 |
| On the 410th birthday of Fermat, Google Doodles his famous theorem'/conjecture. Unfortunately, the doodle was to small to contain the proof. |
229 is the 50th prime, and is the smallest prime that added up to the reversal of its digits yields another prime, (229 + 922) = 1151 (can you find the next one?)
The sum of the digits of 229 is prime (13) and the sum of squares of the digits is also prime (89).
It can be written as a sum of positive squares in only one way, i.e., 225 + 4 = 15^2 + 2^2 .
extra: 229 is the difference between 3³ and 4⁴ *jim wilder @wilderlab
If you replace each digit of 229 with its square, you get a prime number, 4481. If you do the same with its cube, you get 88729, another prime. *Prime Curios
1/229 has 228 digits in its period
100! + 229 is prime
2^229 is a 69-digit number containing only one zero. Is this the largest power of two that has one or more unique digits? *Prime Curios
If you draw K13, the complete graph with 13 vertices so that it has the fewest possible crossings, it will still have 229 crossings *Wikipedia
1/229 has 228 digits in its period
See More Math Facts for every Year Day, here
1585 The Roanoak Colony in Virginia (to later become known as the "lost" colony) was founded on this day by Sir Walter Raleigh's agents, led by Ralph Lane. If you don't know why that is on a math page, read more here.
1654 Frontispiece from Curious Talks on the Solar Eclipse of August 12, 1654 by Orthodox Theophrastus; "let there be only fear of the shadow" "love of light"
 |
| *Astro museum |
1655 William Oughtred writes to John Wallis to praise his methods in "Arithmetica Infinitorum" . It was received too late to be included in the first edition, but was included in the 1695 second edition. *The Arithmetics of Infinitesimals, J. Stedall, pg 11
1762 The Board of Longitude Grants £500 to Christopher Irwin for his marine chair. Marine chairs, despite often having been ignored by modern scholars in favor of the chronometer and lunar-distance approaches to estimating longitude, reappeared throughout the history of the British Commissioners of the Longitude. Christopher Irwin of Ireland generated a lot of national and international interest in the late 1750s and early 1760s with his design. The Board funded the finishing and sea trial of it, granting him £500 on 17 August 1762. Nevil Maskelyne considered the chair alongside the lunar-distance method and one of John Harrison's longitude timekeepers on his 1763 trip to Barbados. (Maskelyne, who in 1765 would become Astronomer Royal and a Commissioner of Longitude, reported that the invention was useless. *Cambridge Digital Library
1771 Joseph Priestley sets out to test the rejuvenating effect of mint growing in a sealed container. He placed a candle in the covered glass and let it burn out in the presence of the mint. Ten days later he would return to the experiment and relight the candle and found, "it burned perfectly well in it." *Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air
(And because student's WILL ask..)
In 1771 and 1772, Joseph Priestley performed a series of experiments that revealed the essential role of air in the growth of green plants.
Priestley observed that a candle burning in a closed space such as a bell jar, soon gets extinguished. Similarly, a mouse would soon suffocate in a closed space.
It was known that a candle placed in a sealed bell jar would eventually burn out and could not be relighted while still in the jar.
In August 1771, Joseph Priestley, placed a mint plant into a transparent closed space with a candle that burned out the air until it soon went out.
After 27 days, he relit the extinguished candle again. Since there was no bright source of light available that time, Priestly had to rely on the sun. He focused sunlight beams with a mirror onto the candle wick and was successful in relighting the candle from outside the bell jar without disturbing the experimental set up.
1811 “Having to conduct my grandson through his course of mathematics, I have resumed the study with great avidity. It was ever my favorite one. We have no theories there, no uncertainties remain on the mind; all is demonstration and satisfaction.” So wrote Thomas Jefferson (1743– 1826) to Benjamin Rush. Taken from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by A. A. Lipscomb, vol. 13 (1903), p. 75, as quoted from Cajori, Mathematics in Liberal Education, p. 109, which is a collection of interesting quotations on the value of mathematics. The following year, his 70th, Jefferson describes his early affection for mathematics in a letter to William Duane "When I was young, mathematics was the passion of my life." *John Fauval, lecture at Univ of Va.
