Monday, 24 August 2026

Simon Stevin's Non-fraction method of Decimals

  


I mentioned the name of Simon Stevin to a young math teacher in talking about decimal fractions the other day and the response I got led me to believe he had never heard of him. I didn't ask, so maybe I was wrong, but it made me think I wanted to post this older blog just to bring his name to some new teachers out there who may not yet have heard of this amazing guy:
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A while back, John Cook at the Endeavour Blog  posted about a comment by Keith Kendig in his book, Conics.

It happened when I started learning about decimals in school. I knew then that ten has one zero, a hundred has two, a thousand three, and so on. And then this teacher starts saying that tenth doesn’t have any zero, a hundredth has only one, a thousandth has only two, and so on. … Only much later did I have enough perspective to put my finger on the problem: The decimal point is always misplaced!



John demonstrates the proposed solution as well. 


The proposed solution is to put the decimal point above the units position rather than after it. Then the notation would be symmetric. For example, 1000 and 1/1000 would look like this:
Of course decimal notation isn’t likely to change, but the author makes an interesting point (No pun intended).

 

I then commented on John's blog that, in fact, Simon Stevin, who probably is more responsible than anyone else for introducing decimal numbers into the west had used a very similar approach as the one suggested by Keith Kendig. The image below is from De Thiende, which translated into English appeared as Decimal arithmetic. In fact, Stevin didn't think of his method as using fractions at all. In fact the English Translation in the full, self-advertising manner of books of the period, was Decimal arithmetic: Teaching how to perform all computations whatsoever by whole numbers without fractions, by the four principles of common arithmetic: namely, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. (My emphasis)

So, as I mentioned at John's blog, "He seems to have viewed the values as integers, much as we now think of minutes and seconds as integers. Few people consciously think of 3 minutes as 3/60 of an hour in regular computations. This was the view that Stevin took. He did not even use fraction names for the place values, but referred to them as prime, second, third, etc. (It has been often suggested that the use of ', ", etc for the minute and second in time, 12 23' 13", date back to the Greeks measure for angles of arc, but Cajori finds no evidence of their use prior to the 16th Century.  (The symbols became common in print in the 16th century, especially in works of Regiomontanus, Tycho Brahe, and their followers.)

The names minute and second came from the Latin for "minor part" which gave us minute, and the "second minor part" which gives us seconds.)

Decimal fractional numeration and the

decimal point in 15th-century Italy


The notation, in spite of the objections of folks like Mr. Kendig, didn't seem very useful, and so in 1612 Bartholomaeus Pitiscus opted for the decimal point we use today, and when it was used by John Napier, well here we are. 
His decimal points first appear in his 1608 edition of Trigonometria in the added trigonometric tables and can also be found in the 1612 edition. (The word 'trigonometry' is due to Pitiscus and first occurs in the title of his work Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus first published in Heidelberg in 1595 as the final section of A Scultetus's Sphaericorum libri tres methodicé conscripti et utilibus scholiis expositi. In 1600 a revised version of Pitiscus's work was published in Augsburg as Trigonometriae sive de dimensione triangulorum libri quinque. )



Now if all Simon Stevin had done was introduce a really nice book on decimal fractions, you could give him a pat on the back and a big
"ataboy" and send him on his way, but:
He was big on hydrostatics, handy if you are Dutch, and in fact he made many improvements in the Dutch windmill pumping system. He also figured out that water pressure depended on height, and not on the shape of the container, and he was the first to explain the tides as the effect of the moon.
And for a walk on the wild side, he invented those land yachts you see racing up and down beaches. The one he made for the Prince of Orange was said to outrun the horses (with 26 passengers!).
he was one of the first to write about the equal temperament musical scale related to the twelfth root of two, which he seems to have gotten from Galileo's father.
And in math, he was the first in the west to write about a general solution to the quadratic equation; which alone should make him a name known to high school students and teachers.



In the Stevin plaza on the statue of Stevin is an image that many find curious.  A nice explanation below comes from the Futility Closet of Greg Ross.
"Drape a chain of evenly spaced weights over a pair of (frictionless) inclined planes like this. What will happen? There’s more mass on the left side, but the slope on the right side is steeper. Simon Stevin (1548-1620) realized that in fact the chain won’t move at all — if it did, we could link the ends as shown and produce a perpetual motion machine."




