Tuesday, 1 September 2026

On This Day in Math- September 1

 



"Life is good for only two things, discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics"
Siméon Poisson

The 244th day of the year; 244 is the smallest number (besides 2) that can be written as the sum of 2 squares or the sum of two 5th powers. *What's Special about this number


244 is anti-perfect. The proper divisors are 1, 2, 4, 61, and 122, & adding their reversal is 1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + 221 = 244. *Jim Wilder ‏@wilderlab (244 is the smallest multi-digit anti-perfect number; There is one more year day which is anti-perfect.... don't just sit there, go find it!)

244 is also the sum of three cubes, \( 244 = 1^3 + 3^3 + 6^3 \)  

244 is "power friendly" with 136.   \(244 =1 ^3 + 3^3 + 6^3\) and  \(136 = 2^3 + 4^3 + 4^3\)



EVENTS

1488 The Plimpton Library has a copy of Anianus, Computus Manualis combined with Boethius, Arithmetica, which is probably the first book on mathematics printed in Strasburg. It DIDN'T happen on this date but I include it here because it has the first known printing of the little mnemonic that begins, “Thirty days hath September,”

*historyofscience.com


1672 Hooke's diary records " Calculated lengths of Glasses." from Hooke's Journal *Robert Hooke ‏@HookesLondon This was done using Hookes "musical cylinder" or string phone. In July 1664 Hooke produced an experiment to show the number of vibrations of an extended String, made in a determinate time, requested to give a certain Tone or Note, by which it was found that "a Wire making two hundred seventy two vibrations in one second of time sounded G Sol Re Vt. in the Scale of all Musick". Hooke had found that middle C had 272 beats a second, and on 1st September 1672 Hooke noted the he had invented an easy way for "a musical cylinder with pewter tips pinched between cylindrick rings". *Daniel P McVeigh, "An Early History of the Telephone 1664-1865"  

Today if we saw this device we would call it a string phone, although it was not clear from Hooke's notes that his intention was to speak through the device. What is clear is that the device was created for the purpose of making music.



1698 The last Russian year to begin on September 1. January 1, 1699 began a new year. *VFR but still on the Julian Calendar. Russia would not switch to the Gregorian calendar until 24 January 1918 when the Council of People's Commissars issued a Decree that Wednesday, 31 January 1918 was to be followed by Thursday, 14 February 1918, thus dropping 13 days from the calendar. *Wik


1742 a letter from Euler to Niklaus I Bernoulli on pentagonal number theorem. Euler also notes in this letter that the coefficients of the terms in the series
1 + 1n + 2n
2 + 3n
3 + 5n
4 + 7n
5 + 11n
6 + 15n
7 + 22n
8 + 30n
9 + 42n
10 + 56n
11 + etc.
give the number of different ways in which the exponent of the term can be made by addition, i.e. that it is the generating function for the (unrestricted) partition function. Euler then writes: “This series moreover arises from division, if unity were divided by \((1 − n)(1 − n^2)(1 − n^3)(1 − n^4)(1 − n^5 )\) etc., which product if expanded gives this expression \( 1 − n − n^2 + n^5 + n^7 − n^{12} − n^{15} + n^{22} + n^{26} − n^{35} − etc\) . where the precise way in which the exponents proceed I have not been able to penetrate, although by induction(Euler means experimentation and extrapolation of a pattern, not the proof by induction we use today) I have concluded for no other exponents to occur, unless they are contained in the formula (3xx ± x)/2; and this is such that the powers of n have the + sign if the exponents arise with an even number substituted for x”. *Jordan Bell, Euler and the Pentagonal Number Theorem


1849 On the night of September 1, 1849, the nearly full Moon appeared over the town of Canandaigua, New York. At 10:30 P.M., Samuel D. Humphrey slid a highly polished, silver-plated copper sheet measuring 2¾x1¾ inches into his camera, which was pointed at the Moon. After developing the plate with mercury vapor, he sent his daguerreotype to Harvard College. This is believed to be the oldest existing photo of the moon.
Many sources (Wikipedia, for instance) claim this is actually the first known photo of the moon was taken on March 23, 1840 (see my page for that date) by John W. Draper of New York City. Draper is credited with making a clearer daguerreotype of the (full) Moon in March 1840, and he sent a letter with a copy of the image to John Herschel. Others believe his original photo was destroyed in a fire. This may be due to some confusion about a photo taken the previous year by Daguerre, which burned in his laboratory fire. 

The first photographer is widely acknowledged to be a French inventor named Joseph Nicéphore Niépcethe. He started experimenting with ways to record light in 1814. One of the oldest surviving photos of any kind was taken in 1825 when Niépce captured the black-and-white image of an engraving of a boy pulling a horse. However, this method required a full eight hours of exposure.

 *PB notes




A different photo that is claimed to be the oldest surviving photograph: View from the Window at Le Gras (French: Point de vue du Gras) is a heliographic image and the oldest surviving camera photograph. It was created by French inventor Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France, and shows parts of the buildings and surrounding countryside of his estate, Le Gras [fr], as seen from a high window.


below: The original plate (left) and colorized reoriented enhancement (right). The photo was found to be taken at his home from a second-story south-facing bedroom window.


1854 It was on this day that John Snow became aware of the cholera epidemic, and began his studies leading to the isolation of the Broad Street Pump. "Early on the morning of September 1st, 1854, in the Berwick Street district of St. James's, Westminster, where I had spent some hours of the preceding day without hearing any mention of cholera-and where, in former epidemics, the mortality from that disease had been inconsiderable-I was asked to visit a house in which lay, already collapsed, four persons who had been seized with cholera during the night; and, on leaving this house, whichever way I turned, I came upon similar scenes. At noon, when I met my brother curate and the Scripture-reader for a short time in the vestry of St. Luke's, Berwick Street, I learned that they had each been occupied all the morning in the same way as myself. The rest of the day was spent in the same manner; and, as an indication of the severity of the outbreak, I record that, of all the cholera patients visited by me on that day, only one recovered." *The John Snow Archives, For those who are unfamiliar with the case, a beautiful book:



John Snow Pub, and the notorious pump




1859 First recorded observation of a solar flare. Richard Christopher Carrington English astronomer was the first to map the motions of sunspots and thus discover from them that the Sun rotates faster at the equator than near the poles (equatorial acceleration). He observed that the sunspots were not attached to any solid object, and also discovered the movement of sunspot zones toward the Sun's equator as the solar cycle progresses. On 1 Sep 1859, Carrington was the first to record the observation of a solar flare. *TIS Richard Hodgson, another English amateur astronomer, independently made the observations of the same solar flare. *Wik He reported his Description of a Singular Appearance seen in the Sun in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (1860), "While engaged in the ... observation of ... solar spots ... two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out. ... I therefore noted down the time, ... and seeing the outburst to be very rapidly on the increase ... I hastily ran to call some one to witness ... and on returning within 60 seconds, was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled. Very shortly afterwards the last trace was gone. In this lapse of 5 minutes, the two patches of light traversed a space of about 35,000 miles."*TIS

a modern image of a solar flare



1861 (Sept ?) Sir Charles Bright and Mr. Latimer Clark proposed the names of ohm, volt, and farad for the practical units based on the centimetre-gramme-second absolute system, Sir William Thomson gave a cordial support; and on his initiative was formed the famous Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association, which year by year has done so much to carry to perfection the standard and the methods of electrical measurement. *IEC History This seems to have been the first time a unit of measure was named for a famous scientist.

Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin



In 1869, Cleveland Abbe began a weather reporting system in Cincinnati, Ohio and published a weather bulletin which contained his first weather forecast on September 1, 1869. In the United States, on October 21, 1743, Benjamin Franklin had tracked a hurricane for the first time. It was the first recorded instance in which the progressive movement of a storm system was recognized. A photo gallery of the development of the US Weather Bureau is available here:
In 1847, the first weather warnings were issued via telegraph. In 1870, the National Weather Service was born. *Weather.about.com



1885  On September 5, 1885, Scientific American published a photograph depicting a “streak of real ‘Jersey lightning,’” taken by William Nicholson Jennings (1860-1946) at 10:30 p.m. on the first of August that same year. Captured on the roof of Jennings’ house in North Philadelphia and later reproduced as a lantern slide, the photograph reveals a flash of lightning traveling diagonally from the upper left corner of the frame to the horizon, illuminating the tops of trees and a line of row house roofs in the foreground. Regional and national newspapers soon proclaimed Jennings as the first to successfully photograph lightning with a camera.

The Today in Science claims an earlier occurrence.  " In 1884, the first photograph of a lightning flash made in the U.S. was made by W. C. Gurley of the Marietta Observatory, Ohio. The flash was about 3 miles away."  I don't have a picture of that one (but am willing to post one if someone can find it) so Jennings gets the plug.


*Panaroma





1902 The French film pioneer George Méliès presented the very first science fiction movie to the stunning public of the Paris Olympia theater. *Yovisto 



https://youtu.be/xLVChRVfZ74




1916 The first (late) summer meeting of the MAA was held at MIT, September 1-2, 1916. *MAA


1920 The central limit theorem didn't get it's name until 1920 even though the first version of the theorem was published in 1733. *Probability Fact ‏@ProbFact,
The first version of this theorem was postulated by Abraham de Moivre who used the normal distribution to approximate the distribution of the number of heads resulting from many tosses of a fair coin. The actual term "central limit theorem" (in German: "zentraler Grenzwertsatz") was first used by George Pólya in 1920 in the title of a paper, "Über den zentralen Grenzwertsatz der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung und das Momentenproblem", in Mathematische Zeitschrift. (9/1/1920) Pólya referred to the theorem as "central" due to its importance in probability theory. According to Le Cam, the French school of probability interprets the word central in the sense that "it describes the behavior of the center of the distribution as opposed to its tails". *Wik



1922 British chemist and physicist Francis W. Aston was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He developed the mass spectrometer, a device that separates molecular fragments of different mass and measures them with remarkable accuracy. Using the spectrometer, Aston discovered that neon had two isotopes, \(^{20} \)Ne and \(^{21} \)Ne, and was awarded the 1922 Nobel Prize for this work. *RSC.org




1936 The first meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Rudolf Carnap presented an invited address, “Truth in Mathematics and Logic,” to an audience of three hundred. *VFR


1939 Robert Oppenheimer wrote a seminal paper on black holes that went mostly overlooked and is still relatively un-noted because it was published on the same day that WWII began with German invasion of Poland.




1939 World War II began, as German troops marched into Poland.


1963 The scientific community learned about rotating black holes in general relativity #OTD in 1963, when Roy Kerr's groundbreaking paper appeared in Physical Review Letters. hat tip @RobertMcNees


1964 The Ryukyu Islands issued a stamp commemorating the opening of the Ryukyu Islands–Japan microwave system for telephone and telegraph messages. Pictured is a parabolic antenna, one of the many applications of the reflective properties of the conics. [Scott #123] *VFR





1967  Harvey Friedman was appointed Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, just three weeks before his nineteenth birthday. This is the youngest at which anyone has begun a university career. He is now a distinguished logician at The Ohio State University. (Guinness) See September 23, 1948, September 30, 1717, and November 19, 1982. *VFR



In 1997, the discovery of a new sub-atomic particle was announced, called the "exotic meson." Scientists speculated that the exotic meson might comprise four quarks, unlike all other known particles, which have three. The research team included physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, N.Y., and other facilities in the U.S. and Russia.*TIS


1994 U.S. Library of Congress starts "Virtual Library" project.The LOC holds the first of several meetings to plan a project to convert its materials to digital form so they will be accessible via computer networks to students and researchers around the world. The "virtual library" project could also save rare materials that are degrading or have been vandalized, as well as saving space for the library, whose belongings fill up 575 miles of shelving. At the time of the initial meeting -- at which librarians and technical experts from several major computer companies discussed strategy and funding -- the library hoped to have its most vulnerable materials digitized by the year 2000. *CHM


2008 John D. Barrow is appointed Gresham Professor of Geometry. He had previously held the Gresham chair in Astronomy, (2003-2007). *Wik






