Pat'sBlog

Monday, 11 May 2026

How the term Scientist came to be-

Re-posted from a 2011 Post:

John Cook, at the Endeavour just wrote a nice tid-bit about science/language regarding the creation of the word scientist. I knew the story, but apparently from a flawed source as I had credited the wrong poet (I had Wordsworth... not a bad poet, but not correct) .. so I will correct my notes, and along the way, supplement John's blog with a little more interesting detail from my notes about the topic.. (I think most of this is right).
John Wrote:

For most of history, scientists have been called natural philosophers. You might expect that scientist gradually and imperceptibly replaced natural philosopher over time. Surprisingly, it’s possible pinpoint exactly when and where the term scientist was born.

It was June 24, 1833 at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in attendance. (He had previously written about the scientific method.) Coleridge declared that although he was a true philosopher, the term philosopher should not be applied to the association’s members. William Whewell responded by coining the word scientist on the spot. He suggested

by analogy with artist, we may form scientist.

Since those who practice art are called artists, those who practice science should be called scientists.

This story comes from the prologue of Laura Snyder’s new book The Philosophical Breakfast Club. The subtitle is “Four Remarkable Friends Who Transformed Science and Changed the World.” William Whewell was one of these four friends. The others were John Herschel, Richard Jones, and Charles Babbage.

I also found a note about what might be the first use in print. "Interestingly, the philosopher William Whewell wrote a review of On the Connexion of the Sciences in 1834, ( by Mary Sommerville) and in the review he coined the word "scientist" as an appropriate name for a person who dabbles in experimental natural philosophy. "(*Linda Hall Org)

John Cook was good enough to share some material from the book and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who enjoys the history of science, or just a good story. This is my first read of anything by Laura Snyder, but I hope it will not be the last.

And now, here is the part from my notes which I hope adds to the story:
Whewell was also frequently in correspondence with Michael Faraday, and created the scientific terms anode, cathode, and ion. A letter between the two discussing these three terms is in the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. I have tried to capture an image below, but the library does not allow flash and the image is taken through the glass case... my apologies that it is not clearer.

In spite of its creation at such a high academic level, the word scientist was not well accepted for a long time. Its eventual acceptance came first in America, but it seems even there it encountered fierce opposition to its formal use well into the Twentieth Century. In The American Language in 1921, H. L. Mencken wrote
The last-named scientist was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it. Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it. The use of the word aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as "an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."

The term Natural Philosopher which scientist replaced had not been around long itself. Prior to the time of Galileo a Philosopher was indifferent to the observed facts, and dealt only with moral and logical theory. Galileo thought that,"The proper object of Philosophy is the great book of nature..." and not the words of other men. Eventually these new students of the "book of nature" became the "Natural Philosophers".

Despite several common assertions to the fact that Whewell coined the term in 1840,[Did they get the wrong date?... see date above in John Cook's story] the OED lists an earlier use in print, "1834 Q. Rev. LI. 59 Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers... Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist(***see below), economist, and atheist but this was not generally palatable."

It seems like they are talking about the same event with a different date on this article.

William Whewell is buried in Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge, UK. A memorial marker in the chapel is shown here and there is a statue in the ante-chapel

Addendum: I recently came across notes that suggest that Faraday didn't really accept the term despite his close relation with Whewell and his public endorsement of it; "As for hailing [the new term] scientist as 'good', that was mere politeness: Faraday never used the word, describing himself as a natural philosopher to the end of his career." It also appears he didn't like physicist, "[The new term] Physicist is both to my mouth and ears so awkward that I think I shall never use it. The equivalent of three separate sounds of i in one word is too much." *Sydney Ross Nineteenth-Century Attitudes: Men of Science (1991), 10.

A few years after I wrote this, Thony Christie featured a guest post on his Renaissance Mathematicus by Dr Melinda Baldwin with lots more information. The entire article is worthy of your reading, but I have "liberated" a few sections here:

"Most nineteenth-century scientific researchers in Great Britain, however, preferred another term: “man of science.” The analogue for this term was not “artist,” but “man of letters”—a figure who attracted great intellectual respect in nineteenth-century Britain. “Man of science,” of course, also had the benefit of being gendered, clearly conveying that science was a respectable intellectual endeavor pursued only by the more serious and intelligent sex."

And this which has lots of information about the 20th century use of "scientist" even by "scientific" journals:

"Feelings against “scientist” in Britain endured well into the twentieth century. In 1924, “scientist” once again became the topic of discussion in a periodical, this time in the influential specialist weekly Nature. In November, the physicist Norman Campbell sent a Letter to the Editor of Nature asking him to reconsider the journal’s policy of avoiding “scientist.” He admitted that the word had once been problematic; it had been coined at a time “when scientists were in some trouble about their style” and “were accused, with some truth, of being slovenly.” Campbell argued, however, that such questions of “style” were no longer a concern—the scientist had now secured social respect. Furthermore, said Campbell, the alternatives were old-fashioned; indeed, “man of science” was outright offensive to the increasing number of women in science.

In response, Nature’s editor, Sir Richard Gregory, decided to follow in Carrington’s footsteps. He solicited opinions from linguists and scientific researchers about whether Nature should use “scientist.” The word received more support in 1924 than it had thirty years earlier. Many researchers wrote in to say that “scientist” was a normal and useful word that was now ensconced in the English lexicon, and that Nature should use it.

However, many researchers still rejected “scientist.” Sir D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, a zoologist, argued that “scientist” was a tainted term used “by people who have no great respect either for science or the ‘scientist.’” The eminent naturalist E. Ray Lankester protested that any “Barney Bunkum” might be able to lay claim to such a vague title. “I think we must be content to be anatomists, zoologists, geologists, electricians, engineers, mathematicians, naturalists,” he argued. “‘Scientist’ has acquired—perhaps unjustly—the significance of a charlatan’s device.”

In the end, Gregory decided that Nature would not forbid authors from using “scientist,” but that the journal’s staff would continue to avoid the word."

*** Sciolist..... If you recognized this term you are ahead of me...I looked it up and found:

Noun 1. sciolist - an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge
a dabbler, a dilettante (thank goodness they didn't use my name or picture)

[From Late Latin sciolus, smatterer, diminutive of Latin scius, knowing, from scre, to know; (This is the same root that gives us science.) *PB

On This Day in Math - May 11

A mind which has a taste for scientific inquiry,and has learned the habit of applying its principles readily to the cases which occur,has within itself an inexhaustible source of pure and exciting contemplations.

~John Herschel

The 131st day of the year; 131 is the sum of three two-digit primes (31 + 41 + 59) whose concatenation is the decimal expansion of first six digits of pi (3.14159...).

Any ordering of the digits of 131 is still prime. This is called an "absolute" prime.