This is remembered as the “Epitaph of Stevinus.” Richard Feynman wrote, “If you get an epitaph like that on your gravestone, you are doing fine.”
 

the statue in the middle of Simon Stevin plein in Bruges.  


 
It is important to distinguish between the (re)invention of the decimal point, and the creation of decimal fractions.  
In a mercantile context, Leonardo of Pisa had come close to a pure representation of decimal
fractions in his 1202 Liber abaci by extending from metrological considerations, where (for instance) he represented the number

71.7579463519 as  9  1  5   3   6   4    9   7   5   7      71.    
                             10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10  

Note the fraction is read from right to left and if you read the value reading only one upper digit at a time the first approximation is 7/10.  When you add in the five you multiply all the tens below and right of it to get 5/100 more or 75/100. 

On This Day in Math - August 24



The shortest path between two truths in the real domain passes through the complex domain.

~Jacques Salomon Hadamard


The 236th day of the year; 236 is the sum of twelve consecutive primes, 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 + 13 + 17 + 19 + 23 + 29 + 31 + 37 + 41

Since 236/4 = 59, 236 = 60^2 - 58^2.

The sum of the divisors of 236, 2+2 + 59 =63, the product of it's digits is 2x3x6 = 36, the reversal of the sum of the divisors.*Prime Curios

236^2 + 1 is a prime

236 is the average of two consecutive primes 233 and 239.

236 is a Happy Number. The sum of the squares of the digits under iteration go to 1.


And 236 is the number of possible positions in Othello after 2 moves by both players. *Erich Friedman (Students might try to figure out how many possible positions are there in tic-tac-toe after 2 moves by each player. Entice them with this number fact from Cliff Pickover @pickover )




EVENTS


79 Thousands were killed when the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.*VFR An estimated 20,000 people died. When discovered, the sites became astonishing archaeological time capsules. 

Vesuvius has erupted many times since. It is the only volcano on Europe's mainland to have erupted in the last hundred years. It is regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world

Mount Vesuvius as seen from the ruins of Pompeii*Wik



1563 Tycho Brahe watched a spectacular conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, and found that the time of the closest approach was days away from the predictions in the Ptolemaic Tables. He emerged from the experience with a life long passion for accuracy and exactitude and a devotion to the verdict of the sky. *Timothy Ferris, Coming of Age in the Milky Way  

A great conjunction is a conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn, when the two planets appear closest together in the sky. Great conjunctions occur approximately every 20 years when Jupiter "overtakes" Saturn in its orbit.

 Near conjunction, Dec 16, 2020 *Wik



1609 Galileo presented this telescope to the Doge in the Presence Chamber of the Doge's Palace and was confirmed in the professorship for life with his salary doubled! [Letter of 29 Aug 1609 from Galileo to his brother‑in‑law in Florence, quoted in Fahie, pp. 82‑83.] '... an object which is at a distance of nine miles will appear as if it were only one mile away, ... one can detect ships and sails of the enemy at sea ... we can see him two or more hours earlier than he can possibly see us, ....' [Galileo's letter to the Doge on 24 Aug 1609, quoted in Scandone, pp.12‑14 ; in Van Helden, pp. 7-8]. Through the connections of his friend Paolo Sarpi, Galileo presents an eight-powered telescope to the Venetian Senate. He is rewarded by a doubling of his salary and life- tenure at the University of Padua. He is disappointed by the fine print. *Galileo Project (I love the idea that the Greek name "telescope" was created by an actual Greek mathematician. It was created in 1611 by the Greek mathematician Giovanni Demisiani for one of Galileo Galilei's instruments presented at a banquet at the Accademia dei Lincei.)