BIRTHS


1659 Joseph Saurin (September 1, 1659 at Courtaison – December 29, 1737 at Paris) . In the early seventeenth century he defended the calculus against the criticisms of Michael Rolle. *VFR He became friends with de L'Hôpital, Malebranche and Varignon but, by 1702, he was in dispute with Rolle over the calculus. This came about because of his role as mathematics editor of the Journal des Sçavants. He appealed to the Académie Royal des Sciences but, although Saurin was correct, they had no wish to come out against Rolle who was a member. Perhaps to be diplomatic, Saurin was elected to the Académie Royal des Sciences in 1707. *SAU In the Paris Académie Royale des Sciences in July of 1700, Michel Rolle voiced opposition to the use of infinitesimal magnitudes.Rolle was not alone in this project, for he allied himself with several mathematical conservatives, including the Abbé Jean Gallois and the Abbé Thomas Gouye, both of whom venerated the Greek standards of rigor and had significant reservations about the use of infinitesimal methods. Rolle's criticisms were later published in the memoir Du nouveau systême de l'infini, which he opened by declaring that

We have always regarded geometry as an exact science, and also as the source of the exactness which is spread throughout all the other parts of mathematics. We see among its principles only true axioms: all the theorems and all the problems proposed here are either solidly demonstrated or capable of a solid demonstration. And if it should happen that any false or less certain principles slip in, they should be at once banished from this science.
But it seems that this character of exactitude no longer reigns in geometry, ever since we became entangled in the new system of the infinitely small. For myself, I do not see that it has produced any new truth, and it seems to me that it often leads to error.

*Leibniz on the Foundations of the Calculus:
The Question of the Reality of Infinitesimal Magnitudes, Douglas M. Jesseph



1826 Alfred Ely Beach (1 Sep 1826; 1 Jan 1896) American inventor and publisher, whose Scientific American helped stimulate 19th-century technological innovations and became one of the world's most prestigious science magazines. Beach himself invented a tunneling shield and built the pneumatic tube subway (1870). In 1856 he won First Prize and a gold medal at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition. Beach had invented a typewriter for the blind. It resembled the modern typewriter in the arrangement of its keys and typebars, but embossed its letters on a narrow paper strip instead of a sheet. *TIS Beach purchased SA while the paper was still a small weekly journal with a circulation less than 300. It was bought for $800 in July 1846 by 20-year-old Beach as editor, and Orson Desaix Munn.




1835 William Stanley Jevons,(1 September 1835 – 13 August 1882) Political economist. He did early work in symbolic logic and built an early logic machine, the first that could solve complicated problems faster than they could be solved by hand.*VFR Irving Fisher described his book The Theory of Political Economy (1871) as beginning the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical. In so doing, it expounded upon the "final" (marginal) utility theory of value. Jevons had written in his Principles of Science, p. 123, "Can the reader say what two numbers multiplied together will produce the number 8616460799 ? I think it unlikely that anyone but myself will ever know." This became known as Jevons' Number and was factored by Derrick Norman Lehmer in 1903. (Reader, try your hand.)
In economics, the Jevons paradox (sometimes Jevons effect) is the proposition that technological progress that increases the efficiency with which a resource is used tends to increase (rather than decrease) the rate of consumption of that resource. *Wik



1902 Dirk Brouwer (1 Sep 1902; 31 Jan 1966) Dutch-born U.S. astronomer and geophysicist known for his achievements in celestial mechanics, especially for his pioneering application of high-speed digital computers for astronomical computations. While still a student he determined the mass of Titan from its influence on other Saturnian moons. Brouwer developed general methods for finding orbits and computing errors and applied these methods to comets, asteroids, and planets. He computed the orbits of the first artificial satellites and from them obtained increased knowledge of the figure of the earth. His book, Methods of Celestial Mechanics, taught a generation of celestial mechanicians. He also redetermined astronomical constants.*TIS







DEATHS


1648 Marin Mersenne died (8 September 1588 – 1 September 1648).Often called the center of the scientific world in the early 17th century for his communication with and between many of the most prominent scientific minds of the period. He is perhaps best known today among mathematicians for Mersenne prime numbers, those which can be written in the form Mn = 2^p − 1 for some prime integer p.

 He also performed extensive experiments to determine the acceleration of falling objects by comparing them with the swing of pendulums, reported in his Cogitata Physico-Mathematica in 1644. He was the first to measure the length of the seconds pendulum, that is a pendulum whose swing takes one second, and the first to observe that a pendulum's swings are not isochronous as Galileo thought, but that large swings take longer than small swings. *Wik




1687 Henry More (October 12, 1614 – September 1, 1687) was an English philosopher of science whose ideas may have influenced Newton. One other thing about Henry More which we should discuss is his relation to Newton. Newton was born close to Grantham and attended the Free School in Grantham. In fact he had lodgings in Grantham for seven years with a Mr Clark, the brother of a teacher at the Free School. More, who was about 30 years older than Newton, often returned to his home town of Grantham and when he did so he lived with one of the two Clark brothers. Therefore when More was a major figure at Cambridge he must have got to know the young pupil Newton. We certainly know that there was contact between Newton and More up till the time More was around 70 years of age.
Did More's ideas of space influence Newton? It is impossible to say with any certainty, but we can certainly note that Newton's idea of absolute space and time was crucial to his physics and that this notion of space is closely related to that put forward by More in his arguments against Descartes. Also in terms of gravity, for Descartes it was necessary to have an interaction through matter between the bodies. For Newton gravity was a force which acted through empty space and although he does not appear to have identified space with God as More did, nevertheless the spiritual aspect of space supported Newton's gravitational theories. *SAU




1716 Heinrich Meissner (April 20th 1644 in Hamburg - September 1 1716 Hamburg) was a co-founder of the Hamburg Masters and computing Mathematical Society in Hamburg. This is the oldest existing mathematical society in the world.
From 1688 until shortly before his death he was "writing, arithmetic and upper-master" of the parish school of St. Jacobi .
Meissner founded (Jan 2, 1690) along with Valentin Heins 'art-accounting practicing Society ", which became Hamburg Mathematical Society .
Meissner published a whole series of books and magazines. Worth mentioning are especially the key star and Algebrae, a textbook on algebra in the German language, and the Teutsche Euclid, a translation of the first two books in the "Elements" of Euclid with extensive annotations. *Wik




1662  Paul Halcke (also: Halcken or Halke), (1662 in Elmshorn, 1731 in Buxtehude) was a German mathematician, writer, computer, and calendar maker.

