Pat'sBlog

Friday, 13 June 2025

A Brief History of Blackboards and Slates

My career in education began with the use of chalk and a blackboard, transitioned into a room with only dry erase marker boards, and finished in a class with only an electronic smart board. Except for the few times I was inconvenience by a projector bulb picking a bad moment to go bad (and if a chalk board had been available, I would have been grateful) I loved the improvements that each transition brought to my ability to more effectively convey my ideas.
But for the period from 1800 to 2000 few things were as ubiquitous in a mathematics classroom as the blackboard. Today modern "white boards" may have taken their place in many institutions, or even an electronic version called a smart board; but board work still seems to be a part of the current classroom procedure. In a recent talk, Keith Devlin began by saying, "I step back from the (now largely metaphorical) blackboard and .. "
Whatever the present state of its demise, the classic chalkboard was so common a classroom presence that it was part of a frequently repeated gag sequence on the popular Simpsons cartoon series.(Not sure if the use shown above could be termed "educational")

It appears that the blackboard first came into American education around 1800. The National Museum of American History website on colonial education says,:

"Mathematics teachers with ties to England and France introduced blackboards into the United States around 1800. By the 1840s, these erasable surfaces were used for teaching a wide range of subjects in elementary schools, colleges, and academies. The Massachusetts educator William A. Alcott visited over 20,000 schoolhouses. “A blackboard, in every school house," he wrote, "is as indispensably necessary as a stove or fireplace."

James Pillan, a Scottish teacher and education reformer is often cited as the "inventor" of the blackboard, but this seems to be a misunderstanding based on a letter from Pillan which appeared in Jeremy Bentham's Chrestomathia (1815). It was entitled Successful application of the new system to language-learning, and dated 1814; it mentions the use of chalk and blackboard in teaching geography. But Pillan only began teaching in 1810, almost a decade after the board made its way to America, and as we shall see, literally hundreds of years too late to "invent" the chalkboard. He may, however, be the inventor of colored chalk. He is reported to have had a recipe with ground chalk, dyes and porridge.

Blackboards and slates were seemingly used well before any of the previous examples in musical study. In Composers at Work, author Jessie Ann Owens devotes several pages to the existence of several types of slate and wood "cartella" which were used to write out musical ideas. She describes the discoveries of these with five or ten line staves dating to the 16th century. Much larger wall size examples seem to have been used but have only been confirmed by iconography. The book includes an image from a woodcut by Hieronymus Holtzel of Nuremberg in 1501.

In America they seem to have very quickly become and essential part of daily school life. [From a web page of Prof. Rickey]

Perhaps no one method has so influenced the quality of the instruction of the cadets as the blackboard recitations. Major Thayer (Superintendent from 1817) insisted on this form, although old records show that it was introduced at West Point by Mr. George Baron, a civilian teacher, who in the autumn of 1801 gave to Cadet Swift "a specimen of his mode of teaching at the blackboard." Today it is the prominent feature in Academic instruction. [Quoted from Richardson 1917, p. 25] There is indication that the blackboard was used in a few schools in the US before it was used at USMA. See Charnel Anderson, Technology in American Education, 1650-1900, published by the
US Dept of Health, Education, and Welfare 1961(I have read this document and he credits Frenchman Claude Crozet with introducing the blackboard to the USMA and that he built and painted one to teach his classes. It may well be that after Baron left under a cloud in 1802, the method was not used by other teachers there until Crozet arrived in 1817.

Thayer had visited the Ecole Polytechnique in France to study their methods and was heavily influence by the "French" method when he became superintendent, even to the point of extending instruction in French so that the students could better master the French texts in advanced math.. I can't find an early example of the use of chalk or slate in France, but they seem to have been very much a part of the educational process by the time Galois threw an eraser at his examiner in July of 1829.

Galois was not the only one who reacted negatively to some of the innovations in education connected to the blackboard. At Yale, there were two "rebellions" in which students refused to accept some changes in testing practice. Here is a paragraph from Stories in Stone: Travels Through Urban Geology By David B. Williams.

This "rebellion" occurred in 1830, with 43 rebels expelled, including Andrew Calhoun, the son of John C Calhoun, and Alfred Stillé, who eventually did get a degree from Yale and another from U of Pennsylvania before he became a somewhat famous doctor, and one of the first to distinguish Typhus from Typhoid fever. His rebellious side wasn't limited to college however, as he refused to accept germ theory and laboratory medicine. There had been a similar event in 1825 at Yale, but those students recanted and were readmitted.

One of the earliest mentions of blackboards I have found has nothing to do with education, however. It seems that a custom developed in London's financial district in the later part of the 19th century to list the names of debtors on a blackboard to shame them into paying, and it seems to have persisted for a long time. Here is a description of the practice from Chronicles and Characters of the Stock Exchange
By John Francis, Daniel Defoe; printed in 1850.

From Wikipedia I learned that the Oxford English Dictionary provides a citation from 1739, to write "with Chalk on a black-Board". I know it is common in England for Pubs to advertise with a blackboard outside their doors on the sidewalk, but have no idea how far back this idea originated.

Prior to the use of blackboards students learned their early lessons from an object called a hornbook. Here is a description of one from the Blackwell Museum webpage at Northern Illinois University

Paper was pretty expensive once and hornbooks were made so children could learn to read without using a lot of paper. A hornbook was usually a small, wooden paddle with just one sheet of paper glued to it. But because that paper was so expensive, parents and teachers wanted to protect it. So they covered the paper with a very thin piece of cow's horn. The piece of cow's horn was so thin, you could see right through it. That's why these odd books were called "hornbooks."

Hornbooks seem to have been totally imported from England into the American Colonies, and almost all had a cross on the upper left, with the Lord's Prayer at bottom. The American Revolution seemed to have almost completely eliminated the import of Hornbooks in rejection of all things English at the time. The education conversion to the blackboard seems to have finished the hornbooks very quickly afterward judging from this quote from the OED about Hornbooks, (a1842 HONE in A. W. Tuer Hist. Horn-Bk. I. i. 7) " A large wholesale dealer in..school requisites recollects that the last order he received for Horn-books came from the country, about the year 1799. From that time the demand wholly ceased..In the course of sixty years, he and his predecessors in business had executed orders for several millions of Horn-books".
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Early blackboards were usually made of wood, (but some may have been made of paper mache') and painted with many coats as true slate boards were very expensive. Schools purchased large pots of "slate paint" for regular repainting of the boards. The Earliest quotes from the OED date to 1823.