1654 Pascal wrote a letter to Fermat, discussing Fermat’s solution to the “problem of points.”


I was not able to tell you my entire thoughts regarding the problem of the points
by the last post,and at the same time, I have a certain reluctance at doing it for fear lest
this admirable harmony which obtains between us and which is so dear to me should
begin to flag, for I am afraid that we may have different opinions on this subject. I
wish to lay my whole reasoning before you, and to have you do me the favor to set me
straight if I am in error or to indorse me if I am correct. I ask you this in all faith and
sincerity for I am not certain even that you will be on my side.
When there are but two players, your theory which proceeds by combinations is
very just. But when there are three, I believe I have a proof that it is unjust that you
should proceed in any other manner than the one I have. But the method which I
have disclosed to you and which I have used universally is common to all imaginable
conditions of all distributions of points, in the place of that of combinations (which I do
not use except in particular cases when it is shorter than the general method), a method
Which is good only in isolated cases and not good for others.
I am sure that I can make it understood, but it requires a few words from me and a
little patience from you. (I wish I had known this phrase early in my teaching career… it seems it would have been frequently useful)

*http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/pascal.pdf




1731 Darwin receives a letter from his old teacher, J S Henslow, that will change his life: "I have been asked by Peacock who will read & forward this to you from London to recommend him a naturalist as companion to Capt Fitzroy employed by Government to survey the S. extremity of America— I have stated that I consider you to be the best qualified person I know of who is likely to undertake such a situation— I state this not on the supposition of yr. being a finished Naturalist, but as amply qualified for collecting, observing, & noting any thing worthy to be noted in Natural History." *DarwinProject  




1775 Imen, Vtin, Caapan... Now you can count to three in the language of the native Americans living around Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. On this date the ship carrying Fr. Vicnete Maria, who spoke several native languages quite fluently interviewed them and recorded their responses for counting to 14. Later records of similar interviews in nearby regions match up very well to support the authenticity of this earliest known record of Native American numbers in the west. *Barbanabas Hughes. The priest accompanied explorer Juan de Ayala on the first Spanish naval entry aboard the San Carlos into the San Francisco Bay.  On 12 August 1775, Ayala gave the name Isla de Alcatraces, "island of the pelicans ", and what is now Yerba Buena Island, "on account of the abundance of those birds that were on it." The name was transferred in 1826 to Alcatraz Island. The word "Alcatraz" comes from Spanish, which in turn was a probably a loan word from Arabic, القطرس al-qaṭrās meaning "sea eagle." The pelicans native to San Francisco Bay are brown pelicans.




1804  Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Jean-Baptiste Biot ascending in a hot-air balloon above the Parisian suburb of Place Saint-Cloud, to an altitude of over 7,000 meters to study the earth’s atmosphere. Fortunately they didn’t pass out. *CoffeeFueled  

 One account is of just that.  One of the scientists DID pass out at about 35,000’.  Fortunately, the other was able to open the upper vent.  *Tim Hamilton

This ascent was commissioned by the French National Institute in the wake of renewed interest in atmospheric physics, particularly the role of air in light propagation and magnetism. Biot was tasked with investigating the magnetism of the upper atmosphere, while Gay-Lussac, already becoming known for his work in chemistry, studied the composition of gases.

They brought barometers, thermometers, electrometers, and bottles to collect air samples for chemical analysis.

Just a few weeks later, on September 16, Gay-Lussac made a solo ascent and reached 7,016 meters, breaking their previous altitude record and setting a balloon altitude record that stood for nearly 50 years. Biot had not joined due to the physical toll the first flight took on him.

Gay-Lussac later used the air samples collected to develop his law of combining gas volumes and other gas laws. The mission helped lay the groundwork for modern meteorology and atmospheric chemistry. *PBnotes




In 1853, it has been claimed that the first potato chips were prepared by Chef George Crum, an American Indian, at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, NY. When railroad magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining there, he sent his fried potatoes back to the kitchen, complaining they were "too thick." The chef, George Crum retaliated by slicing paper thin strips of potatoes and frying them to a crisp. But Vanderbilt loved these "Saratoga Chips" and they became an instant success.* TiS




1931 Oh Yes, They really did!  Time Magazine published a story about a minister/University President who had trisected the angle, Rev. Jeremiah Joseph Callahan declared, "the problem can easily be solved by plane geometry."  The conjecture from antiquity had been proved impossible in 1837, at least for mathematicians.  I guess Lewis Carroll said it best, 

"I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."  *Ht to Dave Richeson@divbyzero in his Tales of Impossibility.