He was the brother of writer and computer Johann Halcke and founded, in 1690, together with Heinrich Meißner, the Hamburgischen Kunst-Rechnungs lieb- und übenden Societät, today's Hamburg Mathematical Society. Since about 1687 he was writer and calculator at the city school of Buxtehude.

In 1694 he issued a solution's book to a collection of exercises by Heinrich Meißner, and later he published his own collection of 574 exercises from mathematics and astronomy, entitled Mathematischer Sinnen-Confect ("mathematical mind candy"), which was translated in various languages and remained a seminal textbook for more than a century. The exercises were enriched by poems and descriptions of the solving methods. In particular, exercise 289 on page 256 consists in finding the smallest Euler brick, for which Paul Halcke is most well-known today. This cuboid has sides and face diagonals of integer lengths {44, 117, 240} and {125, 244, 267}.

Halcken was also the first (1729) to show that  the product of the aliquot divisors of 24, equals its cube, \(1*2*3*4*6*8*12 = 13824=24^3\)  and that the same fact is true about 40.

He also edited several popular calendars for the years 1705, 1707, 1715, 1716 and 1725.

An Euler brick, named after Leonhard Euler, is a rectangular cuboid whose edges and face diagonals all have integer lengths. A primitive Euler brick is an Euler brick whose edge lengths are relatively prime. A perfect Euler brick is one whose space diagonal is also an integer, but such a brick has not yet been found.



1908 Aleksandr Nikolayevich Korkin (3 March [O.S. 19 February] 1837–September 1, 1908) was a Russian mathematician. He made contribution to the development of partial differential equations. After Chebyshev, Korkin was the most important initiator of the formation of the Saint Petersburg Mathematical School*Wik




1982 Ludwig Georg Elias Moses Bieberbach​ (4 December 1886, 1 September 1982 wrote a habilitation thesis in 1911 about groups of Euclidean motions – identifying conditions under which the group must have a translational subgroup whose vectors span the Euclidean space – that helped solve Hilbert's 18th problem. He worked on complex analysis and its applications to other areas in mathematics. He is known for his work on dynamics in several complex variables, where he obtained results similar to Fatou's. In 1916 he formulated the Bieberbach conjecture, stating a necessary condition for a holomorphic function to map the open unit disc injectively into the complex plane in terms of the function's Taylor series.*Wik




1988 Luis Walter Alvarez (June 13, 1911 – September 1, 1988) was an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968. The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century.
In 1940 Alvarez joined the MIT Radiation Laboratory, where he contributed to a number of World War II radar projects, from early improvements to Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) radar beacons, now called transponders, to a system known as VIXEN for preventing enemy submarines from realizing that they had been found by the new airborne microwave radars. The radar system for which Alvarez is best known and which has played a major role in aviation, most particularly in the post war Berlin airlift, was Ground Controlled Approach (GCA). Alvarez spent a few months at the University of Chicago working on nuclear reactors for Enrico Fermi before coming to Los Alamos to work for Robert Oppenheimer on the Manhattan project. Alvarez worked on the design of explosive lenses, and the development of exploding-bridgewire detonators. As a member of Project Alberta, he observed the Trinity nuclear test from a B-29 Superfortress, and later the bombing of Hiroshima from the B-29 The Great Artiste.
After the war Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyze these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968. He was involved in a project to x-ray the Egyptian pyramids to search for unknown chambers. With his son, geologist Walter Alvarez, he developed the Alvarez hypothesis which proposes that the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs was the result of an asteroid impact. *Wik




1982 Haskell Brooks Curry (12 Sep 1900; 1 Sep 1982)American mathematician who was a pioneer of modern mathematical logic. His research in the foundations of mathematics led him to the development of combinatory logic. Later, this seminal work found significant application in computer science, especially in the design of programming languages. Curry worked on the first electronic computer, called ENIAC, during WW II. He also formulated a logical calculus using inferential rules. In 1942, he published Curry's paradox, which occurs in naive set theory or naive logics, and allows the derivation of an arbitrary sentence from a self-referring sentence and some apparently innocuous logical deduction rules.*TIS




2006 Warren J. Mitofsky, (17 September 1934 - 1 September 2006)While working at the Census Bureau in the 1960s, he and a colleague, Joseph Waksberg, began to devise a random-digit dialing (RDD) system that now bears both their names.
Mr. Mitofsky went to work at CBS News in 1967. Not long afterwards, he organized the first "exit poll" in a Kentucky gubernatorial election, with his first national exit poll being in 1972. He directed the CBS News Election and Survey Unit until 1990, leading, in 1975, to the joint effort with the NYTimes, the CBS News/New York
Times Poll (which The Times calls the New York Times/CBS News Poll),
which he directed until 1990.
Since 2003, Mitofsky, considered the "Father of Exit Polling" by many, led election-night analysis for the News Election Pool, providing exit-poll results and projections. (Mitofsky disliked the term "exit poll"; he preferred "Election Day survey".)
In exit polls on Election Day in 2004, Mitofsky's early exit polls found Senator John Kerry leading over President Bush, which led some in the news media to prepare for Senator Kerry becoming President Kerry. But such was too premature, as Mitofsky readily acknowledged, later discovering that the pro-Kerry exit-poll lead was caused by Republicans refusing to participate at a greater rate than Democrats in the exit polls. [Guess this shows the importance of not ignoring nonresponse.]
However, despite all this, Mitofsky will probably be best remembered by many for his efficient method of sampling telephone numbers using random-digit dialing (RDD), which is now known as the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method. In 1970, Mitofsky wrote an unpublished CBS News memorandum titled "Sampling of Telephone Households" that helped make his name a household word in public-opinion polling. Eight years later, Joseph Waksberg published an analogous paper, "Sampling Methods for Random Digit Dialing", in the prestigious Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), thus resulting in the Mitofsky-Waksberg Method appellation.
The Mitofsky-Waksberg Method of RDD is a cluster-sampling method
for sampling residential telephone numbers that greatly increases
the percentage of calls that do reach residential households. *David Bee





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




Monday, 31 August 2026

On This Day in Math - August 31

 



The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science. ... The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer's telescope or a hydrogen bomb.
~Sir Bernard Lovell


The 243rd day of the year; 243 is the largest three digit number that can be expressed as a fifth power (35).