131 is the sum of three prime numbers that all begin with the same digit. *Prime Curios

bonus: 131 is the 32nd prime and the sum of the digits of both numbers is 5. 32 & 131 is the smallest n, P(n) pair with this property. Such numbers are often called Honaker Primes after G. L. Honaker, Jr, from Prime Curios. There is only one more such prime that is a year day.

The reciprocal of 131 repeats with a period of 130 digits, 1/131 =0.007633587786259
54198473282442748091603053435114503816793893129770992366412213740458
015267175572519083969465648854961832...

EVENTS

1892 Francis Ysidro Edgeworth's ﬁrst Newmarch lecture. In May and June of 1892 Edgeworth, newly appointed to the Oxford chair and editor of The Economic Journal, gave six Newmarch lectures, "On the Uses and Methods of Statistics."

He was an Anglo-Irish philosopher and political economist who made significant contributions to the methods of statistics during the 1880s. From 1891 onward, he was appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal.

1894 The Mississippi Weather Almanac lists this date as the date of the "most unusual weather event in the states history." In the little town of Bovina, just a short run from Vicksburg (Grant had his Army make Bovina a field hospital during the siege of Vicksburg) during a hail storm a 6" by 8" gopher turtle fell from the sky encased in ice. (admit it, you just don't find that kind of fascinating science information on your typical blog) * "Queen of the Turtle Derby" by Julia Reed.

According to Wikipedia, "The gopher tortoise is a representative of the genus Gopherus, which contains the only tortoises native to North America.

1897 black American inventor, William U. Moody was issued a U.S. design patent for a “game board design.” . It shows a rectangular board with a particular arrangement of partitions in the form of arcs of concentric circles and some other shorter partitions causing a complex route for a ball to travel from one corner to the diagonal corner, presumably, by tilting the board. *TIS
This was one of a number of variants of the most popular maze game of the period. Charles Martin Crandall produced many popular toys from his plant in Pennsylvania, and his "Pigs in Clover", release in 1889, captured the nation in a frenzy. The New York Tribune's March 13, 1889 issue reported Senator William M. Evarts purchased one from a street fakir in order to get rid of him. He took the puzzle home and worked it for hours. The following morning he brought it with him into senate chambers where Senator George Graham Vest stopped by Evarts' desk, borrowed the puzzle and took it to a cloak room. Soon thereafter he was joined by Senators James L. Pugh, James B. Eustis, Edward C. Walthall and John E. Kenna. A page was sent out to buy five of the puzzles and upon his return, the group engaged in a "pig driving contest". About 30 minutes later, Senator Vest announced his accomplishment of driving the last pig in the pen. A few days later a political cartoon in the New York World's March 17, 1889 issue lampooned President Benjamin Harrison's advisors and cabinet members showing the group sitting around playing the game. The caption read "Will Mr. Harrison be able to get all these hungry pigs in the official pen?"

1905 Albert Einstein's paper, "On the motion of small particles suspended in liquids at rest required by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat." (Brownian motion paper) is received by Annalen der Physik, .
"In this paper Einstein reports that the kinetic theory of heat predicts that small particles suspended in water must execute a random motion visible under the microscope. He suspects this motion is Brownian motion but has insufficient datato affirm it. The prediction is a powerful test of the truth of the kinetic theory of heat. A failure to observe the effect would refute the theory. If it is seen and measured, it provides a way to estimate Avogadro's number. The domain in which the effect is observed is one in which the second law of thermodynamics no longer holds, a disturbing result for the energeticists of the time. " * John D. Norton, Einstein, 1905 Pitt.edu

Einstein completed six papers in 1905. Each was published by the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik. Four of the papers were published in 1905 and the other two in 1906. The papers were:

"On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," completed March 17, 1905. This work includes the light quanta hypothesis and study of the photoelectric effect. This was fundamental in the development of the quantum theory and was the basis of the justification for Einstein receiving the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921.

"On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in Liquids at Rest Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat," completed in May 1905. (above)

"On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," completed in June 1905. This is this paper that founded the special theory of relativity.

"Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on Its Energy Content?," completed in September 1905. This is a follow-up to the special relativity paper in which Einstein presents a preliminary version of the equation E=mc^2.

"A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," completed April 30, 1905 and revised on August 19, 1905. This is Einstein's Ph.D. dissertation work from the University of Zurich. It contains a new method for the determination of molecular sizes and of Avagadro's number.

"On the Theory of Brownian Motion," completed December 19, 1905. This appeared , in 1906. This is a second paper on Brownian motion. *Gardnerr

1920 Oxford University passed a statute admitting women to degrees. *VFR Women had been allowed to take examinations at Oxford since 1883. In 1892 Grace Chisholm took the exam for the Final Honours School in mathematics (as an unofficial candidate) and out-performed all the Oxford students. She took the test (unofficially) on a challenge, with Isabel Maddison. Both women earned a First Class degree in the Mathematical Tripos examinations.

1928 radio station WGY, in Schenectady, NY, began America’s first regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. The programs lasted from 1:30 to 2:00 p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Most of the viewers were on the technical staff at nearby General Electric, which had designed the system and was using the broadcasts to refine its equipment. A handful of hobbyists who had built their own sets were also able to watch. Those who tuned in had to make constant adjustments, turning two knobs at once to keep the blurry picture discernible on their three-inch-square screens. By the end of 1928, 17 more stations around the country began scheduled broadcasts, designed to test the apparatus rather than attract viewers. *TIS

Beginning in 1926, Ernst Alexanderson worked on an experimental mechanical television system. This led, on September 11, 1928, to the WGY Players broadcasting the first televised play, an old spy melodrama titled The Queen's Messenger and starring Izetta Jewel and Maurice Randall. Alexanderson's development of a portable and simplified television transmitter made the broadcast possible. The only viewers were newspaper and magazine writers watching the program on a 3x3-inch (7.6 cm) screen located three miles (five kilometers) away in the WGY studio. The broadcasts took place at 1:30 and 11:30 p.m.

WGY Radio Players performing a dramatic scene from William Vaughn Moody's "The Great Divide" (1923)

1940 At the 1940 New York World's Fair Westinghouse displayed a machine, the Nimatron, that played Nim. From May 11, 1940, to October 27, 1940, only a few people were able to beat the machine in that six-week period; if they did, they were presented with a coin that said Nim Champ. It was also one of the first-ever electronic computerized games.

Nim is a two-player mathematical game of strategy where players take turns removing objects from distinct piles. The winner is the player who removes the last object.

Variants of nim have been played since ancient times. The game is said to have originated in China—it closely resembles the Chinese game of jiǎn-shízǐ (捡石子), or "picking stones"—but the origin is uncertain; the earliest European references to nim are from the beginning of the 16th century. Its current name was coined by Charles L. Bouton of Harvard University, who also developed the complete theory of the game in 1901, but the origins of the name were never fully explained. The Oxford English Dictionary derives the name from the German verb nimm, meaning "take". *Wik

1951, Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.

"Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time. In stepped a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Led by professor Jay Forrester, the researchers developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. *Wired

Diagram of a 4×4 plane of magnetic core memory in an X/Y line coincident-current setup. X and Y are drive lines, S is sense, Z is inhibit. Arrows indicate the direction of current for writing. *Wik

1957 Howard F. Fehr, of Columbia University Teachers College, in an address at Syracuse: “A mathematics professor who talks at length affects both ends of the listener—he makes one end feel numb and the other feel dumb.” [Eves, Revisited, p. 151] . *VFR

1959 Eugene P. Wigner delivered a penetrating Courant Lecture at NYU on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” which is well worth reading. *VFR

1979 VisiCalc Introduced. It was the ﬁrst program operable by inexperienced computer users. As it ran only on the Apple, the company soon was on top of the market. *VFR

1986 A specially designed bicycle set the human powered land speed record of 105.37 km per hour (65.48 miles per hour). *VFR In September of 2016 the record was shattered by a Canadian team with an enclosed bicycle travelling at 89,6 MPH.

The bike, named Eta for the Greek symbol used to denote efficiency in engineering, uses a highly aerodynamic shape and coating, an ergonomic reclining position for the rider, and modern composite materials such as carbon fiber weaves to provide as much power transfer as possible through the stiff bike frame. *Popular Mechanics

1997 Garry Kasparov loses in the rematch with IBM's Deep Blue in the first match of what many considered a test of artificial intelligence. The world's best chess player, Kasparov lost the match and $1.1 million purse to the IBM supercomputer, which he had claimed could never surpass human chess ability. After losing the sixth and final game of the match, Kasparov accused IBM of building a machine specifically to beat him. Observers said he was frustrated by Deep Blue's quickness although they expected him to win with unconventional moves. *CHM On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue became the first machine to win a chess game against a reigning world champion under regular time controls. However, Kasparov won three and drew two of the following five games, beating Deep Blue by a score of 4–2 (wins count 1 point, draws count ½ point). The match concluded on February 17, 1996.
Deep Blue was then heavily upgraded (unofficially nicknamed "Deeper Blue") and played Kasparov again in May 1997, winning the six-game rematch 3½–2½, ending on May 11. *Wik

BIRTHS

1702 Isaac Greenwood. (11 May 1702 Boston, Massachusetts – 22 October 1745 Charleston, South Carolina ) In 1727 he was installed at Harvard as the ﬁrst Hollis professor of mathematics and natural and experimental philosophy. He strengthened and modernized the science program at Harvard. *VFR
During his tenure, he wrote anonymously the first natively-published American book on mathematics – the Greenwood Book, published in 1729. This book made the first published statement of the short scale value for billion in the United States, which eventually became the value used in most English-speaking countries.
He was removed from the Chair for intemperance (drunkenness) in 1737.
Unable to support his family, he joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain – HMS Rose in 1742, and later HMS Aldborough in 1744. He was released from service in Charleston, South Carolina, on 22 May 1745.
He drank himself to death a few months later on 22 October 1745.*Wik

In his Arithmetick, Greenwood chose to use the short scale value for one billion, i.e. 1 billion = 1000 x 1 million, or 10^9. This standard has been retained by the English speaking countries of the world. The continental countries of Europe use the long scale, i.e. 1 billion = 1 million million, or 10^12.

I recently learned that Greenwood was the first American born Dentist.

1744 José Anastácio da Cunha (May 11, 1744 – January 1, 1787) was a Portuguese mathematician. He is best known for his work on the theory of equations, algebraic analysis, plain and spherical trigonometry, analytical geometry, and differential calculus.

Da Cunha wrote a 21 part encyclopedia of mathematics Principios Mathemáticos which he began to publish in parts from 1782 (it was published as a complete work in 1790) which contained a rigorous exposition of mathematics, in particular a rigorous exposition of the calculus. The book contained the elements of geometry and algebra in addition to the calculus. In all areas da Cunha paid unusual attention to methodology as well as rigour. Struik, reviewing writes:-

His importance for the history of mathematics is due to his "Principios Mathemáticos", published posthumously in 1790 and translated into French by J M d'Abreu [Racle, Bordeaux, 1811]. This book is characterized by the attempts at rigor, especially in the calculus. Da Cunha develops a criterion for the convergence of a series which he uses to define the exponential function in a rather modern way, and from these develops the binomial series.

1871 Frank Schlesinger (May 11, 1871 New York City – July 10, 1943 Old Lyme, Connecticut) American astronomer who pioneered in the use of photography to map stellar positions and to measure stellar parallaxes, which could give more precise determinations of distance than visual ones, and with less than one hundredth as much time at the telescope. He designed instruments and mathematical and numerical techniques to improve parallax measurements. He published ten volumes of zone catalogs, including some 150,000 stars. He compiled positions, magnitudes, proper motions, radial velocities, and other data to produce the first edition and, with Louise Jenkins, the second, of the widely-used Bright Star Catalogues, making Yale a leading institution in astrometry. He established a second Yale observatory in South Africa. *VFR

1875 Harriet Quimby (May 11, 1875 – July 1, 1912) Harriet Quimby of Coldwater, Michigan, the first American woman to earn a pilot's license, on August 1, 1911, when she earned license #37 from the Aero Club of America. She later becomes the first woman to fly an airplane across the English Channel. Her accomplishment received little media attention, however, as the sinking of the Titanic ocean liner the day before riveted the interest of the public and filled newspapers.

The Vin Fiz Company, a division of Armour Meat Packing Plant of Chicago, recruited Quimby as the spokesperson for the new grape soda, Vin Fiz in April 1912. Her distinctive purple aviator uniform and image graced many of the advertising pieces of the day.

1881 Theodore von Karman (May 11, 1881 – May 7, 1963) Hungarian-American aerospace engineer and physicist who was active primarily in the fields of aeronautics and astronautics. He is responsible for many key advances in aerodynamics, notably his work on supersonic and hypersonic airflow characterization.*Wik; He was director of the Institute for Aerodynamics at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule (RWTH) in AACHEN, Nordrhein-Westfalen, in 1913-1934. The main lecture theatre complex is named the Kármán Auditorium and there is a photo and a bust of him in the foyer.

President Kennedy presenting the first National Medal of Science to Theodore von Kármán, 1963 (jfklibrary.ord)

1902 Edna Ernestine Kramer Lassar (May 11, 1902 – July 9, 1984), born Edna Ernestine Kramer, was an American mathematician and author of mathematics books.

Kramer was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants. She earned her B.A. summa cum laude in mathematics from Hunter College in 1922. While teaching at local high schools, she earned her M.A. in 1925 and Ph.D. in 1930 in mathematics (with a minor in physics) from Columbia University with Edward Kasner as her advisor.

She wrote The Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics, A First Course in Educational Statistics, Mathematics Takes Wings: An Aviation Supplement to Secondary Mathematics, and The Main Stream of Mathematics.