1971 The Soviet Union issued a stamp for the centenary of the birth of the British physicist, Ernest Rutherford. Beside his picture is a diagram of the movement of atomic particles which involves a hyperbola. [Scott #3888].*VFR

It seems that it was sometime in the period around 1908–1911, when he was at Manchester and developing the nuclear model of the atom that he was quoted by students as saying, "All science is either Physics or stamp collecting."





2006 And then there were only eight.... the International Astronomical Union decided to rescind Pluto’s status as a planet and reclassify it as another entity called a “dwarf planet”. *FFF, pg 537
I have been told that as early as 1980 at a celebration of the discovery, Brian Marsden, a long time opponent of Pluto as a planet, had said, "I will kill your Planet if it's the LAST thing I DO!". (I'm told this story is in :The Case for Pluto, by Alan Boyle)

 New Horizons spacecraft captured this high-resolution
 enhanced color view of Pluto on July 14, 2015. *LOC

 





BIRTHS

1556 Sophie Brahe
, also known as Sophia Thott (24 August 1556 – 1643), was a Danish horticulturalist and student of astronomy, chemistry, and medicine, best known for assisting her brother Tycho Brahe with his astronomical observations.
She was born in Knudsturp, as the youngest of ten children, to Otte Brahe, advisor to the King of Denmark; and Beate Bille Brahe, leader of the royal household for Queen Sophie. Famous astronomer Tycho Brahe, 10 years her senior, was Sophie's oldest brother. When she was 17, she started assisting her brother with his astronomical observations in 1573, and helped him with the work that became the basis for modern planetary orbit predictions. She frequently visited his observatory Uranienborg, on the then-Danish island of Hveen. Tycho wrote that he had trained her in horticulture and chemistry, but he told her not to study astronomy. He expressed with pride that she learned astronomy on her own, studying books in German, and having Latin books translated with her own money so that she could also study them. Brother and sister were united by their work in science, and by their family's opposition to science as an appropriate activity for members of the aristocracy. Tycho referred with admiration to her 'animus invictus', her "determined mind" *Wik  

Portrait from 1602 *Wik






1561 Bartholomeo Pitiscus born. He coined the word “Trigonometry,” and first used it in print in 1595.*VFR Pitiscus achieved fame with his influential work written in Latin, called Trigonometria: sive de solutione triangulorum tractatus brevis et perspicuus (1595, first edition printed in Heidelberg), which introduced the word "trigonometry" to the English and French languages, translations of which had appeared in 1614 and 1619, respectively. It consists of five books on plane and spherical trigonometry. Pitiscus is sometimes credited with inventing the decimal point, the symbol separating integers from decimal fractions, which appears in his trigonometrical tables and was subsequently accepted by John Napier in his logarithmic papers (1614 and 1619).*Wik






1846 Professor Enoch Beery Seitz, the most distinguished mathematician of his day (Fairfield county, Ohio, August 24, 1846,- Kirksville, Missouri, October 8, 1883) He began his mathematical course in 1872 by contributing solutions to the problems proposed in the "Stairway" department of the Schoolday Magazine, conducted by Artemas Martin. His masterlv and original solutions to difficult Average and Probability problems, soon attracted universal attention among mathematicians.  Dr. Martin, being desirous to know what works he had treating on that difficult subject, was greatly surprised to learn that he had no works upon the subject, but had learned what he knew about that difficult department of mathematical science by studying the problems and solutions in the Schoolday Magazine. He then contributed to the Analyst, the Mathematical Visitor, the Mathematical Magazine, the School Visitor, and the Educational limes, of London, England.
He took a mathematical course in the Ohio Wesleyan University in 1870, but did not finish it or graduate. In 1879,he was elected one of the teachers in the Greenville High School, which position he held till 1879. On the 24th of June, 1875, he married Miss Anna E. Kerlin, one of Dark county's most refined ladies. In 1879, he was elected to the chair of mathematics in the Missouri State Normal schlool, Kirksville, Missouri. During his first year as chair, he solved a problem posed by Professor Woolhouse in 1864 concerning the probability of firing a musket ball through the air at random. In the same vein, Seitz proposed a similar problem to the editor Artemis Martin in The Mathematical Visitor. Because of its difficulty, the problem received a great deal of attention and notoriety. Perhaps inspired by the Greenville hometown legend Annie Oakly and her rifleman ship, Seitz offered the problem:

"A cube is thrown into the air and a random shot fired through it; find the chance that the shot passes through the opposite side."