1823 PILLANS Contrib. Cause Educ. A large black board served my purpose. On it I wrote in chalk. 1835 Musical Libr. Supp., Aug. 77 The assistant wrote down the words..on a blackboard. 1846 Rep. Inspect. Schools I. 147 The uses of the black board are not yet fully developed.

However under "slates" I found other earlier uses. In "1698 FRYER Acc. E. India & P. 112 A Board plastered over, which with Cotton they wipe out, when full, as we do from Slates or Table-Books" which indicates that boards covered with Plaster or other materials were used to write upon much earlier than the earliest use of "blackboards" in classrooms.

Another early use of slates is given in David E. Smith's Rara arithmetica of a book printed in 1483 in Padua of the arithmetic of Prosdocimo containing a mention of the use of a slate. This led Smith to conclude that at this time the merchants would actually erase and replace numbers (as was originally done by the Hindu mathematicians working in their sand trays) in division rather than showing the cross-outs that distinguish the galley method of division after it was adopted to use on paper.

The very earliest claim for slates I have found is of use in the 11th century. A work called Alberuni's India (Tarikh Al-Hind), "They use black tablets for the children in the schools, and write upon them along the long side, not the broadside, writing with a white material from the left to the right."

Chalkboards became so important for teaching that teachers in the 19th century sometimes went to extremes to create one. In Glen Allen, Virginia; a school is named for Elizabeth Holladay, a pioneer teacher who started the first public school in the Glen Allen area of Henrico County at her home in 1886. On a note about the history of the school it says she had, "Black oilcloth tacked to another part of the shipping crate served as a blackboard."

The slate was used even after paper became a relatively commonplace item. Many school histories report the use of slates into the 20th Century. This use may have been significant. The Binney & Smith company, better known to many for their creation of the Crayola Crayon, began the production of slate pencils, for writing on slate, in the year 1900. As an aside, they also won a Gold Medal at the St. Louis Fair.

A local museum in Roxbury, New Zealand has Binney and Smith Slates and Pencils displayed in a school started in 1872. I am searching for records of cost of slates, lead pencils, paper and such in 1800-1920 period, and any help is appreciated. These slate pencils were solid cylinders of lead or stone.

An add for an "Andrews Quiet Drawing Slate'" from 1870's was priced at 40 cents.

The same museum also has a display of wooden slate pencils, which look like regular lead pencils, but with lead filing.

Slate pencils prior to 1800 were known as Dutch Pencils in England, but increased slate mining in Wales around 1800 led to more domestic production, and use of slates, and slate pencils in England. In the journal Australian Historical Archaeology, (2005) Peter Davies reports that in the excavation of a site called Henry Mill that was only operational from 1904 until around 1930 they found 30 slate pencils, remnants of four slates, and a single graphite pencil core.

The National Museum of American has a pastel of “School Boy with Slate.” from 1822.

In "Slates Away!": Penmanship in Queensland, Australia, John Elkins, who started primary school in 1945, writes that he used slates commonly until around the third year of school.

I think in Prep 1 that we had some paper to write on with pencils, but my memory of the routine use of slates is much more vivid. Each slate was framed in wood and one side was inscribed with lines to guide the limits for the upper and lower extremities of letters. The slate "pencils" were made of some pale gray mineral softer than slate which had been milled into cylinders some one-eighth of an inch in diameter and inserted into metal holders so that about an inch protruded.
Each student was equipped with a small tobacco tin in which was kept a damp sponge or cloth to erase the marks. Sharpening slate pencils was a regular task. We rubbed them on any suitable brick or concrete surface in the school yard. Teachers also kept a good supply of spares, all writing materials and books being provided by the school. It is possible that the retention of slates stemmed from the political imperative that public education should be free.

Slates were advertised in newspapers in the US as early as 1737. Slates, as indicated above, show up as commonplace in quotes from the OED as early as 1698. It seems they may have been used for some artistic or educational purposes as early as the end of the 15th Century. In the famous painting of Luca Pacioli,
Ritratto di Frà Luca Pacioli, Pacioli is shown drawing on a slate to copy an example from Euclid in the open book before him. The closed book, which has the dodecahedron upon it, is supposedly Pacioli's Somma di aritmetica which was written in 1494.
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In the Dec 2003 issue of Paradigm, the Journal of the Textbook Colloquium, is an article by Nigel Hall titled, "The role of the slate in Lancasterian schools as evidenced by their manuals and handbooks". A couple of snips from the article appear below:

The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first citation for slate being used as a writing tool a quotation from Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe written about 1391. Whether usage began around this time or had begun much earlier is unknown, although as a technology it shared many characteristics with the wax tablet, used extensively from before the time of the Greeks until the 1600s in Europe, and even surviving in some usages until the early twentieth century (Lalou, 1989). Knowledge of the use of slate for writing after Chaucer is limited until one reaches the second half of the eighteenth century. The mathematician Digges (1591) refers to writing on slates and in the new colony of America an inventory (Plymouth Colony Archive, n.d.) made on 24 October 1633 of the possessions of the recently deceased Godbert and Zarah, noted among many items, ‘A writing table of slate’ (table here being a tablet of slate).

Hall goes on to suggest that, in fact, the use of slates may not have been very common in England until the end of the 18th Century because reading (beginning with hornbooks) was much more commonly taught than writing. He credits Lancaster for the promotion of slates for writing and math, but suggests that the slate was a principal element in the "monotorial system" in which more advanced students taught the lower group. An illustration showing the use of slates (now broken) and the student monitor below is taken from the article. [See the full article here]

The blackboard was extended to some specialty uses as well. A "Slated Globe" was advertised in The New York Teacher, and the American Educational Monthly, Volume 6 in 1869 for use in spherical geometry and geography classes. A four inch diameter globe sold for $1.50

I also recently found this image on a Wikipedia article about Benjamin Pierce. He seems to be standing beside a stand with a spherical blackboard resting on it, but can not be sure that is what it was.