Kramer married the French teacher Benedict Taxier Lassar on July 2, 1935. Kramer-Lassar died at the age of 82 in Manhattan of Parkinson's disease

1924 Eugene Borisovich Dynkin ( May 11, 1924 — 14 November 2014) was a Soviet and American mathematician. He has made contributions to the fields of probability and algebra, especially semisimple Lie groups, Lie algebras, and Markov processes. The Dynkin diagram, the Dynkin system, and Dynkin's lemma are named for him.
In 1968, Dynkin was forced to transfer from the Moscow University to the Central Economic Mathematical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. He worked there on the theory of economic growth and economic equilibrium. He remained at the Institute until 1976, when he emigrated to the United States. In 1977, he became a professor at Cornell University, where he died in 2014. *Wik

1918 Richard Phillips Feynman (11 May, 1918 – 15 February, 1988) was an American theoretical physicist who was probably the most brilliant, influential, and iconoclastic figure in his field in the post-WW II era. By age 15, he had mastered calculus. He took every physics course at MIT. His lifelong interest was in subatomic physics. In 1942, he went to Los Alamos where Hans Bethe made the 24 year old Feynman a group leader in the theoretical division, to work on estimating how much uranium would be needed to achieve critical mass for the Manhattan (atomic bomb) Project. After the war, he developed Feynman Diagrams, a simple notation to describe the complex behavior of subatomic particles. In 1965, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for work in quantum electrodynamics. *TIS

1924 Antony Hewish FRS FInstP (11 May 1924 – 13 September 2021) was a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his role in the discovery of pulsars. ( Several prominent scientists protested the omission of Bell Burnell, though she maintained that the prize was presented appropriately given her student status at the time of the discovery) He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969

In late Nov 1967, using a radio telescope, Hewish and Ph.D. student Jocelyn Bell observed an unusual signal corresponding to a sharp burst of radio energy at a regular interval of approximately one second. It is believed that rapidly rotating neutron stars with intense electromagnetic fields emit radio waves from their north and south poles. From a great distance, these radio emissions are perceived in pulses, similar to the way one sees the light from a lighthouse's rotating lantern. Hewish and Bell's discovery served as the first evidence of this phenomenon.

1930 Edsger Wybe Dijkstra (May 11, 1930 – August 6, 2002) was a Dutch computer scientist. He received the 1972 Turing Award for fundamental contributions to developing programming languages, and was the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin from 1984 until 2000. Among his contributions to computer science are the shortest path-algorithm, also known as Dijkstra's algorithm; Reverse Polish Notation* and related Shunting yard algorithm; the THE multiprogramming system, an important early example of structuring a system as a set of layers; Banker's algorithm; and the semaphore construct for coordinating multiple processors and programs. Another concept due to Dijkstra in the field of distributed computing is that of self-stabilization – an alternative way to ensure the reliability of the system. Dijkstra's algorithm is used in SPF, Shortest Path First, which is used in the routing protocols OSPF and IS-IS. *Wik

*The Reverse Polish Notation was first created by Polish logician Jan Łukasiewicz, who invented Polish notation in 1924. The first computer to use postfix notation, though it long remained essentially unknown outside of Germany, was Konrad Zuse's Z3 in 1941 as well as his Z4 in 1945. The reverse Polish scheme was again proposed in 1954 by Arthur Burks, Don Warren, and Jesse Wright and was independently reinvented by Friedrich L. Bauer and Edsger W. Dijkstra in the early 1960s to reduce computer memory access and use the stack to evaluate expressions.

1958 Kristie Irene Macrakis (March 11, 1958 – November 14, 2022) was an American historian of science, author and professor in the School of History, Technology and Society at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was the author or editor of five books and was widely known for her work at the intersection of history of espionage and history of science and technology.

Macrakis received her PhD in the history of science at Harvard University. After teaching at Harvard University for a year as a lecturer, Macrakis spent a year in Berlin on an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Chancellor's Scholar for Future Leaders, before taking up a position at Michigan State University where she advanced from Assistant to Full Professor, before taking up a Full Professor position at Georgia Tech.

Prisoners, Lovers, and Spies (2014) and Seduced by Secrets (2008) were her single authored books. Nigel Jones wrote in The Spectator that Prisoners, Lovers and Spies is "beguilingly informative and sweeping survey of hidden communication. Kirkus Reviews named it one of the best nonfiction books of 2014 and called it "lively...engaging" and "An engrossing study of unseen writing and the picaresque misadventures of those who employ it."

Seduced by Secrets was hailed as the "best book" on the Ministry for State Security by Benjamin Fischer in the International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence,[while Joseph Goulden, of the Washington Times, gave it "a five cloak-and-dagger rating. Good reading for the specialist and the layman alike."]

Macrakis was also the author of numerous articles, both scholarly and popular. While a graduate student at Harvard she found that the Rockefeller Foundation funded science in Nazi Germany; that work was covered in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 29 October 1986). Her most widely read popular magazine article is "The Case of Agent Gorbachev," published in American Scientist.

Following a brief illness, Macrakis died on November 14, 2022, at the age of 64.

DEATHS

1610 Matteo Ricci (October 6, 1552; Macerata – May 11, 1610;Beijing )was an Italian Jesuit who went to China as a missionary and introduced the Chinese to Western mathematics.*SAU
There is now a memorial plaque in Zhaoqing to commemorate Ricci's six-year stay there, as well as a "Ricci Memorial Centre", in a building dating from the 1860's.

Ricci arrived at the Portuguese settlement of Macau in 1582 where he began his missionary work in China. He mastered the Chinese language and writing system. He became the first European to enter the Forbidden City of Beijing in 1601 when invited by the Wanli Emperor, who sought his services in matters such as court astronomy and calendrical science. He emphasized parallels between Catholicism and Confucianism but opposed Buddhism. He converted several prominent Chinese officials to Catholicism. He also worked with several Chinese elites, such as Xu Guangqi, in translating Euclid's Elements into Chinese as well as the Confucian classics into Latin for the first time in history.*Wik

1686 Otto von Guericke (originally spelled Gericke) (November 20, 1602 – May 11, 1686 (Julian calendar); November 30, 1602 – May 21, 1686 (Gregorian calendar)) was a German scientist, inventor, and politician. He is best remembered for his invention of the Magdeburg hemispheres, popularized in the writings of Caspar Schott. His major scientific achievements were the establishment of the physics of vacuums, the discovery of an experimental method for clearly demonstrating electrostatic repulsion, and his advocacy of the reality of "action at a distance" and of "absolute space". *Wik

1871 1st Baronet) Sir John (Frederick William) Herschel (7 March 1792 – 11 May 1871) was an English astronomer. As successor to his father, Sir William Herschel, he discovered another 525 nebulae and clusters. John Herschel was a pioneer in celestial photography, and as a chemist contributed to the development of sensitized photographic paper (independently of Talbot). In 1819, he discovered that sodium thiosulphate dissolved silver salts, as used in developing photographs. He introduced the terms positive image and negative image. Being diverse in his research, he also studied physical and geometrical optics, birefringence of crystals, spectrum analysis, and the interference of light and sound waves. To compare the brightness of stars, he invented the astrometer.*TIS [He was buried in Westminster Abbey.]