After nearly a year with no solutions forthcoming, Seitz published his own solution in The Mathematical Visitor:
He remained at Kirksville until his death death from that "demon of death," typhoid fever on the 8th of October, 1883.
On March the llth, 1880,he was elected a member of the London Mathematical Society, being the fifth American so honored. 
He is often called "Teacher of the Great", for his many distinguished students: "When Professor Seitz went to Kirksville, in spite of the youth of the institution, he found an enthusiastic and capable body of students. He entered upon his work with his usual energy and the results of it are still felt throughout the country. He had in his class in algebra at one time, in the autumn of 1880, John J. Pershing who was destined to be the head of the armies of the United States In the World War, and Enoch Crowder who became head of the draft boards in the same conflict. He also had as a student at Kirksville. B F. Carroll, who later became governor of the state of Iowa, and John. R. Kirk who became president of the same institution in which he was then a student of Professor Seitz." *Obit in The Herald-Advertiser of Huntington, W.Va.
Seitz was elected to the London Mathematical Society on 11 March 1880, only the fifth American to be so honored. Over 500 of his solutions were published in the Analyst, the Mathematical Visitor, the Mathematical Magazine, the School Visitor and the Educational Times of London, England.




1894 Rudolf Oskar Robert Williams Geiger (24 Aug 1894, 22 Jan 1981) German meteorologist, one of the founders of microclimatology, the study of the climatic conditions within a few metres of the ground surface. His observations, made above grassy fields or areas of crops and below forest canopies, elucidated the complex and subtle interactions between vegetation and the heat, radiation, and water balances of the air and soil.*TIS


1914 Wilhelm Lexis (17 July 1837, Eschweiler, Germany – 24 August 1914, Göttingen, Germany), full name Wilhelm Hector Richard Albrecht Lexis, was a German statistician, economist, and social scientist. The Oxford Dictionary of Statistics cites him as a "pioneer of the analysis of demographic time series". Lexis is largely remembered for two items that bear his name—the Lexis ratio and the Lexis diagram.

Although it can take various forms, the typical Lexis diagram is a graphical illustration of the lifetime of either an individual or a cohort of same-aged individuals. On the diagram, each such lifetime appears as a straight line in a two-dimensional plane, with one dimension representing time and the other representing age. The use of Lexis diagrams is very common amongst demographers, so much so that they often are used without being identified as Lexis diagrams. *Wik






1917 Ralph Eugene Lapp (August 24, 1917 – September 7, 2004) was an American physicist who participated in the Manhattan Project.
 Lapp was an American nuclear physicist and author who began his career in high-energy physics research with Arthur H. Compton. Lapp then worked at Chicago on the Manhattan Project. With 69 others, he signed Leo Szilard’s 17 Jul 1945 petition to President Truman, the month before the attack on Hiroshima. They urged that Japan should have an opportunity to surrender before use of the atom bomb. (Nevertheless, the actual attack was by surprise.) After the war, he researched the results in Japan. Lapp lectured across the U.S. He wrote 22 books on nuclear safety, including the dangers of nuclear fallout in The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon (1958). A Post book reviewer in 1956 called him “a one-man atomic truth squad and nuclear lie detector.”



1943 Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck (born August 24, 1942) is an American mathematician and a founder of modern geometric analysis. She is a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, where she held the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chair. She is currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University.