In an 1899 article for the proceedings of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, Professor Arthur E Haynes of the University of Minnesota had an article for, "The Mounting and Use of a Spherical Blackboard, which included this image.

Recently, J F Ptak posted an article on his Science Books blog from Scientific American, (Sep 13, 1890) about a pen-tip eraser for slate pens meant to be wetted to erase the marks on a slate by the pen. The article described the invention with credit to the inventor, Mrs Emma C. Hudson

On This Day in Math - June 13

Mathematics is not a careful march
down a well-cleared highway,
but a journey into a strange wilderness,
where the explorers often get lost.
Rigour should be a signal to the historian
that the maps have been made,
and the real explorers have gone elsewhere.

~W.S. Anglin

The 164th day of the year; With the ordered digits of 164 we can form 3 2-digits numbers. Those 3 numbers ± 3 are all prime (16 + 3 = 19, 16 - 3 = 13, 14 + 3 = 17, 14 - 3 = 11, 64 + 3 = 67, 64 - 3 = 61). *Prime Curios

In base 10, 164 is the smallest number that can be expressed as a concatenation of two squares in two different ways: as 1 + 64 or 16 + 4

A scrabble board has 225 squares on the board, many are special squares with double letter or double word notation, but 164 have nothing.

164 is CLXIV in Roman Numerals, using every symbol 100 or below once each.

There are 164 ways to place 5 nonattacking queens on a 5 by 8 board. */derektionary.webs.com/april-june

164 is a palindrome in base 3 (20002) or 2*3^4 + 2

Speaking of Pythagorean triangles, T(164) (the 164th triangular number) is the hypotenuse of a right

triangle with all triangular numbers for its side lengths. The legs of the triangle are T(132) and T (143). $8778^2 + 10296^2 = 13530^2$

EVENTS

1611 a publication on the newly discovered phenomenon of sunspots was dedicated. Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione. ("Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun"). This first publication on such observations, was the work of Johannes Fabricius, a Dutch astronomer who was among the first ever to observe sunspots through a telescope. On 9 Mar 1611, at dawn, Johannes had used his telescope to view the rising sun and had seen several dark spots on it. He called his father to investigate this new phenomenon with him. The brightness of the Sun's center was very painful, and the two quickly switched to a projection method by means of a camera obscura.

1676 Newton sent Oldenburg the “Epistola prior” for transmission to Leibniz. Among other things it contained the ﬁrst statement of the binomial theorem for negative and fractional exponents. *VFR This may be the first use of fractional and negative exponents in the modern sense (cajori, 308 pgs 370-371)
The idea and limited use had been mentioned by Viete, but in a rhetorical manner. Wallis, twenty years earlier, had mentioned both negative and fractional "indices" and gives an example using 1/sqrt(2) has index (-1/2). On October 24 of the same year, Newton would use irrational exponents in a letter to Oldenburg.

Michael Stifel introduced the term exponent in 1544 in Arithmetica integra. His work with exponents only included numbers that had a base of 2. He also used negative exponents. Therefore he discovered the geometric sequence: ...-1/8, -1/4, -1/2, 1, 2, 4, 8 ...

Nicole Oresme (1323-1382) used exponents but without raised numbers, and he used fractional exponent idea in study of chords.

1699 John Wallis writes a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury suggesting that switching from the Julian to Gregorian calendar might be a mistake and expressing his fear that, "..if we go to alter that, it will be attended with a greater mischief than the present inconvenience. "
In a postscript he comments that Lock's suggestion of omitting the Feb 29 from eleven consecutive leap years would lead to ".. a confusion for four and forty years together, wherein we should agree neither with the old nor with the new account." *Philosophical Transactions, 1699 21, 343-354
In accordance with a 1750 act of Parliament, England and its colonies changed calendars in 1752. *Wik

In 1755, William Hogarth's painting, "An Election Entertainment", refers to the 1754 election and shows protesters out the window, and a stolen Tory campaign banner "Give us back our eleven days". This led many historians to write about mass protests against the act. Most historians now dismiss the whole event as urban legend.

*Historic U K

1771 Lagrange presented, to the Berlin Academy, the ﬁrst proof of Wilson’s theorem (n is prime iff n divides (n − 1)! + 1). Edward Waring published the theorem in 1770, but Leibniz knew it previously . *VFR

This theorem was stated by Ibn al-Haytham around 1000 CE. The Wilson of the name was John Wilson (1741-1793), an English mathematician and judge. He was a student of Edward Waring and the Senior Wrangler in 1761. This means that he was the best of all the First Class students to graduate after taking the Mathematical Tripos. Wilson was elected a Fellow of Peterhouse and he taught mathematics at Cambridge with great skill, quickly gaining an outstanding reputation for himself. However, he was not to continue in the world of university teaching, for in 1766 he was called to the bar having begun a legal career on 22 January 1763 when he was admitted to the Middle Temple. It was a highly successful career, too.

John Wilson

1865 Only three months before his death, Sir William Rowan Hamilton received a letter from the American astronomer, Benjamin Gould, informing him that the newly created U.S. National Academy of Sciences had elected him ﬁrst on its list of Foreign Associates, thereby signifying that the academy considered him the greatest living scientist. [T. L. Hawkins, Hamilton, p. xv] *VFR

1878 Arthur Cayley addresses the London Mathematical Society brings the four color theorem to a wider audience when printed in the Society’s proceedings (Dave Richeson, Euler’s Gem, pg 132)

The conjecture was first proposed in 1852 when Francis Guthrie, while trying to color the map of counties of England, noticed that only four different colors were needed. At the time, Guthrie's brother, Fredrick, was a student of Augustus De Morgan at University College. Francis inquired with Fredrick regarding it, who then took it to De Morgan (Francis Guthrie graduated later in 1852, and later became a professor of mathematics in South Africa). According to De Morgan:"A student of mine [Guthrie] asked me to day to give him a reason for a fact which I did not know was a fact — and do not yet. He says that if a figure be any how divided and the compartments differently coloured so that figures with any portion of common boundary line are differently coloured — four colours may be wanted but not more — the following is his case in which four colours are wanted. Query cannot a necessity for five or more be invented… *Wik

Others have suggested that Mobius presented the challenge of drawing a map requiring five colors as early as 1840.

