was improved by others and led to the development of the steam engine, a major contribution to the Industrial Revolution. *TIS If you are not familiar with Papin, check out this blog by The Renaissance Mathematicus.

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1796 Baden Powell (22 August 1796–11 June 1860 Kensington, London) born in Stamford Hill, England. Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford from 1827 to 1854. He deserves credit for the modest reforms in mathematical education at Oxford in the 1850s. One son (he had 14 children by 3 wives) Robert Baden-Powell founded the scouting movement. *VFR He fought for the principle acknowledging scientific advances were compatible with Christian religion. Following Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1859, he contributed one of seven essays in "Essays and Reviews," 1860. This was violently attacked, and the authors denounced as being inspired by "the Evil One himself." "There was some expectation of him becoming a Bishop, before Essays and Reviews were published" (letter from his widow to her nephew 20.8.1909). *Pinetreeweb.com

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1834 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
Developed a bolometer (for measurements of the cosmic microwave background) and determent the value of the solar constant.*Wik

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1908 Donald Harry Sadler (22 August, 1908 – 24 October, 1987 ) was an English astronomer and mathematician who developed an international reputation for his work in preparing astronomical and navigational almanacs. He worked as the Superintendent of His Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office from 1937 to 1971.

Sadler began work as an assistant at His Majesty's Nautical Almanac Office in 1930, working under the direction of the Superintendent, Leslie Comrie, when it was based at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich, London. Sadler was promoted to Deputy Superintendent of the Office in 1933.

Comrie left the Nautical Almanac Office in 1936. A decision was taken to move the Office to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, placing it under the direction of the Astronomer Royal, and Sadler was appointed a Chief Assistant at the observatory. Sadler was appointed Comrie's successor as Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac Office in 1937. Sadler was the eighth person to occupy this post since it was created in 1818.

Sadler took on the task of consolidating projects begun by Comrie, publishing new tables for use in navigation. The Second World War soon intervened and the Nautical Almanac Office was moved temporarily out of London to the safer environment of Bath. The Office expanded in size temporarily to prepare data for military use. Sadler was awarded the OBE in 1948 in recognition of this work.

Sadler supervised the relocation of the Nautical Almanac Office in 1949 from Bath to the new home of the Royal Greenwich Observatory at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. He expanded the use of calculating machines in astronomical calculations. He increased international cooperation in preparing astronomical tables, particularly with the United States Naval Observatory.

In 1954 Sadler married his colleague, Flora Sadler (née McBain), in what was described as 'the astronomical romance of the decade'.

Donald Sadler oversaw the transfer of the Nautical Almanac Office within the Royal Greenwich Observatory from the control of the Admiralty to the new Science Research Council.

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1915 James Hillier, OC (August 22, 1915 – January 15, 2007) was a Canadian-born scientist and inventor who designed and built, with Albert Prebus, the first successful high-resolution electron microscope in North America in 1938. *Wik

Professor Burton and grad students Hillier and Prebus developed the first practical electron microscope that focused a beam of electrons for illumination 

Three years earlier, Professor E.F. Burton, Chairman of the Physics Department, was at a meeting in Berlin, Germany to discuss the useful possibilities of electron microscopy. Observed at the originator of the instrument, German scientist Ernst Ruska built an electron microscope in 1931. He had trouble with refining his design, resulting in specimens destroyed by the hot beam of the microscope. “After attending the meeting Burton became certain that, once perfected, the electron microscope would be a key tool in biological and medical research,” said Julie Stoehr in The Undiscovered Country: Development of the Electron Microscope (Quasar, University of Alberta). Burton “returned to Canada determined to construct such an instrument.”

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1923 Hidehiko Yamabe (山辺 英彦, Yamabe Hidehiko, August 22, 1923, in Ashiya, Hyōgo, Japan – November 20, 1960, in Evanston, Illinois) was a Japanese mathematician. Above all, he is famous for discovering that every conformal class on a smooth compact manifold is represented by a Riemannian metric of constant scalar curvature. Other notable contributions include his definitive solution of Hilbert's fifth problem. *Wik

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1927 Heinrich-Wolfgang Leopoldt (22 August 1927 – 28 July 2011) was a German mathematician who worked on algebraic number theory.