243 is also the sum of five consecutive prime numbers (41 + 43 + 47 + 53 + 59).

Venus' day is 243 Earth days. *Derek Orr

243 is a Harshad number, divisible by the sum of it's digits, and every permutation of its digits is also. Students should try to figure out why.

I have heard it was Feynman who first noted that 1/243 = .00 4 11 5 22 6 33 7 44 8 55 9 67 0 78 1 89 3..  If you think of the zero in 67 0 78 as the zero of a ten, you can understand the 67, 78, etc


243, like all odd numbers, is the difference in consecutive squares, 122^2-121^2 = 243, because it is 3 mod6 it is also the difference of two squares of integers that differ by 3, 42^2 - 39^2. And with multiple 3's you get more differences, 18^2 - 9^2 

243 is a palindrome in base 8 (363)

3^3 + 6^3 = 243

On April 14, 2014,  Almost exactly a year after Yitang Zhang announced a proof (see April 17) that there are infinitely many pairs of prime numbers which differ by 70 million or less Terrance Tao's online group attack on the problem reduced the number to 243. Zhang's proof is the first to establish the existence of a finite bound for prime gaps, resolving a weak form of the twin prime conjecture. 


EVENTS


1682 Michael Rolle published an elegant solution to a difficult problem publicly posed by Ozanam: Find four integers the difference of any two of which is a perfect square as well as the sum of the first three will be a perfect square. This brought him public recognition. *VFR Ozanam believed that the smallest of the four numbers that would satisfy these properties would have at least 50 digits. Rolle found four numbers, all satisfying the conditions Ozanam posed, containing only seven digits in each of the four numbers. *Michel Rolle and His Method of Cascades, Christopher Washington  (If there is any record of the actual numbers in Rolle's solution, are if someone gas hacked it out by computer, I  would love to have a solution.)


He published his most important work Traité d'algèbre  in 1690 on the theory of equations. In this treatise, he invented the notation  for the th root of  and, as a consequence, it became the standard notation.  He is best known for Rolle's theorem (1691), and  is also the co-inventor in Europe of Gaussian elimination (1690).







1831, New London Bridge opened to traffic in London. In 1821, a committee was formed by Parliament to consider the poor condition of the existing centuries-old bridge. The arches had been badly damaged by the Great Freeze, so it was decided to build a new bridge. Building commenced under John Rennie in 1825, and completed in 1831, at the expense of the city. The bridge is composed of five arches, and built of Dartmoor granite. It was opened with great splendor by King William the fourth, accompanied by Queen Adelaide, and many of the members of the royal family, August 1st, 1831. In the 1960's it was auctioned and sold for $2,460,000 to Robert McCulloch who moved it to Havasu City, Arizona. The rebuilt London Bridge was completed and dedicated on 10 Oct 1971. *TIS



In 1842, the U.S. Naval Observatory was authorized by an act of Congress, one of the oldest scientific agencies in the U.S. James Melville Gilliss (1811-1865) is considered its founder, who in 1842 he secured the Congressional appropriation for the Depot of Charts and Instruments (est. 1830) to become the Naval Observatory. Its primary task was to care for the Navy's charts, navigational instruments and chronometers, which were calibrated by timing the transit of stars across the meridian. Initially located at Foggy Bottom, the observatory moved in 1893 to its present facility in Washington, DC. Gillis visited Europe to procure instruments, and the books that formed the core of the Naval Observatory Library. Matthew Fontaine Maury was the first director, followed by Gillis (1861-65)*TIS

The time ball was one of the first systems to enable the Observatory to disseminate time to support remote users. The ball was dropped daily (except Sundays) at the astronomically determined instant of Mean Solar Noon in Washington, which enabled the navigators of ships anchored in the Potomac River to check the rates of their chronometers. 

 Depicted is the time ball atop the dome of the 9.6-inch refractor telescope at the USNO's Foggy Bottom site, its home from 1844 until 1893.


*Navy.mil



1846 Le Verrier's announces his prediction of the location of the yet to be discovered planet Neptune. Using only mathematics and astronomical observations of the known planet Uranus and encouraged by physicist Arago, Director of the Paris Observatory, Le Verrier was intensely engaged for months in complex calculations to explain small but systematic discrepancies between Uranus's observed orbit and the one predicted from the laws of gravity of Newton. At the same time, but unknown to Le Verrier, similar calculations were made by John Couch Adams in England. Le Verrier announced his final predicted position for Uranus's unseen perturbing planet publicly to the French Academy on 31 August 1846, two days before Adams's final solution, which turned out to be 12° off the mark, was privately mailed to the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Le Verrier transmitted his own prediction by 18 September letter to Johann Galle of the Berlin Observatory. The letter arrived five days later, and the planet was found with the Berlin Fraunhofer refractor that same evening, 23 September 1846, by Galle and Heinrich d'Arrest within 1° of the predicted location near the boundary between Capricorn and Aquarius.

Some of the earliest recorded observations ever made through a telescope, Galileo Galilei's drawings on 28 December 1612 and 27 January 1613 contain plotted points that match up with what is now known to have been the positions of Neptune on those dates. On both occasions, Galileo seems to have mistaken Neptune for a fixed star when it appeared close—in conjunction—to Jupiter in the night sky. *Wik

statue of Le Verrier



1869 Mary Ward was an Anglo Irish amateur scientist who 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 world's first known fatal motor vehicle accident victim."