It was the first major theorem to be proved using a computer. Initially, this proof was not accepted by all mathematicians because the computer-assisted proof was infeasible for a human to check by hand.The proof has gained wide acceptance since then, although some doubters remain. The four color theorem was proved in 1976 by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken.

Letter of De Morgan to William Rowan Hamilton, 23 Oct. 1852 *Wik

1878 Thomas Craig received his Ph.D. at The Johns Hopkins University under the direction of J. J. Sylvester for a dissertation on “The representation of one surface upon another; and on some points in the theory of the curvature of surfaces.” He was one of the four to receive his degree there (the philosopher Josiah Royce was another). These were the ﬁrst Ph.D.s oﬀered by Johns Hopkins, a university founded in 1876 to advance graduate education. *VFR

Craig and George Bruce Halsted were the first Hopkins Fellows in mathematics. James Joseph Sylvester had been invited to lead a graduate program in mathematics but would only be doing that. Craig was needed to teach differential calculus and integral calculus. Craig received his Ph.D. in 1878.

1893, Bertha (Lamme) Feicht earned a degree in mechanical engineering with a specialty in electrical engineering from Ohio State University. Many refer to her as the first Woman Engineering graduate outside of civil engineering in the US.
During her 12 years at Westinghouse, she worked with the company’s best and brightest, including her pioneering brother, Benjamin, and eventual husband, Russell Feicht.
Benjamin put himself on the map by helping to design the electrical system for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He later worked on the hydroelectric dam on the Niagara River, helping to solve the practical problems of using electric power to light the city of Buffalo.
A highlight for Russell Feicht was designing the then huge 2,000-horsepower motor Westinghouse displayed at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Both men both served as the company’s chief engineer.
But little record survives about Bertha’s own work, which “Women in Science” says is normal, if not good. *Springfield News-Sun

1959 France issued a stamp picturing Jean Le Rond d’Alembert.
D'ALEMBERT (1717 1783) was abandoned by his parents on the steps of Saint Jean le Rond, which was the baptistery of Notre-Dame. Foster parents were found and he was christened with the name of the saint of the church. When he became famous, his mother attempted to reclaim him, but he rejected her.

1983 Pioneer 10, launched 3 March 1972, leaves the solar system, being the ﬁrst man-made object to do so. It has traveled over three billion miles. (Students, estimate uts current distance?)

1994 Lynchburg College Professor Thomas Nicely, discovers a flaw in the Pentium chip from Intel while trying to calculate Brun's constant,(The sum of the reciprocals of all the twin primes, 1/3+1/5+1/7+1/11+1/13.... which converges to about 1.902.)
The Pentium chip occasionally gave wrong answers to a floating-point (decimal) division calculations due to errors in five entries in a lookup table on the chip. Intel spent millions of dollars replacing the faulty chips.
Nicely first noticed some inconsistencies in the calculations on June 13, 1994 shortly after adding a Pentium system to his group of computers, but was unable to eliminate other factors until October 19, 1994. On October 24, 1994 he reported the issue to Intel. According to Nicely, his contact person at Intel later admitted that Intel had been aware of the problem since May 1994, when the flaw was discovered during testing of the FPU for its new P6 core, first used in the Pentium Pro. *Wik

Nicely died Sept. 11, 2019.

BIRTHS

1555 Giovanni Antonio Magini (in Latin, Maginus) (June 13, 1555; Padua, Italy – February 11, 1617; Bologna, Italy) was an Italian astronomer, astrologer, cartographer, and mathematician.
Dedicating himself to astronomy, in 1582 he wrote Ephemerides coelestium motuum, translated into Italian the following year.
In 1588 he was chosen over Galileo Galilei to occupy the chair of mathematics at the University of Bologna after the death of Egnatio Danti. He died in .
Magini supported a geocentric system of the world, in preference to Copernicus's heliocentric system. Magini devised his own planetary theory, in preference to other existing ones. The Maginian System consisted of eleven rotating spheres, which he described in his Novæ cœlestium orbium theoricæ congruentes cum observationibus N. Copernici (Venice, 1589).
In his De Planis Triangulis (1592), he described the use of quadrants in surveying and astronomy. In 1592 Magini published Tabula tetragonica, and in 1606 devised extremely accurate trigonometric tables. He also worked on the geometry of the sphere and applications of trigonometry, for which he invented calculating devices. He also worked on the problem of mirrors and published on the theory of concave spherical mirrors.
He also published a commentary on Ptolemy’s Geographia (Cologne, 1596).
As a cartographer, his life's work was the preparation of Italia or the Atlante geografico d'Italia (Geographic Atlas of Italy), printed posthumously by Magini's son in 1620. This was intended to include maps of every Italian region with exact nomenclature and historical notes. A major project, its production (begun in 1594) proved expensive and Magini assumed various additional posts in order to fund it, including becoming tutor in mathematics to the sons of Vincenzo I of Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, a major patron of the arts and sciences. He also served as court astrologer. The Duke of Mantua, to whom the atlas is dedicated, assisted him with this project and allowed for maps of the various states of Italy to be brought to Magini. The governments of Messina and Genoa also assisted Magini financially in this project. Magini did not do any of the mapping himself.
He was also interested in pursuits which today would be considered pseudoscientific. A strong supporter of astrology, he defended its use in medicine in his De astrologica ratione (Venice, 1607). Magini collaborated closely with Valentine Naibod, and in this book he published De annui temporis mensura in Directionibus and De Directionibus from Naibod's unfinished manuscript Claudii Ptolemaei Quadripartitae Constructionis Apotelesmata Commentarius novus et Eiusdem Conversio nova. He was also interested in metoposcopy.
He corresponded with Tycho Brahe, Clavius, Abraham Ortelius, and Johann Kepler.
*Wik