1957 Théophile Ernest de Donder (19 August 1872 – 11 May 1957) was a Belgian mathematician and physicist famous for his 1923 work in developing correlations between the Newtonian concept of chemical affinity and the Gibbsian concept of free energy.
He received his doctorate in physics and mathematics from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1899, for a thesis entitled Sur la Théorie des Invariants Intégraux (On the Theory of Integral Invariants).
He was professor between 1911 and 1942, at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Initially he continued the work of Henri Poincaré and Élie Cartan. As from 1914 he was influenced by the work of Albert Einstein and was an enthusiastic proponent of the theory of relativity. He gained significant reputation in 1923, when he developed his definition of chemical affinity. He pointed out a connection between the chemical affinity and the Gibbs free energy.
He is considered the father of thermodynamics of irreversible processes. De Donder’s work was later developed further by Ilya Prigogine. De Donder was an associate and friend of Albert Einstein. *Wik

Théophile Ernest de Donder at the 1927 Solvay Conference . Appearing in front of de Donder is Paul Dirac .

1965 Jason John Nassau (29 March 1893 in Smyrna, (now Izmir) Turkey - 11 May 1965 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) was an American astronomer.
He performed his doctoral studies at Syracuse, and gained his Ph.D. mathematics in 1920. (His thesis was Some Theorems in Alternants.) He then became an assistant professor at the Case Institute of Technology in 1921, teaching astronomy. He continued to instruct at that institution, becoming the University's first chair of astronomy from 1924 until 1959 and chairman of the graduate division from 1936 until 1940. After 1959 he was professor emeritus.
From 1924 until 1959 he was also the director of the Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a pioneer in the study of galactic structure. He also discovered a new star cluster, co-discovered 2 novae in 1961, and developed a technique of studying the distribution of red (M-class or cooler) stars.*Wik

1981 Odd Hassel (17 May 1897 – 11 May 1981) was a Norwegian physical chemist and Nobel Laureate.

He shared (with Sir Derek H.R. Barton of Great Britain) the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in establishing conformational analysis (the study of the 3-D geometric structure of molecules). A ring of six carbon atoms has two conformations - the chair and boat forms. These easily interchange - about a million times in a second at room temperature. One of the conformations is, however, strongly predominant (about 99%). Hassel carried out fundamental investigations on this system and showed how heavy or bulky groups, attached to the carbon atoms, take up their positions relative to the ring and to each other. Such work is of great importance for predicting the mode of reaction of a certain molecule. *TIS

2012 Fritz Joseph Ursell FRS (28 April 1923 – 11 May 2012) was a British mathematician noted for his contributions to fluid mechanics, especially in the area of wave-structure interactions. He held the Beyer Chair of Applied Mathematics at the University of Manchester from 1961–1990, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1972 and retired in 1990.

Ursell came to England as a refugee in 1937 from Germany. From 1941 to 1943 he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a bachelor degree in mathematics. *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, 10 May 2026

On this Day in Math - May 10

Nature is not embarrassed by difficulties of analysis.

~Augustin Fresnel

The 130th day of the year; 130 is the sum of the factorials of the first five terms of the Fibonacci sequence.
Did you know that any four terms of the Fibonacci sequence will give you a Pythagorean triangle? If we use 3, 5, 8, 13 you can get 3+13 = 39, 2*5*8 = 80, and 3*8 + 5 * 13 = 89, and {39, 80, 89} is a Pythagorean Right triangle with an area of 1560 (which is 3 * 5 * 8 * 13) Which makes it a Heronian triangle. First observed by Charles W. Raine in 1948. For more on this Pythagonacci connection.

130 is the sum of the squares of the divisors of 10, ( $ 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2 = 130 $
130 is also the only number equal to the sum of the squares of its first 4 divisors: 130 = 1^2 + 2^2 + 5^2 + 10^2.*Prime Curios

This is the 46th day of the year that is the sum of two squares.It is the sum of two squares in two different ways. 130 = 11² + 3² = 9² + 7².

Haven't mentioned the hexgonal numbers much this year so far, but 130 is the largest number that cannot be written as the sum of four hexagonal numbers.
Hexagonal numbers are given by the formula H(n) = n(2n-1), and produce the sequence 1, 6, 15, 28, 45, 66, 91... (can you find numbers that ARE the sum of four ) (All the even perfect numbers are in that sequence..)

EVENTS

1741 d'Alembert is (finally) accepted to the French Academy of Sciences. He had applied five times since March 1 of the same year. He was accepted as an adjunct associate astronomer at the age of 24. *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d'Alembert: science and the Englightenment; pg 25

1752 Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment using a 40-foot (some say 50 ft) (12 m)-tall iron rod instead of a kite, and he extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. Based on his observations, Franklin had proposed an experiment with an elevated rod or wire to "draw down the electric fire" from a cloud, with the experimenter standing in the protection of an enclosure similar to a soldier's sentry box.
Before Franklin could put his proposal into practice, D'Alibard performed his experiment in Paris. One week later, M. Delor repeated the experiment in Paris, followed in July by an Englishman, John Canton. But one unfortunate physicist did not fare so well. Georg Wilhelm Reichmann attempted to reproduce the experiment, according to Franklin's instructions, standing inside a room. A glowing ball of charge traveled down the string, jumped to his forehead and killed him instantly - providing history with the first documented example of ball lightning in the process.
As for Franklin, he was apparently unaware of these other experiments when he undertook his own version during a thunderstorm in June 1752, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Unlike Reichmann, he quite sensibly stood under a shed roof to ensure he was holding a dry, non-conducting portion of the kite string.*AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY News

It is said that Dalibard used wine bottles to ground the pole, and he successfully extracted electricity from a low cloud. It is not known (or is doubted) whether Franklin ever performed his proposed experiment

1760 Euler writes the tenth of his Letters to a German Princess. This one on the "Compression of the air. " . "The explanation of sound, which I have had the honor of presenting to you Highness, leads me forward to..." (The Euler Archive)

Letters to a German Princess, On Different Subjects in Physics and Philosophy were a series of 234 letters written by the mathematician Leonhard Euler between 1760 and 1762 addressed to Friederike Charlotte of Brandenburg-Schwedt and her younger sister Louise. *Wik

1810 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was summoned by the King of Prussia to be Professor of Astronomy at the University at Konigsburg and to supervise the construction of an Observatory, becoming its first Director. In 1819 he developed and published Fourier series, three years before Fourier! In 1824, he first systematically studied the Bessel functions. In 1838, he made the first observation of a stellar parallax, hence of a stellar distance, of 61 Cygni, about 11 light-years away. Its parallax is less than .3" (or .3' ??) of arc – the aberration due to the Earth's motion is about 40'. He had started working on this about thirty years previously. Henderson, 1839, and Struve, 1840, made independent measurements of a stellar parallax.