Ward was a keen amateur astronomer, sharing this interest with her cousin William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse. Parsons built the Leviathan of Parsonstown, a reflecting telescope with a six-foot mirror which remained the world's largest until 1917. *Wik



In 1886, the first U.S. earthquake on record with significant human consequence - the loss of some 100 lives - hit Charleston, S.C. and its massive effect spread through many eastern States. The epicenter was 15 miles northwest of Charleston, where 41 people died, 90 percent of the city's 6,956 brick buildings were damaged, and nearly all of its 14,000 chimneys were broken off at the roof. However, geologically the most severe earthquakes in U.S. history had occurred earlier in the century near the present town of New Madrid, Missouri (16 Dec 1811). The epicenter then was in a sparsely populated region and caused no known casualties, so the human consequences were relatively not significant, although the violent movement of the ground changed the course of the Mississippi River and created many new lakes.*TIS

Figure 7. Damage on Hayne Street, Charleston. (From Dutton, 1889.)  from U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY CIRCULAR 985


1895, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented in Germany his invention of the rigid airship, known as the Zeppelin. The overall cylindrical shape with rounded ends was covered with a cotton shell, framed with aluminium struts, wire-braced and contained a number of independent hydrogen balloons used for lift. Two or more seperate engines were suspended below for propulsion. The patent title, “Lenkbarer Luftfahrzug” (steerable air-cruising train), referred to a feature whereby additional cylindrical mid-segments could be connected together for a longer airship with greater carrying capacity, though none were ever made in this form. A similar U.S. patent was issued on 14 Mar 1899 for his “Navigable Balloon.” He made his first flight with the LZ-1 on 2 Jul 1900 over Lake Constance, Germany. 

Image: First LZ 1 Ascent 



1899 Cantor, in a letter to Dedekind, remarked that his “diagonal process” can be used to show that the power set of a set has more elements than the set itself. *VFR


1946 The New Yorker Magazine devoted its cover, and the entire issue to a ground breaking article by war correspondent John Hersey, Describing the actual after-effects of the Hiroshima bomb, exposing the suffering, and long-lasting effects of the bomb. The US military, US government, and General Groves had pushed the white-wash that there were no significant after-effects, and one spokesman described the bomb as a "nice way to die."




1950 G¨odel addressed the International Congress of Mathematicians, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on his work in relativity theory. *VFR  

At the International Congress at Toronto in 1924 it had been decided that at each international mathematical congress two gold medals should be awarded. Professor J C Fields, the Secretary of the 1924 Congress, presented a fund to subsidise these medals. They were first awarded in Oslo in 1936. The Committee to select the winners of the 1950 medals was: Professor Harald Bohr (Chairman), Professors L V Ahlfors, Karol Borsuk, Maurice Fréchet, W V D Hodge, A N Kolmogorov, D Kosambi, and Marston Morse. 

The medals in 1950 were awarded to Professor Laurent Schwartz of the University of Nancy and to Professor Atle Selberg of the Institute for Advanced Study. Professor Bohr gave an excellent résumé of the work of Schwartz on distributions and of the work of Selberg on the Riemann zeta function and his elementary proof of the celebrated prime number theorem.  

Harald Bohr, the brother of Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr, was a distinguished mathematician, and a medal winning member of the Danish Olympic football team in the 1908 Summer Olympics in London.  Brother Niels was a teammate with Harald on their local team, playing in goal.

Prof. Harald Bohr



1994 Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. finalized their merger. The two companies hoped to combine forces in creating powerful desktop publishing software, building on the field Aldus founder Paul Brainerd had created in 1985 with his PageMaker software. Pagemaker was one of three components to the desktop publishing revolution. The other two were the invention of Postscript by Adobe and the LaserWriter laser printer from Apple. All three were necessary to create a desktop publishing environment.




1994 David Charles Hahn, later called the "Radioactive Boy Scout" or the "Nuclear Boy Scout", attracted the attention of local police when he was stopped on another matter and they found material in his vehicle that troubled them and he warned that it was radioactive. The gift of a Chemistry set at age twelve sparked his interest, first to make nitroglycerin and then, at age seventeen, to build a homemade breeder nuclear reactor. A Scout in the Boy Scouts of America, Hahn conducted his experiments in secret in a backyard shed at his mother's house in Commerce Township, Michigan. His mother's property was cleaned up by the Environmental Protection Agency ten months later as a Superfund cleanup site. Hahn attained Eagle Scout rank shortly after his lab was dismantled. *R. R. Johnson, Romancing the Atom

Hahn's experiments inspired others to attempt similar feats, particularly Taylor Wilson, who at age 14 became the youngest person to produce nuclear fusion.  

After federal agents uncovered David Hahn’s makeshift nuclear reactor in his mother’s backyard shed—following law enforcement discovering radioactive material in his car trunk—a large-scale cleanup ensued. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the site a Superfund cleanup operation, dismantling the shed and shipping its contents in sealed barrels to a disposal facility in Utah, costing roughly $60,000 and serving as a radiological hazard mitigation effort. In the aftermath, Hahn earned the rank of Eagle Scout, despite initial objections tied to the dangerous experiment he had undertaken 

Life after the incident proved troubled for Hahn. He entered a deep depression—compounded by personal losses, including his mother’s suicide in 1996 and the breakup of his relationship—and eventually enlisted in the U.S. Navy and later the Marine Corps . In 2007 he was arrested for stealing smoke detectors from an apartment complex to extract americium, prompting fears authorities that he might be planning another nuclear experiment; he pleaded guilty to attempted larceny and received a 90-day sentence alongside psychiatric treatment .

Hahn struggled with mental illnes—repoedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia—and although his father later confirmed his 2016 death at age 39 was due to accidental overdose of alcohol, fentanyl, and diphenhydramine—and not radiation poisoning—he had suffered from severe health deterioration including facial sores long before his death.  



2012 A Blue Moon, or the second of two full moons in a single month. August 2012 will have a blue moon on August 31 The last month with two full moons was March of 2010 March 1 and March 30. The next month with a blue moon will be in January of 2018. Once in a Blue moon really isn’t all that often.
Their are alternate definitions for blue moon,f or instance the fourth moon in a quarter.  For that you have to wait until June of 2019. Tonight in 2023 will be the first Blue Moon since 2018.  The nexr blue moon will be on May 31, 2026. 



2012 "Japanese mathematician Shinichi Mochizuki posted four papers on the Internet.
The titles were inscrutable. The volume was daunting: 512 pages in total. The claim was audacious: he said he had proved the ABC Conjecture, a famed, beguilingly simple number theory problem that had stumped mathematicians for decades." From The Paradox of the Proof
by Caroline Chen
.