1580 Willebrord Snellius (Willebrord Snel van Royen) (13 June 1580; Leiden, Netherlands – 30 October 1626, Leiden) was a Dutch astronomer and mathematician, known in the English-speaking world as Snell. In the west, especially the English speaking countries, his name has been attached to the law of refraction of light for several centuries, but it is now known that this law was first discovered by Ibn Sahl in 984. The same law was also investigated by Ptolemy and in the Middle Ages by Witelo, but due to lack of adequate mathematical instruments (trigonometric functions) their results were saved as tables, not functions.
Snell also improved the classical method of calculating approximate values of π by polygons which he published in Cyclometricus (1621). Using his method 96 sided polygons gives π correct to 7 places while the classical method yields only 2 places. Van Ceulen's 35 places could be found with polygons of 230 sides rather than 262. In fact Van Ceulen's 35 places of π appear in print for the first time in this book by Snell.
*Wik *SAU

1773 Thomas Young (13 June 1773 – 10 May 1829) was an English polymath. He is famous for having partly deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs (specifically the Rosetta Stone) before Jean-François Champollion eventually expanded on his work. He was admired by, among others, Herschel and Einstein.
Young made notable scientific contributions to the fields of vision, light, solid mechanics, energy, physiology, language, musical harmony and Egyptology.*Wik .. For someone as talented as Young, he received relatively few honours. The one which pleased him most was election as a foreign member of the Institute in Paris in 1827. When Young died two years later, Arago gave the eulogy at the Institute saying:-
The death of Young in his own country attracted but little regard. *SAU

I recently learned that Young was also the first Secretary of the Board of Longitude, and also served as Superintendent of the Nautical Almanac" thanks to * Sophie Waring @atinybitwaring

Experiments with light and color, hand-colored engraving in A Course of Lectures on Natural Philosophy and the Mechanical Arts, vol. 1, plate 30, 1807, by Thomas Young (Linda Hall Library)

1779 Joseph Clement, an English machinist, was born June 13, 1779. Clement was one of a remarkable group of precision tool makers who developed their craft in the first few decades of the 19th century . Joseph Bramah was one of those, as well as Henry Maudslay, and Clement trained with both of them before setting out on his own in 1817. He specialized in designing and building lathes, and he won several awards from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for improved precision lathes and chucks. He was one of the first to lobby for standards in screw threads and pitch, so that machine screws from one workshop would work in machinery manufactured by other firms. One of his screw-cutting lathes survives in the Science Museum in London . Clement was also renowned for a massive metal planing machine that he invented, which would prune metal from objects no matter their shape, and which could handle material of great size. He published some of the details of the "Great Planer" in the Transactions of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts in 1833 , a journal that we have in our serials collection.

Because of Clement's skill at precision manufacture, Charles Babbage sought him out in the early 1820s when he was designing a calculating machine, the first Difference Engine. Clement worked on the project for a number of years and produced thousands of meticulously-made parts, some of which were assembled in 1833 into the working fragment of Difference Engine no. 1 that is still on display in the Science Museum in London . The detail photos reveal just how good Clement was at his craft. But Babbage and Clement had a falling out soon thereafter – Babbage thought Clement was enriching his workshop with tools made at Babbage's expense – and the two parted ways. Difference Engine no. 1 was not completed in the lifetime of either man, although Babbage’s son assembled a more complete model in the 1870s, from Clement’s unused parts. *Linda Hall Org

*Science Museum, London

1806 George Parker Bidder (13 June 1806 – 20 September 1878) was an English engineer and calculating prodigy. Born in the town of Moretonhampstead, Devon, England, he displayed a natural skill at calculation from an early age. In childhood, his father, William Bidder, a stonemason, exhibited him as a "calculating boy", first in local fairs up to the age of six, and later around the country. In this way his talent was turned to profitable account, but his general education was in danger of being completely neglected.

Still many of those who saw him developed an interest in his education, a notable example being Sir John Herschel. His interest led him to arrange it so George could be sent to school in Camberwell. There he did not remain long, being removed by his father, who wished to exhibit him again, but he was saved from this misfortune and enabled to attend classes at the University of Edinburgh, largely through the kindness of Sir Henry Jardine,
On leaving college in 1824 he received a post in the ordnance survey, but gradually drifted into engineering work.
Bidder died at Dartmouth, Devon and was buried at Stoke Fleming.
His son, George Parker Bidder, Jr. (1836–1896), who inherited much of his father's calculating power, was a successful parliamentary counsel and an authority on cryptography. His grandson, also named George Parker Bidder, became a marine biologist and president of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1945. *Wik

1831 James Clerk Maxwell (13 June 1831 – 5 November 1879) Scottish physicist and mathematician. Maxwell's researches united electricity and magnetism into the concept of the electro-magnetic field. In London, around 1862, Maxwell calculated that the speed of propagation of an electromagnetic field is approximately that of the speed of light. He proposed that the phenomenon of light is therefore an electromagnetic phenomenon. The four partial differential equations, now known as Maxwell's equations, first appeared in fully developed form in Electricity and Magnetism (1873). He died relatively young; some of the theories he advanced in physics were only conclusively proved long after his death. Maxwell's ideas also paved the way for Einstein's special theory of relativity and the quantum theory. *TIS My favorite anecdote about Maxwell: It is said that on his arrival at Cambridge University he was informed that there would be a compulsory 6 a.m. church service. After a moment of thought he replied, "Aye, I suppose I could stay up that late. "

Statue of James Clerk Maxwell by Alexander Stoddart, unveiled in Edinburgh Square, 2008 (*Wikimedia commons)

1871 Ernst Steinitz (13 June 1871 – 29 September 1928) In 1910 he gave a general abstract deﬁnition of a ﬁeld. He is responsible for introducing a number of concepts into the Theory of Fields, including prime subﬁelds, separable elements, and perfect ﬁelds. *VFR

In 1910 Steinitz published the very influential paper Algebraische Theorie der Körper (German: Algebraic Theory of Fields, Crelle's Journal). In this paper he axiomatically studies the properties of fields and defines important concepts like prime field, perfect field and the transcendence degree of a field extension, and also normal and separable extensions (the latter he called algebraic extensions of the first kind). Besides numerous, today standard, results in field theory, he proved that every field has an (essentially unique) algebraic closure and a theorem, which characterizes the existence of primitive elements of a field extension in terms of its intermediate fields. Bourbaki called this article "a basic paper which may be considered as having given rise to the current conception of Algebra".