Leopoldt was brought up in Schwerin, the town of his birth, on the south west shore of Schweriner Lake, about 65 km southwest of the city of Rostock. He was studying at the Gymnasium in Schwerin when World War II began in 1939. He continued his secondary education until January 1943 when Germany began the Luftwaffenhelfer programme. This drafted all boys born in 1926 or 1927, which included Leopoldt, into the military where they were supervised by the Hitler youth who began a programme of ideological indoctrination. Members of the Luftwaffe also trained the boys in military duties. After the war in 1945 the future looked very uncertain and Leopoldt decided that his best option was to take up an apprenticeship. However, he was very fortunate that his love for playing music meant that he joined a group one of whom was the mathematics teacher who had taught him in the Gymnasium. The teacher was, of course, already fully aware of Leopoldt's mathematical abilities and he began to teach him the mathematical principles of astronomy. Soon the teacher was encouraging Leopoldt return to the Gymnasium to complete his school education so that he might gain admission to university. Leopoldt took his teacher's advice and went back to the Gymnasium, gaining the qualifications to enter university in 1947. He then enrolled to study mathematics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, matriculating in the autumn of 1947. *SAU

Leopoldt earned his Ph.D. in 1954 at the University of Hamburg under Helmut Hasse with the thesis Über Einheitengruppe und Klassenzahl reeller algebraischer Zahlkörper (On group of unity and class number of real algebraic number fields). As a postdoc, he was from 1956 to 1958 at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 1959, he obtained his habilitation degree at the University of Erlangen and was then at the University of Tübingen. From 1964, he was ordentlicher Professor at the University of Karlsruhe, where he was also Director of the Mathematics Institute.

Leopoldt and Tomio Kubota introduced and investigated p-adic L-functions (now named after them). These functions are a component of Iwasawa theory and are a p-adic version of the Dirichlet L-functions. With Hans Zassenhaus he also worked on computer algebra and its applications in number theory. *SAU

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1929  Vera Martha Winitzky de Spinadel (August 22, 1929 – January 26, 2017) was an Argentine mathematician. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in mathematics at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1958. Between 2010 and 2017, she was full Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires. In 1995, she was named Director of the Centre of Mathematics and Design. In April 2005 she inaugurated the Laboratory of Mathematics & Design, University Campus in Buenos Aires. From 1998 to her death she was the President of the International Mathematics and Design Association, which organizes international congresses every 3 years and publishes a Journal of Mathematics & Design. She was the author of more than 10 books and published more than 100 research papers. Spinadel was a leader in the field of metallic mean and in the development of the classical Golden Ratio and got wide international recognition. *Wik

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DEATHS

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1664 Maria Cunitz (1604 - August 22, 1664) was an astronomer who published simpler versions of Kepler's work. *SAU The publication of the book Urania propitia gained Cunitz a European reputation. She was acclaimed as the most learned woman since Hypatia of Alexandria. Significantly for a technical publication of that period, her book was written both in Latin and German (stating that it was to increase the accessibility to her work). Urania propitia was a simplification of the Rudolphine Tables. It provided new tables, new ephemera, and a more elegant solution to Kepler's Problem, which is to determine the position of a planet in its orbit as a function of time. Today, her book is also credited for its contribution to the development of the German scientific language. *Wik

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1676 Edward Cocker (1631 – 22 August 1676) was an English scholar who was the author of an influential arithmetic text which ran to more than 100 editions. Cocker died with no money in his Poke to quote his own phrase. As Wallis writes

Subsequently he might well have suffered material loss in the Fire and have had the expense of successive removals. He may also have spent extravagantly. He possessed 'some choice Manuscripts, and a great Collection of Printed Authors in several Languages' ... In any event, he died in debt, 'within the rules' of the King's Bench Prison, which was situated in Southwark; the quoted phrase meant that the prisoner had purchased the right to live within a short distance of the prison. Cocker's move to Southwark was probably an enforced one, consequent on his committal for debt.