BIRTHS


1663 Guillaume Amontons (31 Aug 1663; 11 Oct 1705)French physicist, who developed the air thermometer - which relies on increase in volume of a gas (rather than a liquid) with temperature - and used it (1702) to measure change in temperature in terms of a proportional change in pressure. This observation led to the concept of absolute zero in the19th century. Deaf since childhood, Amontons worked on inventions for the deaf, such as the first telegraph, which relied on a telescope, light, and several stations to transmit information over large distances. Amontons' laws of friction, relied upon by engineers for 300 years, state that the frictional force on a body sliding over a surface is proportional to the load that presses them together and is also independent of the areas of the surfaces. *TIS



1821 Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (31 Aug 1821; 8 Sep 1894) was a German scientist who contributed much to physiology, optics, electrodynamics, mathematics, and meteorology, including the law of the conservation of energy (1847). He also developed thermodynamics, in particular introducing concept of free energy. In 1850, he measured the speed of a nerve impulse and, in 1851, invented the ophthalmoscope. He discovered the function of the cochlea in the inner ear and developed Thomas Young's theory of color vision (published 1856). His study of muscle action led him to formulate a much more accurate theory concerning the conservation of energy than earlier proposed by Julius Mayer and James Joule. *TIS



1837 Édouard Jean-Marie Stephan (31 August 1837 – 31 December 1923) was a French astronomer. His surname is sometimes spelled Stéphan in some literature, but this is apparently erroneous.  He was born in Sainte Pezenne (today one of the districts of the town of Niort) and attended the Ecole Normale Superieure, and graduated at the top of his class in 1862.

He was the director of the Marseille Observatory from 1864 to 1907 (until 1872 he was subordinate to Urbain le Verrier). In the early part of his career there, he had limited opportunities to do observations because he was preoccupied with improving the observatory. He discovered the asteroid 89 Julia in 1866. In 1867 he used the new telescope to observe a transit of Mercury. *Wik

The Marseilles Observatory had a new reflecting telescope built by Leon Foucault, the first to have a mirror ground from glass. *LH





1848 Emil Weyr
 (1 July 1848 in Prague, Bohemia (now Czech Republic) - 25 Jan 1894 in Vienna, Austria) His father Frantisek Weyr, was a professor of mathematics at a realschule (secondary school) in Prague from 1855. Emil was four years older than his brother Eduard Weyr who also became a famous mathematician. Emil attended the realschule in Prague where his father taught, then studied at the Prague Polytechnic from 1865 to 1868 where he was taught geometry by Vilém Fiedler.
He studied in Italy with Cremona and Casorati during the academic year 1870-71 returning to Prague where he continued to teach. In 1872 he was elected to be Head of the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists. In 1875 he was appointed as professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. He, together with his brother Eduard Weyr, were the main members of the Austrian geometric school. They were interested in descriptive geometry, then in projective geometry and their interests turned towards algebraic and synthetic methods in geometry. Among many works Emil Weyr published were Die Elemente der projectivischen Geometrie and Über die Geometrie der alten Aegypter.
Emil Weyr led the geometry school in Vienna throughout the 1880's up until his death. Together with Gustav von Escherich, Emil Weyr founded the important mathematical journal Monatshefte fuer Mathematik und Physik in 1890. The first volumes of the journal contain papers written by his brother Eduard. In 1891 Emil Weyr became one of the first 19 founder members of the Royal Czech Academy of Sciences. *SAU



1864 Robert Hardie (31 Aug 1864 in George Street, Edinburgh, Scotland - 9 March 1942 in Edinburgh, Scotland) graduated from Oxford and occupied various posts in the Philosophy department of Edinburgh University. He was a founder member of the EMS. *SAU


1880 Heinrich Franz Friedrich Tietze (August 31, 1880 – February 17, 1964) contributed to the foundations of general topology and developed important work on subdivisions of cell complexes. The bulk of this work was carried out after he took up the chair at Munich in 1925.*SAU He is remembered for the Tietze extension theorem. He also developed the Tietze transformations for group presentations, and was the first to pose the group isomorphism problem.
He was born in Schleinz, Austria and died in Munich, Germany. *Wik

A quote attributed to Tietze:  

"The story was told that the young Dirichlet had as a constant companion all his travels, like a devout man with his prayer book, an old, worn copy of the Disquisitiones Arithmeticae of Gauss."

Quoted in G Simmons Calculus Gems (New York 1992).





1884  George Alfred L´eon Sarton, (August 31, 1884; Ghent, Belgium - March 22, 1956, Cambridge, Massachusetts) ,historian of science and founder of the journal Isis. *VFR Sarton intended to complete an exhaustive nine volume history of science — which, during the preparation of the second volume, induced him to learn Arabic and travel around the Middle East inspecting original manuscripts of Islamic scientists — but at the time of his death only the first three volumes had been completed. (I. From Homer to Omar Khayyam. — II. From Rabbi Ben Ezra to Roger Bacon, pt. 1-2. — III. Science and learning in the fourteenth -century, pt. 1-2. 1927-48.) The project was inspired by his study of Leonardo da Vinci but the period of Leonardo's life was not reached before the death of Sarton.

He is considered the founder of the discipline of the history of science as an independent field of study.  

He established the journal Isis, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the University of Chicago Press. It covers the history of science, history of medicine, and the history of technology, as well as their cultural influences.*Wik




1885 Herbert Westren Turnbull (31 Aug 1885; 4 May 1961)English mathematician who made extensive and notable contributions to the study of algebraic invariants and concomitants of quadratics. Turnbull was also interested in the history of mathematics, writing The Mathematical Discoveries of Newton (1945), and began work on the Correspondence of Isaac Newton.*TIS



1913 Sir Alfred Charles Bernard Lovell (31 Aug 1913, ) is an English radio astronomer who established and directed (1951-81) Jodrell Bank Experimental Station, Cheshire, England, with (then) the world's largest steerable radiotelescope, now named after him Prior to WW II, he worked at Manchester University on cosmic ray research. During the war, he helped develop aircraft onboard radar systems. After the war, to escape interference to radar equipment from city trams, he moved his research to the University's more remote Jodrell Bank property. In 1946, he showed that radar echoes could detect optically invisible daytime meteor showers. He gained funding to build the 250-ft-diam. telescope. When completed in 1957, it was able to track the first artificial satellite, Sputnik I. *TIS