Uhlenbeck won the 2019 Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." She is the first woman to win the prize since its inception in 2003.
*Wik








DEATHS


1595 Thomas Digges (1546?, 24 Aug 1595)
English astronomer and mathematician who (with his father, Leonard) was a pioneer in the use of the telescope. He was the leader of the English Copernicans. His observations of the new star of 1572, published in his Alae seu scalae mathematicae (1573) were second only to Tycho Brahe in accuracy. He used his observations of the supernova to justify the heliocentric system. In mathematics, he wrote on platonic and archimedian solids. *TIS After his father's death he was adopted and taught by John Dee. Digges was one of the first to translate (parts of) Copernicus into English. *Renaissance Mathematicus His father, Leonard Diggs, was also a fine mathematician, and often cited as the inventor (and namer) of the theodolite.
Thomas was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immovable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying distances; he was also first to postulate the "dark night sky paradox". *Wik

 The dark night sky paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe. In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, any line of sight from Earth must end at the surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night.  



1670 William Neile (7 December 1637 – 24 August 1670) was an English mathematician and founder member of the Royal Society. His major mathematical work, the rectification of the semicubical parabola ( \(y^3 = a x^2\) ), was carried out when he was aged nineteen, and was published by John Wallis who was his teacher. By carrying out the determination of arc lengths on a curve given algebraically, in other words by extending to algebraic curves generally with Cartesian geometry a basic concept from differential geometry, it represented a major advance in what would become infinitesimal calculus. His name also appears as Neil.
Neile was the first to calculate the length of the semi-cubical parabola.  It was discovered  (created?) by William Neile in 1657. It was the first algebraic curve to have its arc length computed. Wallis published the method in 1659 giving Neile the credit. 





1739 Takebe Katahiro  (建部 賢弘; 1664 – August 24, 1739) was a Japanese mathematician who wrote most of Seki's Encyclopaedia.

Takebe Katahiro's name is given in several different forms including Takebe Kenko and Tatebe Kenko. He had an older brother Takebe Kataaki (1661-1716) who was also a mathematician and the two brothers were both pupils of Takakazu Seki. Let us note now that when we speak of Takebe in this article, we are referring to Takebe Katahiro and if we refer to his brother we shall use his full name Takebe Kataaki. Takebe was only thirteen years of age when he became Seki's pupil and both brothers remained with their teacher until his death in 1708. Not only did the brothers gain much from Seki's teaching but they also had access to his extensive library of Japanese and Chinese books on mathematics. Annick Horiuchi writes :-
"The brothers did their utmost to spread Seki's work, to make it easier to understand, and to defend it against detractors. They were the main craftsmen of Seki's project (launched 1683) to record mathematical knowledge in an encyclopaedia. The 'Taisei sankei' (Comprehensive Classic of Mathematics), in 20 volumes, was finally completed by Takebe Kataaki in 1710. It gives a good picture of Seki's skill at reformulating problems, as well as Takebe Katahiro's ability to correct, perfect, and extend his master's intuitions."
Takebe was only nineteen years old when he published his first mathematics book the Kenki Sanpo Ⓣ (1683). He followed this in 1685 with the book Hatsubi Sanpo Endan Genkai Ⓣ. These early works were based on the methods Seki had developed for handling polynomials. These methods were extended to handle polynomials in a single variable but with variable coefficients. Tatebe improved and extended the methods of his teacher and applied them to a wide range of problems in these books. Takebe had made a careful study of Zhu Shijie's Chinese text Suanxue qimeng  published in 1299 and the work had been a great help to him in developing his theory of polynomials. In 1690 Takebe published an annotated Japanese translation of the Suanxue qimeng  which he intended as a text for students of mathematics.*SAU

Seki Takakazu




1796 (Nicholas Léonard) Sadi Carnot (born 1 Jun 1796, 24 Aug 1832) was a French physicist. He became a captain of engineers in the army, and spent much of his life investigating the design of steam engines. His book Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824) contained a theorem which says that a maximum efficiency of heat engine can be obtained by a reversible engine, and that efficiency depends only on the temperatures of the hot and the cool sources of the engine. This theorem played an essential role for the subsequent development of thermodynamics. It was written to promote the construction of steam engines and other heat engines in France, whose industrial development was lagging behind England's. *TIS





1842 Benjamin Wright (10 Oct 1770, 24 Aug 1842)American engineer who directed the construction of the Erie Canal. A one-time judge, he helped survey the Erie Canal route. When the Erie Canal was finally funded in 1817, Wright was selected as one of the three engineers to design and build it, then named chief engineer. Wright made the Erie Canal project a school of engineering. Until mid-century, almost every civil engineer in the U.S. had trained with, or been trained by someone who had worked under, Wright on the Erie Canal. Because he trained so many engineers on that project, Wright has been called the "father of American civil engineering." He also engaged in the design and construction at the outset of the first railroads. He was the first Chief Engineer of the Erie Railroad.*TIS