1868 Wallace Clement Ware Sabine (June 13, 1868, Richwood, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan 10, 1919, Cambridge, Mass.) was a U.S. physicist who founded the science of architectural acoustics. After experimenting in the Fogg lecture room at Harvard, to investigate the effect of absorption on the reverberation time, on 29 of October 1898 he discovered the type of relation between these quantities. The duration T of the residual sound to decay below the audible intensity, starting from a 1,000,000 times higher initial intensity is given by: T = 0.161 V/A (V=room volume in m³, A=total absorption in m²). The first auditorium Sabine designed applying his new insight in acoustics, was the new Boston Music Hall, formally opened on 15 Oct 1900. Now known as the Symphony Hall, and still considered one of the world's three finest concert halls.*TIS

1872 Jessie Chrystal MacMillan (13 June 1872 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 21 September 1937 in Edinburgh, Scotland) was the first female science graduate at Edinburgh University and the first female honors graduate in Mathematics. She went on to study at Berlin. She was the first woman to plead a case before the House of Lords. She became active in the Women's Suffrage Movement and went on to become a lawyer.
A Millennial plaque is at Kings Buildings (West Mains Road), in Edinburgh. It reads:

In honour of
JESSIE CHRYSTAL MACMILLAN
1872-1937
Suffragist, founder of Women's International League for Peace and Freedom,
first woman science graduate of the University (1896).

*SAU

1876 William Sealy Gosset(13 June 1876; Canterbury, England- 16 October 1937 in Beaconsfield, England)
Gosset was the eldest son of Agnes Sealy Vidal and Colonel Frederic Gosset who came from Watlington in Oxfordshire. William was educated at Winchester, where his favourite hobby was shooting, then entered New College Oxford where he studied chemistry and mathematics. While there he studied under Airy. He obtained a First Class degree in both subjects, being awarded his mathematics degree in 1897 and his chemistry degree two years later.
Gosset obtained a post as a chemist with Arthur Guinness Son and Company in 1899. Working in the Guinness brewery in Dublin he did important work on statistics. In 1905 he contacted Karl Pearson and arranged to go to London to study at Pearson's laboratory, the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, at University College in session 1906-07. At this time he worked on the Poisson limit to the binomial and the sampling distribution of the mean, standard deviation, and correlation coefficient. He later published three important papers on the work he had undertaken during this year working in Pearson's laboratory.
Many people are familiar with the name "Student" but not with the name Gosset. In fact Gosset wrote under the name "Student" which explains why his name may be less well known than his important results in statistics. He invented the t-test to handle small samples for quality control in brewing. Gosset discovered the form of the t distribution by a combination of mathematical and empirical work with random numbers, an early application of the Monte-Carlo method.

McMullen says:-
To many in the statistical world "Student" was regarded as a statistical advisor to Guinness's brewery, to others he appeared to be a brewer devoting his spare time to statistics. ... though there is some truth in both these ideas they miss the central point, which was the intimate connection between his statistical research and the practical problems on which he was engaged. ... "Student" did a very large quantity of ordinary routine as well as his statistical work in the brewery, and all that in addition to consultative statistical work and to preparing his various published papers.

From 1922 he acquired a statistical assistant at the brewery, and he slowly built up a small statistics department which he ran until 1934.
Gosset certainly did not work in isolation. He corresponded with a large number of statisticians and he often visited his father in Watlington in England and on these occasions he would visit University College, London, and the Rothamsted Agricultural Experiment Station. He would discuss statistical problems with Fisher, Neyman and Pearson. *SAU

1911 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

Alvarez with a magnetic monopole detector in 1969

1911 Erwin Wilhelm Müller (or Mueller) (June 13, 1911 – May 17, 1977) was a German physicist who invented the Field Emission Electron Microscope (FEEM), the Field Ion Microscope (FIM), and the Atom-Probe Field Ion Microscope. He and his student, Kanwar Bahadur, were the first people to experimentally observe atoms.

Images of the atomic structures of tungsten were first published in 1951 in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. In FIM, a voltage of about 10kV is applied to a sharp metal tip, cooled to below 50 kelvin in a low-pressure helium gas atmosphere. Gas atoms are ionized by the strong electric field in the vicinity of the tip and repelled perpendicular to the tip surface. A detector images the spatial distribution of these ions giving a magnification of the curvature of the surface.

1906 Bruno de Finetti (13 June 1906 - 20 July 1985) De Finetti was born in Innsbruck, Austria, and was a big contributor to subjective/personal probability and Bayesian inference along with L.J. ("Jimmie") Savage (1917-1971), both of whom are discussed briefly in Chapter 13 ("The Bayesian Heresy") of David Salsburg's book The Lady Tasting Tea and in Salsburg's concluding Chapter 29.*David Bee

1928 John Forbes Nash, Jr ( June 13, 1928-May 23, 2015) is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in market economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the later part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.
Nash is the subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind. The film, loosely based on the biography of the same name, focuses on Nash's mathematical genius and struggle with paranoid schizophrenia*Wik

1942 Homer Alfred Neal, (June 13, 1942 in Franklin, Kentucky; May 23, 2018 Ann Arbor, Michigan) was an African-American particle physicist and a distinguished professor at the University of Michigan. Neal was President of the American Physical Society in 2016. He was also a board member of Ford Motor Company, a council member of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and a director of the Richard Lounsbery Foundation. Neal was the interim President of the University of Michigan in 1996. Neal's research group works as part of the ATLAS experiment hosted at CERN in Geneva.