1825 A royal decree granted Niels Henrik Abel, then 23, sufficient funds for a year’s travel in France and Germany. *VFR
1859 John Wise (February 24, 1808 – September 28, 1879) was a pioneer in the field of ballooning. He made over 400 flights during his lifetime and was responsible for several innovations in balloon design.
He was the first to observe the jet stream, noting there was a "great river of air which always blows from west to east". On August 17, 1859, he made the first flight of local airmail in the U.S. from Lafayette, Indiana, to Crawfordsville, Indiana, in a balloon named Jupiter, carrying 123 letters and 23 circulars of which one cover was discovered in 1957.His trip of 25 miles (40 km) ended when he was forced to land by lack of buoyancy. The intended destination was New York City or Philadelphia, Pa.
Another source says weather issues forced Wise to land in Crawfordsville after five hours and only 30 miles, and the mail was then delivered to its final destination by train.Wise starts the first airmail delivery in the United States on August 17, 1859 from Lafayette, Indiana.
It wasn't until February 1911 that the first airmail flight in an airplane took place when three letters were carried the short distance between Petaluma and Santa Rosa, California. *PBNotes
1877 Asaph Hall discovered Phobos, inner satellite of Mars. The two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, were found when American astronomer Hall identified them after a long search, although their existence had been a source of speculation before. The possibility of Martian moons had been speculated long before Hall's discovery. The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) even predicted their number correctly, although with faulty logic: he wrote that since Jupiter had four known moons and Earth had one, it was only natural that Mars should have two. Perhaps inspired by Kepler (and quoting Kepler's third law), Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels (1726) refers to two moons in Part 3, Chapter 3 (the "Voyage to Laputa"), in which the astronomers of Laputa are described as having discovered two satellites of Mars orbiting at distances of 3 and 5 Martian diameters, and periods of 10 and 21.5 hours, respectively. The actual orbital distances and periods of Phobos and Deimos of 1.4 and 3.5 Martian diameters, and 7.6 and 30.3 hours, respectively. Hall discovered Deimos on August 12, 1877 at about 07:48 UTC and Phobos on August 18, 1877, at the US Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C., at about 09:14 GMT (contemporary sources, using the pre-1925 astronomical convention that began the day at noon, give the time of discovery as August 11, 14:40 and August 17 16:06 Washington mean time respectively)*Wik In the words of Asaph Hall, "Of the various names that have been proposed for these satellites, I have chosen those suggested by Mr Madan of Eton, England, viz: Deimos for the outer satellite; Phobos for the inner satellite. These are generally the names of the horses that draw the chariot of Mars. "
1896 Mrs. Bridget Driscoll of Croydon, Surrey, became the 1st pedestrian in Britain to die after being hit by a car. Mrs Driscoll, a 44 year old housewife, who was traveling from Old Town, Croydon to a folk-dancing display in Crystal Palace, was hit by a demonstration car traveling at 4mph (according to the driver, Arthur Edsel) . She died within minutes of receiving a head injury. At her inquest, Coroner William Percy Morrison said he hoped that "such a thing would never happen again" and was the first to apply the term ‘accident’ to violence caused by speed. Coroners across the country have followed his example ever since. *Road Safety Center Cardiff.
The first known death by a motor vehicle was Mary Ward (née King; 27 April 1827 – 31 August 1869) . She was an Irish naturalist, astronomer, microscopist, author, and artist. She was killed when she fell under the wheels of an experimental steam car built by her cousins. As the event occurred in 1869, she is the first person known to have been killed by a motor vehicle.
 |
| Bridget as a child |
 |
| Mary Ward |
1934 Dunham Jackson personalizes a book. Harold Bacon recalls that Jackson was an inspired writer of limericks. When Bacon purchased Jackson's "The Theory of Approximations" he took it to Jackson's office and requested he sign it, suggesting a limerick. Without any visible prethought Jackson wrote on the flyleaf:
There was a young fellow named Bacon Whose judgement of books was mistaken In a moment too rash He relinquished some cash And his faith in the Author was shaken August 17, 1934
*Steven Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha Redux Harold M Bacon was a long-serving calculus professor at Stanford where a teaching award in his name has been created since his death in 1992.