*SAU

For many years in the early 19th century a common expression in England was, "all according to Cocker", to indicate something done correctly.  

Benjamin Franklin's autobiography makes mention that he studied ..., Cocker's Arithmetic, after he moved from his home to Pennsylvania, " And now it was that, being on some occasion made asham'd of my ignorance in figures, which I had twice failed in learning when at school, I took Cocker's book of Arithmetick, and went through the whole by myself with great ease.

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1700 Siguenza y Gongora (August 14, 1645 – August 22, 1700) was a Mexican astronomer and philosopher. *SAU He was one of the first great intellectuals born in the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain. A polymath and writer, he held many colonial government and academic positions. In 1681 Sigüenza wrote the book "Philosophical Manifest Against the Comets" in which he tried to dismiss fears of impending superstitious predictions based from astrology; in the work he takes steps to separate the fields of astrology and astronomy. The jesuit Eusebio Kino strongly criticized the texts written by Sigüenza because they were contradicting to established Catholic beliefs in the heavens. Sigüenza often cited authors like Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, and Brahe. In 1690 Sigüenza took an audacious move to defend his previous work by publishing "Libra Astronómica y Filosófica". *Wik

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1752 William Whiston (born 9 Dec 1667, 22 Aug 1752) English Anglican priest and mathematician who sought to harmonize religion and science, and who is remembered for reviving in England the heretical views of Arianism. He attended Newton's lectures while at Cambridge and showed great promise in mathematics. Ordained in 1693. While chaplain to the bishop of Norwich (1694-98), he wrote A New Theory of the Earth (1696), in which he claimed that the biblical stories of the creation, flood and final conflagration could be explained scientifically as descriptions of events with historical bases. The Flood, he believed, was caused by a comet passing close to the Earth on 28 Nov 2349 BC. This put stress on the Earth's crust, causing it to crack and allow the water to escape and flood the Earth. After serving as vicar of Lowestoft (1698–1701), he returned to his alma mater, Cambridge University to become assistant to the mathematician Sir Isaac Newton, whom he succeeded as professor in 1703. *TIS (His translations of the works of Josephus are still in print)

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1907 Platon Sergeevich Poretsky (October 3, 1846, Elisavetgrad - August 9, 1907) He published major works on methods of solution of logical equations, and on the reverse mode of mathematical logic. He applied his logic calculus to the theory of probability. Although he retired from his teaching role at Kazan in 1889 due to ill health, this did not mean that he stopped his research. He continued to undertake research into mathematical logic for the remaining eighteen years of his life. *SAU

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1940 Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge, FRS (12 June 1851 – 22 August 1940) was a British physicist and writer involved in the development of key patents in wireless telegraphy. In his 1894 Royal Institution lectures ("The Work of Hertz and Some of His Successors"), Lodge coined the term "coherer" for the device developed by French physicist Édouard Branly based on the work of Italian physicist Temistocle Calzecchi Onesti. In 1898 he was awarded the "syntonic" (or tuning) patent by the United States Patent Office. He was also credited by Lorentz (1895) with the first published description of the length contraction hypothesis, in 1893, though in fact Lodge's friend George Francis FitzGerald had first suggested the idea in print in 1889. *Wik

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1974 Jacob Bronowski, (18 Jan 1908, 22 Aug 1974)Polish-born British mathematician and man of letters who eloquently presented the case for the humanistic aspects of science. He is remembered as writer and presenter of the BBC television series, The Ascent of Man. Bronowski, who had a Ph.D. in algebraic geometry, spent WW II in Operations Research, and was an official observer of the after-effects of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. After this experience, he turned to biology, to better understand the nature of violence. *TIS

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1975 Andrzej Mostowski (1 November 1913 – 22 August 1975) was a Polish mathematician who worked on logic and the foundations of mathematics.*SAU His son Tadeusz is also a mathematician working on differential geometry. With Krzysztof Kurdyka and Adam Parusinski, Tadeusz Mostowski solved René Thom's gradient conjecture in 2000. *Wik

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1975 Lancelot Thomas Hogben FRS FRSE (9 December 1895 – 22 August 1975) was a British experimental zoologist and medical statistician. He developed the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) as a model organism for biological research in his early career, attacked the eugenics movement in the middle of his career, and wrote popular books on science, mathematics and language in his later career. *Wik

His 1936 Mathematics for the Million, I picked up in the middle school library in 7th grade, was one of the most influential books in shaping my love for math.  Read it, read it to your children, have them read it to their younger siblings.  