Bessel functions describe the radial part of vibrations of a circular membrane.

1831 Everiste Galois was arrested, following a banquet, of about 200 young republicans, that he actively attended.*VFR (SEE MAY 9)

1845 The Spitalfields Mathematical Society This mathematical society was founded in 1717 by Joseph Middleton who taught mathematics to sailors who required mathematical skills for navigating. It met in a public house, the Monmouth's Head, in Spitalfields which is a district just outside the east side of the city of London. The 'Mathematical Society', as it called itself, moved its meeting place a number of time over the following years but remaining in Spitalfields. In 1725 it moved to the White Horse in Wheeler Street, then in 1735 to the Ben Johnson's Head in Woodseer Street.

Dozens of these societies were formed in the early 18th century and contributed to the learning of many tradespeople, and the financial sustenance of many mathematicians of the period. Thomas Simpson was an early member of the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, being one of 49 members in 1736. Simpson was the most distinguished of a group of itinerant lecturers who taught in the London coffee houses. This may seems strange but in fact at this time coffee houses were sometimes called the Penny Universities because of the cheap education they provided. They would charge an entrance fee of one penny and then while customers drank coffee they could listen to lectures. Different coffee houses catered to specific interests such as art, business, law and mathematics. For example De Moivre used Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane as a base during these years, and William Jones, who was a friend of Simpson, was able to make a living lecturing in coffee houses such as Child's Coffee House in St Paul's Churchyard.

The actual death date of the society is not known to me, but the Society wrote to the Royal Astronomical Society who responded on 10 May 1845:-

A meeting of the Council of the Royal Astronomical Society took place yesterday, and I brought forward the suggestions contained in your recent letters to me relating to the venerable Mathematical Society of London, and the Council were unanimous in regretting that this ancient Society of 130 years standing should be on the eve of dissolution and decline. The members of the Council were also, I believe, unanimous that if the nineteen surviving members of the Mathematical Society should in their liberality and public spirit wish to keep the mathematical and astronomical and philosophical portions of their library together, and should kindly and considerately offer to present it to the Royal Astronomical Society, that the Council of the latter would not only be grateful to them for this act of judicious benevolence, but would be willing to elect all the members of the Mathematical Society members for life of the Royal Astronomical Society.

*Assorted notes but much from *SAU, McTutor, Wik

Petticoat Lane Market, Spitalfields, c. 1890.

1869 the first transcontinental railroad to run West out of Chicago was completed, running to Promontory, Utah. Amidst a crowd of dignitaries and workers, with the engines No. 119 and Jupiter practically touching noses, the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads were joined together. Telegraph operators transmitting to both coasts transmit the blows of the hammer as they fall on a golden spike. The nation listened as west and east came together in undivided union. *TIS

The ceremony for the driving of the "Last Spike" at Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

1898 Dewar becomes the first person to liquefy Hydrogen, working in the basement laboratory of the Ri with only a few assistants. *Royal Institution web page

1899 Parker Brothers put out Instant Insanity in 1967. But the puzzle itself was much older. Here's a patent filed on May 10, 1899 (issued April 3, 1900) by F.A. Schossow for a game that would be sold as the Katzenjammer Puzzle. *Dave Richeson

The puzzle consists of four cubes with faces colored with four colors (commonly red, blue, green, and white). The objective of the puzzle is to stack these cubes in a column so that each side of the stack (front, back, left, and right) shows each of the four colors. The distribution of colors on each cube is unique, and the order in which the four cubes are stacked is irrelevant as long as each side shows every color.

A solved stack is shown below, and the nets of each cube if you wish to make your own.

1910 Florence Nightingale was presented with the badge of honour of the Norwegian Red Cross Society. *VictorianWeb She would die a few months later on13 August 1910

1925 John T. Scopes was given a preliminary hearing before three judges. He had been arrested and charged under a new Tennessee's state law, the Butler act, which prohibited the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in public schools. Scopes had agreed to participate in a challenge to that law, with the support of local leaders in Dayton, Tennessee, and the American Civil Liberties Union. A few weeks later, at what became known as the Scope's Monkey Trial, he was found guilty and fined $100. Although upon appeal the fine was ruled excessive and over-ruled, the state law itself was not found unconstitutional. Thereafter, the law was not enforced, but it was not repealed until 1967.*TIS (The state of Tennessee still seems to be struggling with this issue, 2011)

1933 Kurt Schutte, the last of Hilbert’s sixty-nine doctoral students, defends his dissertation on logic. For the full list see Hilbert’s Gesammelte Abhandlungen, vol. 3, pp. 431–433. *VFR

In 1949, the first planetarium in the U.S. owned by a university opened at the University of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The Morehead Planetarium, one of the largest in the U.S., was the gift of John Motley Morehead III (1870-1965), class of 1891. The Morehead Building, erected at the north end of the campus, included the 68-ft dome, 300-seat Star Theater with a Zeiss Model II Star Projector. Morehead was an industrialist and chemist who commercially developed production of calcium carbide, basic to manufacturing acetylene gas, which led to the founding of Union Carbide Corporation. As the U.S. space program began, the planetarium provided important celestial navigation training for U.S. astronauts in the Mercury program.*TIS

1960 Triton ended her 84 day, 36,014 mile circumnavigation of the globe, the ﬁrst by a submerged submarine. The ship generally followed the path of the ﬁrst round the world voyager, Magellan. [Navy Facts, 181, 204] *VFR (Magellan's circumnavigation took three years, On August 10, 1519 to September 6, 1522. Of the 237 men who set out on five ships, only 18 completed the circumnavigation and managed to return to Spain in 1522. As far as I know the Triton had no casualties.)

2012 National Abacus Day ((Soroban Day) in Japan. It was established in 1968 and commemorates the sound of moving beads on the soroban, a Japanese abacus. While not a major public holiday, it recognizes the enduring legacy of the soroban.

By manipulating beads, the user of an abacus can perform simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. *CHM

When I was there in the 1990's the soroban was still used widely by merchants and businesses and taught in schools. Japanese third- and fourth-graders are required to practice soroban in math class, according to the education ministry's website.

Before 2020, DODEA (US Military dependents) students participated in soroban competitions alongside Japanese students in Okinawa and mainland Japan. American students on Okinawa competed for more than 20 years.

From My Personal Collection, sign for abacus school

2013 An annular solar eclipse took place on May 10, 2013, with a magnitude of 0.9544. A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partially obscuring the image of the Sun for a viewer on Earth. An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon's apparent diameter is smaller than the Sun, causing the Sun to look like an annulus (ring), blocking most of the Sun's light. An annular eclipse appears as a partial eclipse over a region thousands of kilometres wide.
Annularity was visible from northern Australia and the southern Pacific Ocean, with the maximum of 6 minutes 3 seconds visible from the Pacific Ocean east of French Polynesia. *Wik A more recent total Eclipse passed across much of North America on April 9, 2024.