He received his B.S. in Physics from Indiana University in 1961, and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1966. From 1976 to 1981, Neal was Dean for Research and Graduate Development at Indiana University, and from 1981 to 1986 he was provost at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He held Honorary Doctorates from Indiana University, Michigan State University, and Notre Dame University.

On 14 Nov 2009, Dr. Neal described the discoveries of spin at the University of Michigan (UM) with a presentation: History of Spin at Michigan *Wik

1966 Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman (13 June 1966, - ) is a Russian mathematician who has made landmark contributions to Riemannian geometry and geometric topology.
In 1994, Perelman proved the soul conjecture. In 2003, he proved Thurston's geometrization conjecture. This consequently solved in the affirmative the Poincaré conjecture, posed in 1904, which before its solution was viewed as one of the most important and difficult open problems in topology.
In August 2006, Perelman was awarded the Fields Medal for "his contributions to geometry and his revolutionary insights into the analytical and geometric structure of the Ricci flow." Perelman declined to accept the award or to appear at the congress, stating: "I'm not interested in money or fame, I don't want to be on display like an animal in a zoo." On 22 December 2006, the journal Science recognized Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture as the scientific "Breakthrough of the Year", the first such recognition in the area of mathematics.
On 18 March 2010, it was announced that he had met the criteria to receive the first Clay Millennium Prize for resolution of the Poincaré conjecture. On 1 July 2010, he turned down the prize of one million dollars, saying that he considers his contribution to proving the Poincaré conjecture to be no greater than that of Richard Hamilton, who introduced the theory of Ricci flow with the aim of attacking the geometrization conjecture. *Wik

DEATHS

1882 William Shanks (25 Jan 1812; June ? ,1882) English mathematician who spent numerous years manually calculating the value of pi. Shanks kept a boarding school at Houghton-le-Spring in a coal mining area near Durham. His calculation of pi reached 707 places by 1873, a feat unchallenged until the use of electronic computers. He used the formula:
pi/4 = 4 tan^-1(1/5) - tan^-1(1/239).
In 1944, Ferguson's new computation of pi showed Shanks had made a mistake in the 528th decimal place, invalidating the digits calculated beyond. Shanks had omitted two terms which caused his error. By the end of the twentieth century, computers could easily extend the results to over 2 billion places.*TIS

*SAU

1916 Silvanus P. Thompson (19 June 1851 – 12 June 1916) In 1910 he published Calculus Made Easy, which was published anonymously until after his death in 1916. It is still in print. *VFR He was a noted physicist and engineer, and a celebrated teacher and writer on electricity and magnetism. He also wrote popular biographies of Faraday and Lord Kelvin. At his death he was professor at City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury (London)

1939 Hermann Wiener (15 May 1857 in Karlsruhe, Germany-13 June 1939 in Darmstadt, Germany)
was a German mathematician who worked on the foundations of geometry*SAU

Hermann, whose father was the mathematician Christian Wiener, graduated from the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. From 1876 to 1879 he studied mathematics and natural science at the Polytechnische Schule Karlsruhe (now the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). From 1879 to 1882 he studied at the Technical University of Munich under Felix Klein and Alexander von Brill and in 1881 at the University of Leipzig. In 1881 he received his Promotion (PhD) in Munich in mathematics with a thesis Über Involutionen auf ebenen Curven (On involutions on plane curves) under the supervision of Ludwig Seidel. In Karlsruhe in 1882 he passed the state examination for secondary school teachers. He was from 1882 to 1883 a Lehramtspraktikant (teaching trainee) at the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe and from 1882 to 1883 his father's assistant at the Polytechnische Schule Karlsruhe. In 1885 Hermann Wiener habilitated at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg with a thesis Rein geometrische Theorie der Darstellung binärer Formen durch Punktgruppen auf der Geraden (Purely geometrical theory of the representation of binary forms by point groups on the line). From 1885 to 1894 he was a Privatdozent at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. In 1894 he was appointed a professor ordinarius at Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), where he retired as professor emeritus in 1927. *Wik

1994 John Leslie Britton (November 18, 1927 – June 13, 1994) was an English mathematician from Yorkshire who worked in combinatorial group theory and was an expert on the word problem for groups. Britton was a member of the London Mathematical Society and was Secretary of Meetings and Membership with that organization from 1973-1976. Britton died in a climbing accident on the Isle of Skye. *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

Thursday, 12 June 2025

On This Day in Math - June 12

My work always tried to unite the true

with the beautiful, but when I had to choose...

I usually chose the beautiful.

~ Hermann Weyl

The 163rd day of the year; 163 is the 38th prime number

$ e^{\pi*\sqrt{163}} $ is an integer. Ok, not quite.

** Actually, $ e^{\pi*\sqrt{163}} $ is approximately 262537412640768743.9999999999992

In the April 1975 issue of Scientific American, Martin Gardner wrote (jokingly) that Ramanujan's constant (e^(pi*sqrt(163))) is an integer. The name "Ramanujan's constant" was actually coined by Simon Plouffe and derives from the above April Fool's joke played by Gardner. The French mathematician Charles Hermite (1822-1901) observed this property of 163 long before Ramanujan's work on these so-called "almost integers."

And one more "almost integer" $\frac{163}{ln 163}$ is 31.999998...

$\pi \approx {2^{9} \over 163}\approx 3.1411$ . and $e\approx {163 \over 3\cdot 4\cdot 5}\approx 2.7166\dots$ Wikipedia

Colin Beveridge ‏@icecolbeveridge pointed out that $ (2+\sqrt{3})^{163} $ is also very, very close to an integer. (but it is very large,greater than 10⁹³ , and was not, to my knowledge, ever the source of an April fools joke.)

163 is conjectured to be the largest prime that can be represented uniquely as the sum of three squares $ 163 = 1^2 + 9^2 + 9^2 $.

Most students know that the real numbers can be uniquely factored. . Some other fields can be uniquely factored as well, for instance, the complex field a+bi where i represents the square root of -1 is such a field. In 1801, Gauss conjectured that there were only nine integers k such that $a + b\sqrt{-k} $ is a uniquely factorable field. The largest of these integers is 163. Today they are called Heegner numbers after a proof by Kurt Heegner in 1952.