1888 Rudolf (Julius Emanuel) Clausius (2 Jan 1822, 24 Aug 1888) was a German mathematical physicist who formulated the second law of thermodynamics and is credited with making thermodynamics a science. Essentially a theoretical physicist, he published his work in thermodynamics in 1865 wherein he stated the First and Second laws of thermodynamics in the following form: (1) The energy of the universe is constant. (2) The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum. In all Clausius wrote eight important papers on the topic. He restated Sadi Carnot's principle of the efficiency of heat engines. The -Clapeyron equation expresses the relation between the pressure and temperature at which two phases of a substance are in equilibrium. *TIS




1971 Wallace John Eckert (June 19, 1902 – August 24, 1971) was an American astronomer, who directed the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau at Columbia University which evolved into the research division of IBM.
He started teaching at Columbia University in 1926, and earned his PhD from Yale in 1931 in astronomy under Professor Ernest William Brown (1866–1938).

Around 1933 Eckert proposed interconnecting punched card tabulating machines from IBM located in Columbia's Rutherford Laboratory to perform more than simple statistical calculations. Eckert arranged with IBM president Thomas J. Watson for a donation of newly developed IBM 601 calculating punch, which could multiply instead of just adding and subtracting. In 1937 the facility was named the Thomas J. Watson Astronomical Computing Bureau. IBM support included customer service and hardware circuit modifications needed to tabulate numbers, create mathematical tables, add, subtract, multiply, reproduce, verify, create tables of differences, create tables of logarithms and perform Lagrangian interpolation, all to solve differential equations for astronomical applications. In January 1940, Eckert published Punched Card Methods in Scientific Computation, which solved the problem of predicting the orbits of the planets, using the IBM electric tabulating machines, based on the punched card. This slim book is only 136 pages, including the index.
In 1940, Eckert became director of the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. World War II had been raging in Europe for many months. The US had not yet officially joined the effort to defeat Hitler. Nonetheless, the demand for navigation tables had risen. This demand helped inspire Eckert to automate the process of creating these tables, using punched card equipment. The 1941 almanac was the first to be produced using automated equipment, down to the final typesetting. Martin Schwarzschild became directory of the Columbia laboratory while Eckert was at USNO.
After the war Eckert moved back to Columbia. Watson had just had a falling out with Harvard University over a project IBM had funded. IBM would instead focus their funding on Columbia, and Eckert's laboratory was named Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory. Eckert understood the significance of his laboratory, keenly aware of the advantage of scientific calculations performed without human interventions for long stretches of computation. A massive machine built to Eckert's specifications was built and installed behind glass at IBM's headquarters on Madison Avenue in January 1948. Known as the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, it was used as a calculating device with some success, but served even better as a recruiting tool. Eckert published a description of the SSEC in November 1948.

As an employee of IBM, Eckert directed one of the first industrial research laboratories in the country. In 1945 he hired Herb Grosch and Llewellyn Thomas as the next two IBM research scientists, who both made significant contributions. When Cuthbert Hurd became the next PhD to be hired by IBM in 1949, he was offered a position with Eckert, but instead founded the Applied Science Department, and later directed the development of IBM's first commercial stored program computer (the IBM 701) based on the demand demonstrated by applications such as those of Eckert.

In this period he continued his innovative contributions to computational astronomy by implementing Brown's Lunar theory in his computer; developing the Improved Lunar Ephemeris; and performing the first numerical integration to compute an ephemeris for the outer planets.

In 1957 the Watson lab moved to Yorktown Heights, New York (with a new building completed in 1961) where it is known as the Thomas J. Watson Research Center. Eckert won the James Craig Watson Medal in 1966 from the US National Academy of Sciences.