2024 A dramatic blast from the sun set off the highest-level geomagnetic storm in Earth’s atmosphere on Friday that is expected to make the northern lights visible as far south as Florida and Southern California and could interfere with power grids, communications and navigations system.

It is the strongest such storm to reach Earth since Halloween of 2003. That one was strong enough to create power outages in Sweden and damage transformers in South Africa.

The effects could continue through the weekend as a steady stream of emissions from the sun continues to bombard the planet’s magnetic field.

The solar activity is so powerful that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which monitors space weather, issued an unusual storm watch for the first time in 19 years, which was then upgraded to a warning. The agency began observing outbursts on the sun’s surface on Wednesday, with at least five heading in the direction of Earth. *New York Times

Julie Lanter in Claryville, Kentucky, caught the aurora on May 10, 2024,

BIRTHS

1754 Colonel Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet, PC, MP, FRS, FRSE, FSA (10 May 1754 – 21 December 1835), was a Scottish politician, military officer, planter and writer who was one of the first people to use the word "statistics" in the English language in his pioneering work, Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which was published in 21 volumes.

1788 Augustin Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 - 14 July 1827, aged 39)did important work on optics where he was one of the founders of the wave theory of light. In 1817, Young had proposed a small transverse component to light, while yet retaining a far larger longitudinal component. Fresnel, by the year 1821, was able to show via mathematical methods that polarization could be explained only if light was entirely transverse, with no longitudinal vibration whatsoever. In the early 19th century, Poisson declared that since Fresnel’s ideas on the wave nature of light implied that the shadow cast by a disk would contain a bright spot at its center, Fresnel’s ideas were obviously flawed. The spot was later detected, proving Fresnel right! He is perhaps best known to the general public as the inventor of the Fresnel lens, first adopted in lighthouses while he was a French commissioner of lighthouses, and found in many applications today.*Wikipedia

1821 Baldassarre Boncompagni, (10 May 1821 – 13 April 1894), noted historian of mathematics. He set up his own publishing house and published his own journal dealing with the history of mathematics from 1868 to 1887. He was responsible for making known the importance of Leonardo Fibonacci to the history of mathematics. *VFR Boncompagni edited Bullettino di bibliografia e di storia delle scienze matematiche e fisiche ("The bulletin of bibliography and history of mathematical and physical sciences") (1868-1887), the first Italian periodical entirely dedicated to the history of mathematics. He edited every article that appeared in the journal. He also prepared and published the first modern edition of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci.*Wik

1847 Wilhelm Karl Joseph Killing (10 May 1847 in Burbach (near Siegen), Westphalia, Germany - 11 Feb 1923 in Münster, Germany)introduced Lie algebras independently of Lie in his study of non-euclidean geometry. The classification of the simple Lie algebras by Killing was one of the finest achievements in the whole of mathematical research.*SAU

1900 Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (10 May 1900; 7 Dec 1979 at age 79) was an English-American astronomer who was the first to apply laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies, and the first to conclude that hydrogen and helium are the two most common elements in the universe. During the 1920s, the accepted explanation of the Sun's composition was a calculation of around 65% iron and 35% hydrogen. At Harvard University, in her doctoral thesis (1925), Payne claimed that the sun's spectrum was consistent with another solution: 99% hydrogen with helium, and just 1% iron. She had difficulty persuading her superiors to take her work seriously. It was another 20 years before Payne's original claim was confirmed, by Fred Hoyle. *TIS

*Michael Magri shared her story this way, "In 1925, a young woman named Cecilia Payne wrote a PhD thesis so groundbreaking, it changed science forever — yet almost no one knows her name.

Born in England, Cecilia Payne’s brilliance was obvious early on. But Cambridge wouldn’t award her a degree because she was a woman. So, she left for the United States, earned the first PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College (Harvard’s sister school), and wrote what has since been called “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

In that thesis, Payne revealed that the Sun — and therefore the stars — are made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. At the time, this was considered outrageous. Even her advisor, Henry Norris Russell, urged her not to publish the conclusion. Four years later, he published the same idea — and received the credit.

But Payne didn’t stop. She became one of the world’s leading experts on variable stars. Her work is the foundation of nearly every study on them since. In 1956, she became the first woman promoted to full professor from within Harvard and the first to lead a department there.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin changed how we understand the universe — yet her name rarely appears in textbooks."

In his paper Russell credited Payne with discovering that the Sun had a different chemical composition from Earth but never shared the rewards of the fame he readily accepted for her work which he’d failed to recognize until years later. *PB Notes

*MacTutor

Linda Hall Org

1904 Edward James McShane (May 10, 1904 – June 1, 1989) is famous for his work in the calculus of variations, Moore-Smith theory of limits, the theory of the integral, stochastic differential equations, and ballistics. In the early 1950s United States senator Joseph R McCarthy whipped up strong feelings against communism. McShane had been asked to complete a questionnaire. One question asked:-
... whether he had ever been involved with organisations that had at any time advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.
It was quite a brave move for McShane to reply "yes", because he was an employee of the State of Virginia! At the University of Virginia this sense of humour added to his popularity with both staff and graduate students.. *SAU

1926 Oliver Gordon Selfridge (May 10, 1926 – December 3, 2008), grandson of Harry Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges' department stores, was a pioneer of artificial intelligence. He has been called the "Father of Machine Perception."
Selfridge was born in England, educated at Malvern College and Middlesex School and then earned an S.B. from MIT in mathematics in 1945. He then became a graduate student of Norbert Wiener's at MIT, but did not write up his doctoral research and never earned a Ph.D. While at MIT, he acted as one of the earlier reviewers for Wiener's Cybernetics book in 1949. He was also technically a supervisor of Marvin Minsky, and helped organize the first ever public meeting on Artificial Intelligence (AI) with Minsky in 1955.
Selfridge wrote important early papers on neural networks and pattern recognition and machine learning, and his "Pandemonium" paper (1959) is generally recognized as a classic in artificial intelligence. In it, Selfridge introduced the notion of "demons" that record events as they occur, recognize patterns in those events, and may trigger subsequent events according to patterns they recognize. Over time, this idea gave rise to Aspect-oriented programming.
In 1968, in their formative paper "The Computer as a Communication Device", J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor introduced a concept known as an OLIVER (Online Interactive Expediter and Responder) which was named in honor of Selfridge.
Selfridge spent his career at Lincoln Laboratory, MIT (where he was Associate Director of Project MAC), Bolt, Beranek and Newman, and GTE Laboratories where he became Chief Scientist. He served on the NSA Advisory Board for 20 years, chairing the Data Processing Panel. Selfridge retired in 1993.
Selfridge also authored four children's books, "Sticks", "Fingers Come In Fives", "All About Mud", and "Trouble With Dragons". *Wik

1958 Ellen Ochoa (born May 10, 1958) is an American engineer, former astronaut and former director of the Johnson Space Center. In 1993, Ochoa became the first Hispanic woman to go to space when she served on a nine-day mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery. Ochoa became director of the center upon the retirement of the previous director, Michael Coats, on December 31, 2012. She was the first Hispanic director and the second female director of Johnson Space Center.