Bacon was a math professor at Stanford, pictured here with his spouse and son Charles, who "grew up at Stanford", and is an American geologist and volcanologist at the United States Geological Survey in the Volcano Hazards Team
 |
| Bacon, wife, and epsilon at Stanford |
1941 When Herbert Robbins saw the proof sheet of the title page of What is Mathematics? with only the name Richard Courant on it, his first reaction was “My god, the man’s a crook.” Realizing that a quiet meeting on their co-authorship of the book would be impossible, Robbins wrote Courant on this date that, while the custom might be different in Europe, in this country the junior author did receive credit. Courant backed down, and so today we know this lovely book as one by Courant and Robbins. For the two sides of this story see Constance Reid, Courant in Gottingen and New York. The Story of an Improbable Mathematician (Springer 1976), 223– 226 and 230–232 as well as “An interview with Herbert Robbins,” The College Mathematics Journal, 15(1984), 4–6. *VFR
1950 The National Bureau of Standards dedicates its Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles. Rather than testing components like its companion, the SEAC, the SWAC had an objective of computing using relatively off-the-shelf technology. It used a Williams Tube -- a modified CRT capable of modest (256 word) electrostatic bit storage -- and a magnetic drum (4,096 words) for storage. The word length was 37-bits and it could add two operands in 64 microseconds.
The SWAC performed much useful work, including searching for Mersenne prime numbers, X-ray crystallography, linear and differential equation solving and operated until December 1967.
Parts of SWAC are on display at The Computer History Museum. *CHM
 |
| SWAC at UCLA *CHM |
1966 Launch of Pioneer 7, American solar satellite. Studied prominences and solar atmosphere. *NSEC
1970 Venera 7 is launched by the USSR. It will later become the first spacecraft to successfully
transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus) * @thepainterflynn
1601 Pierre de Fermat (17 Aug 1601; 12 Jan 1665) French mathematician, often called the founder of the modern theory of numbers. Together with Rene Descartes, Fermat was one of the two leading mathematicians of the first half of the 17th century. He anticipated differential calculus with his method of finding the greatest and least ordinates of curved lines. He proposed the famous Fermat's Last Theorem while studying the work of the ancient Greek mathematician Diophantus. He wrote in pencil in the margin, "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain," that when the Pythagorean theorem is altered to read an + bn = cn, the new equation cannot be solved in integers for any value of n > 2 . *TIS
 |
| *Linda Hall org |
1904 Jakob Levitzki, also known as Yaakov Levitsky (Hebrew: יעקב לויצקי) (17 August 1904 – 25 February 1956) was an Israeli mathematician.
Levitzki was born in 1904 in the Russian Empire and emigrated to then Ottoman-ruled Palestine in 1912. After completing his studies at the Herzliya Gymnasia, he travelled to Germany and, in 1929, obtained a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Göttingen under the supervision of Emmy Noether. In 1931, after two years at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, Levitzki returned to Palestine to join the faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Levitzki together with Shimshon Amitsur, who had been one of his students at the Hebrew University, were each awarded the Israel Prize in exact sciences in 1953, the inaugural year of the prize, for their work on the laws of noncommutative rings.