1975 Anna Margaret Mullikin (March 7, 1893 - August 24, 1975) She was born in Baltimore, Maryland and attended Goucher College, which was then a women's college located in the same city. While there she managed her class basketball team, participated on the swimming team, and earned her A.B. degree in 1915. That same year her name was mentioned in the American Mathematical Monthly [Vol. 22, No. 5 (May 1915),pp. 165-166] for solving the following geometry problem:

A quadrilateral of any shape whatever is divided by a transversal into two quadrilaterals. The diagonals of the original figure and those of the two resulting (smaller) figures are then drawn. Show that their three points of intersection are collinear.

The published solution was by Vola Barton, also from Goucher College, with the remark "Also solved by Anna Mullikin."
In 1918 she entered the graduate program in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, earning her master's degree in 1919. She continued her graduate studies at Penn during the 1919-1920 academic year under the direction of the topologist, Robert L. Moore, while also teaching at the Stevens School in Germantown, Pennsylvania, another private preparatory school for girls. In the fall of 1920 she moved to the University of Texas along with Moore, who had convinced the Texas math department to appoint her as an instructor. Mullikin stayed in Texas for only the one academic year before returning to Philadelphia to complete the requirements for her degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with Moore still as her advisor. She received her Ph.D. in mathematics in 1922. Mullikin did not pursue mathematical research after earning her Ph.D. She spent the rest of her professional career as a high school mathematics teacher, first at William Penn High School for Girls in Philadelphia for one year, and then at Germantown High School where she remained until her retirement in 1959. She was appointed head of the mathematics department in 1952. In 1956 she was a joint author with Ethel and Ewart Grove for the textbook Algebra and Its Use. *Agnes Scott College (One wonders who was (or were) the Dept Head for the almost 30 years this female PhD served before she got the position.)




1982 Giorgio Abetti (5 Oct 1882,24 Aug 1982)Italian astronomer known for his studies of the sun at the University of Padua where was director at the Arcetri Observatory (1921-52), taking over from his father who also held the post (1894-1921). In 1913, Giorgio Abetti took part, as a geodetic and geophysical astronomer, in the De Filippi expedition in Karakorum, Himalaya and Turkestan. He went on expeditions to observe eclipses of the sun, including one to Siber
ia to observe the total eclipse on 19 Jun 1936 and in 1952 to Sudan. With the advice of George Hale, he built a solar tower at the observatory (opened 1925). He wrote a popular text on the sun, a handbook of astrophysics (1936) and a popular history of astronomy (1963).*TIS




1993 Boris Yakovlevich Levin (Ukrainian:  22 December 1906 – 24 August 1993) was a Soviet mathematician who made significant contributions to function theory.

In 1932 he graduated from the University of North Caucasus (Rostov-on-Don). From 1935 to 1949 he was Professor and Head of the Department of Mathematics of the Odessa Institute of Marine Engineers.
In 1949, invited by N. I. Akhiezer, he moved to Kharkov, and since that time he worked at the Kharkov State University.

In 1969 he organized the Department of Function Theory in the Institute for Low Temperature Physics and Engineering of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, in which he worked until his last days (as a Chief of the Department he worked until 1986). *Wik






1997 Louis Essen (6 Sep 1908, 24 Aug 1997 )English physicist who invented the quartz crystal ring clock and the first practical atomic clock. These devices were capable of measuring time more accurately than any previous clocks. He built a cesium-beam atomic clock, a device that ultimately changed the way time is measured. Each chemical element and compound absorbs and emits electromagnetic radiation at its own characteristic frequencies. These resonances are inherently stable over time and space. The cesium atom's natural frequency was formally recognized as the new international unit of time in 1967: the second was defined as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations or cycles of the cesium atom's resonant frequency, replacing the old second defined in terms of the Earth's motion. *TIS

Louis Essen (right) and Jack Parry (left) standing next to the world's first caesium-133 atomic clock.*Wik






Credits :
*CHM=Computer History Museum
*FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts
*NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar
*RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*TIA = Today in Astronomy
*TIS= Today in Science History
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*Wik = Wikipedia
*WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell








Sunday, 23 August 2026

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?



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








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




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 37o 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.



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.




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



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.






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




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



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




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




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



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





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



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




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


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



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


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/



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.



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



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.






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



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




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




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


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.



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.


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.




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