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1992 Harold Maile Bacon (Jan. 13, 1907, August 22, 1992) was an elder statesmen of the Stanford faculty who taught calculus to generations of Stanford undergraduates during a career that spanned more than four decades.
Bacon was widely recognized on campus as the owner of the white colonial-style Row house with the rose-lined driveway. He had ties to the house, and the University, almost since his birth.
He was an ill 6-month-old child when he first visited the campus house he would occupy for more than 60 years. Harriet Dunn, a cousin of Harold Bacon's father, Robert, and owner of the distinctive house, suggested that the child be brought to Stanford from Southern California for examination by Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, who lived nearby on the site now occupied by Dinkelspiel Auditorium. (Wilbur, who prescribed medicine and a better diet for young Bacon, later became the university's third president.)
In the 1920s, Harold Bacon enrolled at Stanford, following in the footsteps of his father, who graduated in 1902. Bacon lived in the two-story, six-bedroom house during part of his undergraduate years, then moved in permanently , at the invitation of Harriet Dunn, when he returned in 1930 to teach.

In 1946, Rosamond Clarke, '30, came to the house when she married the math professor. Harriet Dunn died a month later, leaving the house and renewable land-lease to the Bacons. Jane Stanford had given permission for Mrs. Dunn a nd her husband, Orrin, to build the colonial-revival house in 1899 as recompense for Harriet Dunn's earlier work building and operating a campus boarding house.
For many years, Bacon directed the undergraduate program in mathematics, according to Halsey Royden, who took classes from Bacon during his student days and later became a faculty colleague.
To students and fellow faculty members, Bacon was "the embodiment of Stanford ways and history," Royden said. At the time he retired, Bacon, through his calculus classes, probably had taught "more engineering and science undergraduates than anyone else in the history of the university," Royden said.
*Stanford Obituary
For a wonderful story describing the nature of Harold Bacon as a man and a teacher, see this cover story, The Prisoner and the Professor, from the Stanford Alumni magazine of Mar/Apr 1997

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2018  Richard Vincent Kadison (July 25, 1925 – August 22, 2018) was an American mathematician known for his contributions to the study of operator algebras.

Born in New York City in 1925, Kadison was a Gustave C. Kuemmerle Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Pennsylvania.

He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (elected in 1996), and a foreign member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (elected 1974) and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was a 1969 Guggenheim Fellow.

Kadison was awarded the 1999 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement by the American Mathematical Society. In 2012, he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

He was also a skilled gymnast with a specialty in rings, making the 1952 US Olympic Team but later withdrawing due to an injury.

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2023 Calyampudi Radhakrishna Rao FRS (10 September 1920 – 22 August 2023) was an Indian-American mathematician and statistician. He was professor emeritus at Pennsylvania State University and research professor at the University at Buffalo. Rao was honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002. The American Statistical Association has described him as "a living legend" whose work has influenced not just statistics, but has had far reaching implications for fields as varied as economics, genetics, anthropology, geology, national planning, demography, biometry, and medicine." The Times of India listed Rao as one of the top 10 Indian scientists of all time.

In 2023, Rao was awarded the International Prize in Statistics, an award often touted as the "statistics' equivalent of the Nobel Prize". Rao was also a Senior Policy and Statistics advisor for the Indian Heart Association non-profit focused on raising South Asian cardiovascular disease awareness.

Among his best-known discoveries are the Cramér–Rao bound and the Rao–Blackwell theorem both related to the quality of estimators. *Wik

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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