Ellen Ochoa aboard Space Shuttle Discovery during mission STS-56.

DEATHS

1822 Paolo Ruffini (September 22, 1765 – May 10, 1822) Italian mathematician and physician who made studies of equations that anticipated the algebraic theory of groups. He is regarded as the first to make a significant attempt to show that there is no algebraic solution of the general quintic equation (an equation with the variable in one term raised to the fifth power). In 1799 Ruffini published a book on the theory of equations with his claim that quintics could not be solved by radicals, General theory of equations in which it is shown that the algebraic solution of the general equation of degree greater than four is impossible. Ruffini used group theory in his work but he had to invent the subject for himself. He also wrote on probability and the application of probability to evidence in court cases. *TIS

1829 Thomas Young (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) English physician and physicist who reinforced the wave theory of light with his study of interference of light. As a medical student, he had discovered the how the shape of the eye's lens changes to focus. In 1801, he recognized the cause of astigmatism. Young demonstrated the wave nature of light, polarization of light, interference fringes, and explained the colours seen in thin films such as soap bubbles. He associated wavelength with colour of light, and the eye's perception of any colour as a mixture of red, blue and green. Young's modulus is named after his work with elasticity. He also worked measuring the size of molecules, liquid surface tension. He was also an Egyptologist who helped decipher the Rosetta Stone. The museum in Cairo has another "roseta", the Decree of Canopus, in Hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek, issued by Ptolemy III Euergetes in -238. It decrees leap years to be included in the calendar. It was not discovered until 1866, too late to assist Young and Champollion in deciphering, but which confirmed their work.

1910 Antoine Joseph Bernard Brunhes (3 July 1867 – 10 May 1910) was a French geophysicist known for his pioneering work in paleomagnetism, in particular, his 1906 discovery of geomagnetic reversal. The current period of normal polarity, Brunhes Chron, and the Brunhes–Matuyama reversal are named for him.

1924 August Gutzmer (2 Feb 1860 in Neu-Roddahn, near Neustadt an der Dosse, Germany -10 May 1924 in Halle, Germany) was a German mathematician who worked on differential equations. *SAU

1941 Diederik Korteweg (31 March 1848 – 10 May 1941) was a Dutch mathematician with wide interests. He is now best remembered for his work on the Korteweg–de Vries equation, together with Gustav de Vries.

Korteweg was a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences for 60 years. He was a member of the Dutch Mathematical Society for 75 years. He was editor of Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde from 1897 to his death in 1941.

An experiment conducted aboard the International Space Station in 2003 (Miscible Fluids in Microgravity) was mounted to prove one of Korteweg's theories.[9]

The asteroid 9685 Korteweg and the Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics are named after him.

1989 Hassler Whitney (March 23, 1907 – May 10, 1989) was an American mathematician. He was one of the founders of singularity theory, and did foundational work in manifolds, embeddings, immersions, and characteristic classes. *SAU

In 1947 he was elected member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1969 he was awarded the Lester R. Ford Award for the paper in two parts "The mathematics of Physical quantities" (1968a, 1968b). In 1976 he was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 1980 he was elected honorary member of the London Mathematical Society. In 1982, he received the Wolf Prize from the Wolf Foundation, and finally, in 1985, he was awarded the Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society. *Wik

2003 Ambrosius Paul Speiser (November 13 1922, in Basel – May 10 2003, in Aarau) was a Swiss engineer and scientist. He led the development of the first Swiss electronic computer.

Speiser studied electrotechnology at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH), where in 1948 he earned his diploma in communications engineering. In 1949, Eduard Stiefel sent Heinz Rutishauser and Speiser to study in Harvard under Howard H. Aiken and in Princeton under John von Neumann; Rutishauser and Speiser became acquainted with the Harvard Mark III and the IAS machine. In 1950, the Institut für angewandte Mathematik (Institute for Applied Mathematics, founded in 1948) of ETH acquired the Zuse Z4. As there were no other commercially available electronic computers which were suitable for scientific applications aside from the Z4, this led the Swiss to the idea of developing their own computer inspired by the Z4. Under Speiser's technical direction between 1950 and 1955, Switzerland's first electronic calculating machine, ERMETH, originated.

Speiser earned his doctorate and habilitation during the development of ERMETH, but began an industrial career when he joined IBM in 1955. From 1956 to 1966 he was the director of IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in Rüschlikon, the only research center of IBM outside of the USA at the time. In 1966 he left IBM to become the director of research for Brown, Boveri & Cie in order to develop the company's research center in Dättwil. He also served as the second president of the International Federation for Information Processing from 1965 to 1968.

In 1962 ETH made Speiser a full professor. For years, he taught one of the first courses in computer science at the ETH. In 1986 ETH honored him with an honorary doctorate for his pioneering work at the frontier of informatics. The Schweizerische Akademie der Technischen Wissenschaften chose Speiser on 1987 as president of its executive committee and upon his resignation in 1993 made him an honorary member. Speiser was also a member of the Schweizerischen Schulrats, member of the board of trustees of the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds, and from 1983 to 1988 president of Vororts (now Economiesuisse); *Wik

2009 Carol Jo Crannell (November 15, 1938 – May 10, 2009) was a solar physicist known for her work on solar flares and on the astrophysical observation of x-rays and gamma rays. She worked for thirty years at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
Crannell was born in Columbus, Ohio. She graduated from Miami University in 1960, and completed her Ph.D. in physics at Stanford University in 1967, with Robert Hofstadter as her doctoral advisor. She worked at the Goddard Space Flight Center from 1974 until 2004, when she retired.
Crannell also held an adjunct faculty position at Catholic University of America, where her husband, Hall L. Crannell, is an emeritus professor. Her daughter, Annalisa Crannell, is a mathematician at Franklin & Marshall College.
Crannell's doctoral research concerned particle showers. At Goddard, Crannell pushed for x-ray and gamma-ray observations of the sun, and led balloon-mounted experiments to make these observations.
Crannell played an active role in the struggle for equal opportunity for women in physics. She chaired the Committee on the Status of Women in Physics of the American Physical Society, and helped found the CSWP Gazette, the newsletter of the Committee. Through her position at the Catholic University she also helped bring underrepresented students to summer internships at Goddard.
Crannell became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1992, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1998. In 1990, Women in Aerospace gave her their Outstanding Achievement Award "for her dedication to expanding women’s opportunities for career advancement and for increasing their visibility through her activities as an aerospace professional".
*Wik

Carol Crannell and ε beta (grandchild)