The Lovell Telescope at Jodrell Bank, *wik



1916 Robert Hanbury Brown (31 Aug 1916; 16 Jan 2002) British astronomer who was a pioneer in radar and observational astronomy. During and after WW II he worked with R.A. Watson-Watt and then E.G. Bowen to develop radar for uses in aerial combat. In the 1950s he applied this experience to radio astronomy, developing radio-telescope technology at Jodrell Bank Observatory and mapping stellar radio sources. He designed a radio interferometer capable of resolving radio stars while eliminating atmospheric distortion from the image (1952). With R.Q. Twiss, Brown applied this method to measuring the angular size of bright visible stars, thus developing the technique of intensity interferometry. They set up an intensity interferometer at Narrabri in New South Wales, Australia, for measurements of hot stars.*TIS





DEATHS


1721 John Keill (1 Dec 1671, 31 Aug 1721) Scottish mathematician and natural philosopher, who was a major proponent of Newton’s theories. He began his university education at Edinburgh under David Gregory, whom he followed to Oxford, where Keill lectured on Newton's work, and eventually became professor of astronomy. In his book, An Examination of Dr. Burnett's Theory of the Earth (1698), Keill applied Newtonian principles challenging Burnett's unsupportable speculations on Earth's formation. In 1701, Keill published Introductio ad Veram Physicam, which was the first series of experimental lectures and provided a clear and influential introduction to Isaac Newton’s Principia. He supported Newton against priority claims by Leibnitz for the invention of calculus.*TIS



1811 Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (12 November 1729 – 31 August 1811) was a French soldier and explorer who wrote a calculus book, but is better known for his other exploits.*SAU A contemporary of James Cook, he took part in the French and Indian War and the unsuccessful French attempt to defend Canada from Britain. He later gained fame for his expeditions to settle the Falkland Islands and his voyages into the Pacific Ocean.*Wik



1918 André-Louis Cholesky (October 15, 1875, August 31, 1918, ) was a French military officer and mathematician. He worked in geodesy and map-making, was involved in surveying in Crete and North Africa before World War I. But he is primarily remembered for the development of a matrix decomposition known as the Cholesky decomposition which he used in his surveying work. He served the French military as engineer officer and was killed in battle a few months before the end of World War I; his discovery was published posthumously by his fellow officer in the "Bulletin Géodésique". *Wik



1945 Stefan Banach died. (30 Mar 1892, 31 Aug 1945) Polish mathematician who founded modern functional analysis and helped develop the theory of topological vector spaces. In addition, he contributed to measure theory, integration, the theory of sets, and orthogonal series. In his dissertation, written in 1920, he defined axiomatically what today is called a Banach space. The idea was introduced by others at about the same time (for example Wiener introduced the notion but did not develop the theory). The name 'Banach space' was coined by Fréchet. Banach algebras were also named after him. The importance of Banach's contribution is that he developed a systematic theory of functional analysis, where before there had only been isolated results which were later seen to fit into the new theory. *TIS




1949 André-Louis Debierne (14 July 1874 – 31 August 1949) was a French chemist. He is often considered the discoverer of the element actinium, though H. W. Kirby disputed this in 1971 and gave credit instead to German chemist Friedrich Oskar Giesel.

Debierne studied at the elite École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris (ESPCI ParisTech).

He was a student of Charles Friedel, was a close friend of Pierre and Marie Curie and was associated with their work. In 1899, he discovered the radioactive element actinium, as a result of continuing the work with pitchblende that the Curies had initiated.

After the death of Pierre Curie in 1906, Debierne helped Marie Curie carry on and worked with her in teaching and research.

In 1911, he and Marie Curie prepared radium in metallic form in visible amounts. They did not keep it metallic, however. Having demonstrated the metal's existence as a matter of scientific curiosity, they reconverted it into compounds with which they might continue their researches.*Wik

When Pierre Curie was killed in a carriage accident in 1906, Marie became director of the laboratory, and Debierne assumed her former role as chef des travaux (chief of operations).  He had to manage all the students and interns, and he was apparently very good at the job.  An Englishwoman, Sybil Leslie, who was a graduate student in the lab from 1909 to 1911, had this to say about Debierne:  "He is a Frenchman of the most charming type, gentle, kind, and courteous in manner, and with a vast fund of patience which he certainly needs, for the advice offered in every difficulty is ‘Demandez à M. Debierne.’”  *Linda Hall Lib



1950 Subbayya Sivasankaranarayana Pillai (April 5, 1901 Nagercoil, Tamil Nadu - 31 August 1950, Cairo, Egypt) was an Nagercoil native Indian mathematician specializing in number theory. His contribution to Waring's problem was described in 1950 by K. S. Chandrasekharan as "almost certainly his best piece of work and one of the very best achievements in Indian Mathematics since Ramanujan". In number theory, a Pillai prime, named for him, is a prime number p for which there is an integer n > 0 such that the factorial of n is one less than a multiple of the prime, but the prime is not one more than a multiple of n. To put it algebraically, \(n! \equiv -1 \mod p\) but \(p \not\equiv 1 \mod n \). The first few Pillai primes are 23, 29, 59, 61, 67, 71, 79, 83, 109, 137, 139, 149, 193, ... (sequence A063980 in OEIS). *Wik



2005 Sir Joseph Rotblat (4 Nov 1908, 31 Aug 2005)Polish-born British physicist who is a leading critic of nuclear weaponry. Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences, "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and in the longer run to eliminate such arms," received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995. Forty years earlier, he and other scientists, with philosopher Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, published a manifesto calling on researchers to take responsibility for their work, particularly those working on the atomic bomb. This led to the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, first convened in 1957 in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. He was secretary-general (1957-73), and president (from 1988) of this London-based worldwide organization. *TIS



2010 Nigel John Kalton (June 20, 1946 – August 31, 2010) was a British-American mathematician, known for his contributions to functional analysis.

After studying mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, he received his PhD, which was awarded the Rayleigh Prize for research excellence, from Cambridge University in 1970. He then held positions at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Warwick, Swansea, University of Illinois, and Michigan State University, before becoming full professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, in 1979.

He received the Stefan Banach Medal from the Polish Academy of Sciences in 2005] A conference in honour of his 60th birthday was held in Miami University of Ohio in 2006. He died in Columbia, Missouri, aged 64.




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