Levitzki's son Alexander Levitzki, a recipient of the Israel Prize in 1990, in life sciences, established the Levitzki Prize in the name of his parents, Jacob and Charlotte, for Israeli research in the field of algebra.*Wik
1936 Margaret Heafield Hamilton (August 17, 1936 - ) is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. In one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton's team's work prevented an abort of the landing on the Moon. Among other things, Hamilton credits the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) together with its asynchronous executive as a foundation that provided the means for her to design systems software that included AGC error detection and recovery mechanisms such as the Display Interface Routines, the purpose of which was to warn the astronauts in case of an emergency, by interrupting the astronaut's normal mission sequence displays and replacing them with priority displays (e.g., the priority displays of the 1201 and 1202 alarms that took place during the Apollo 11 landing). Three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The computer was overloaded with incoming data, because the rendezvous radar system (not necessary for landing) updated an involuntary counter in the computer, which stole cycles from the computer. Due to its robust architecture, the computer was able to keep running; the Apollo onboard flight software was developed using an asynchronous executive so that higher priority jobs (important for landing) could interrupt lower priority jobs. Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports concerned with the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. *Wik
In 2016, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
1954 Ingrid Daubechies ( born 17 August 1954- ) is a Belgian physicist and mathematician. Ingrid Daubechies is currently the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. In January 2011 she moved to Duke University as a Professor in mathematics. She is the first woman president of the International Mathematical Union (2011–2014). She is best known for her work with wavelets in image compression. In 2000 Daubechies became the first woman to receive the National Academy of Sciences Award in Mathematics, presented every 4 years for excellence in published mathematical research. The award honored her "for fundamental discoveries on wavelets and wavelet expansions and for her role in making wavelets methods a practical basic tool of applied mathematics." In January 2005, Daubechies became just the third woman since 1924 to give the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture sponsored by the American Mathematical Society. Her talk was on "The Interplay Between Analysis and Algorithm."*Wik
She was awarded the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 2023, becoming the first woman to receive this award. In January 2025, Daubechies was a recipient of the National Medal of Science from President Joe Biden..
 |
| At ICM in 2018 |
1786 Death of Frederick the Great. Euler's interest in lotteries began at the latest in 1749 when he was commissioned by Frederick the Great to render an opinion on a proposed lottery. The first of two letters began 15 September 1749. A second series began on 17 August 1763.
1924 Pavel Samuilovich Urysohn, Pavel Uryson (February 3, 1898, Odessa – August 17, 1924, Batz-sur-Mer) is best known for his contributions in the theory of dimension, and for developing Urysohn's Metrization Theorem and Urysohn's Lemma, both of which are fundamental results in topology. His name is also commemorated in the term Menger-Urysohn dimension and in the term Urysohn integral equation. The modern definition of compactness was given by him and Pavel Alexandrov in 1923.*Wik
1927 (Erik) Ivar Fredholm (7 Apr 1866,17 Aug 1927) Swedish mathematician who founded modern integral equation theory. *TIS
1969 Otto Stern (17 Feb 1888; 17 Aug 1969 at age 81) German-American scientist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1943 for his development of the molecular beam as a tool for studying the characteristics of molecules and for his measurement of the magnetic moment of the proton. *TIS
He is the second most nominated person for a Nobel Prize, with 82 nominations during the years 1925–1945. Stern was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1945 and the American Philosophical Society in 1946.
1894 Cypra Cecilia Krieger Dunaj ( 9 April 1894. Jasło, Galicia, Austrian Empire{Poland}, 17 August 1974. Ontario, Canada) was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from a Canadian university and only the third person to be awarded a mathematics doctorate in Canada. She is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952).
2004 Shizuo Kakutani August 28 1911, August 17 2004) was a Japanese-born American mathematician, best known for his eponymous fixed-point theorem. The Kakutani fixed-point theorem is a generalization of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, holding for generalized correspondences instead of functions. Its most important uses are in proving the existence of Nash equilibria in game theory, and the Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie model of general equilibrium theory. Kakutani's other mathematical contributions include the Kakutani skyscraper, a concept in ergodic theory (a branch of mathematics that studies dynamical systems with an invariant measure and related problems). They also include his solution of the Poisson equation using the methods of stochastic analysis. The Collatz (or 3n+1) conjecture is also known as the Kakutani conjecture. *Wik
2024 Pierre Emile Jean Cartier(10 June 1932 – 17 August 2024) is a French mathematician . His main interest is the algebraic geometry , presentation and category theory . 1957-1959 he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study . From 1961 he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg (then Faculté de Science). In 1971 he was appointed professor at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques in Paris. He was also from 1974 Director of Research CNRS. In 1982 he became a professor at the Ecole Polytechnique and 1988 at the ENS. Pierre Cartier led the Cartier operator and is the namesake of the Cartier divisor . *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
.jpg)