163 is as easy as 1+2*3^4.

163 is the sum 37 + 59 + 67, all prime

EVENTS

1493 First issue of Nuremberg Chronicles published in Latin (A German edition would be issued in December). The journal is said to have printed an image of the 684 passage of Halley's comet. Roberta Olsen and Jay Pasachoff of Wheaton College have written that the same woodblock was used to depict four other comets. They also said the Chronicles use three more prints to depict this same 684 comet in different editions. The one below, from the Library of Congress Collection, is the one which was in the Art Exhibit at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., entitled: "Fire and Ice - A History of Comets in Art"

For more detail about the Chronicles check out this post by the Renaissance Mathematicus.

1676 a partial solar eclipse which was to be viewed as something of an opening ceremony for the Royal Observatory in Greenwich: it was hoped that the King would attend but he did not, Lord Brouncker, President of the Royal Society, being the guest of honour instead. *Rebekah Higgitt, Telescopos

1689 Although they had corresponded, through Oldenburg, about optics sixteen years earlier (much to Newton’s grief), Newton ﬁrst met Christiaan Huygens at a Royal Society meeting in London.
[Newton, Mathematical Papers, 6, xxiii] *VFR

In 1837, British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone received a patent for their electromagnetic telegraph. Their invention was put in public service in 1839, five years before the more famous Morse telegraph.*TIS Wheatstone's telegraph was a five wire/five needle telegraph that had a receiver that pointed out the message letter by letter without a code such as Morse used for his one and two wire models. (Wheatstone was very capable of creating codes as well. He was the creator of the Playfair cipher; an ingenious system which prevented frequency analysis by substituting two letters at a time.)

1891, the Swiss Army Soldier Knife

In 1897, the Swiss Army Knife was patented by Carl Elsener *TIS It was in Ibach, in 1884, where Karl Elsener and his mother, Victoria, opened a cutlery cooperative that would soon produce the first knives sold to the Swiss Army. The original model, called the Soldier Knife, was made for troops who needed a foldable tool that could open canned food and aid in disassembling a rifle. The Soldier Knife included a blade, a reamer, a can opener, a screwdriver, and oak handles. *gearjunkie.com

In 1908, the Rotherhithe-Stepney tunnel beneath the Thames in South London was opened for road vehicle traffic. It was built by Sir Maurice Fitzmaurice between 1904 and 1908. With a length of 4860 feet (1481 metres) excluding the approaches, it remains the largest iron-lined subaqueous tunnel in the world. It was constructed partly by tunneling and partly by the cut and cover method. The area around the entrances was cleared resulting in 3,000 people being rehoused. It is located close to the Rotherhithe-Wapping Thames Tunnel built (1825-43) by Marc Brunel and his son, Isambad K. Brunel which was the world's first tunnel beneath a navigable river.*TIS

southern approach *Wik

1973 Germany issued a postage stamp picturing a model of the calculator built by Wilhelm Schickard of the University of Tubingen 350 years before. [Scott #1123].

1979 Bryan Allen, age 26, of the U.S. pedaled the Gossamer Albatross on the ﬁrst human powered ﬂight across the English channel. This 21 mile ﬂight won him a £100,000 prize oﬀered by British industrialist Henry Kremer. Two years earlier Allen was the ﬁrst to ﬂy an aircraft around a one-mile ﬁgure eight course under human power alone. See “Human-powered ﬂight,” Scientiﬁc American, November 1985, p. 144. *VFR

*NASA

BIRTHS

1577 Paul Guldin born (original name Habakkuk Guldin) (June 12, 1577 – November 3, 1643) was a Swiss Jesuit mathematician and astronomer. He discovered the Guldinus theorem to determine the surface and the volume of a solid of revolution. This theorem is also known as Pappus–Guldinus theorem and Pappus's centroid theorem, attributed to Pappus of Alexandria. ( simply stated: that the volume = area times distance traveled by the centroid, and surface = arclength times distance travelled by centroid. These nicely produce the surface area and volume of a torus, for example.) He was noted for his association with the German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler. He was born in Mels, Switzerland and was a professor of mathematics in Graz and Vienna.
In Paolo Casati's astronomical work Terra machinis mota (1658), Casati imagines a dialogue between Guldin, Galileo, and Marin Mersenne on various intellectual problems of cosmology, geography, astronomy and geodesy. *Wik
Paul Guldin's critique of Bonaventura Cavalieri's indivisibles is contained in the fourth book of his De Centro Gravitatis (also called Centrobaryca), published in 1641. Cavalieri's proofs, Guldin argued, were not constructive proofs, of the kind that classical mathematicians would approve of. *Infinitesimal: How a Dangerous Mathematical Theory Shaped the Modern World, by Amir Alexander

1737 Nicolas Vilant FRSE (12 June, 1737-27 May, 1807) was a mathematician from Scotland in the 18th century, known for his textbooks. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1783.

Vilant was Regius Professor of Mathematics in the University of Saint Andrews from 1765 to his death in 1807. Often ill, he was unable to teach most of this time, and lectures were given by assistants, among them John West. Under Newtonian tradition, he was unable to follow the continental developments in mathematical analysis, like most of his British contemporaries.

He was a good mathematician, and his textbooks were very popular until the first years of the 19th century. The most renowned was The Elements of Mathematical Analysis,( perhaps the first book in English to use the phrase "Mathematical Analysis" in its title) for the Use of Students, first printed in 1777 and used as a university textbook from 1783, reprinted for student use. *Wik

1806 John A. Roebling ( June 12, 1806 – July 22, 1869), civil engineer and designer of bridges, was born in Mühlhausen, Prussia. The Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling's last and greatest achievement, spans New York's East River to connect Manhattan with Brooklyn. When completed in 1883, the bridge, with its massive stone towers and a main span of 1,595.5 feet between them, was by far the longest suspension bridge in the world. Today, the Brooklyn Bridge is hailed as a key feature of New York's City's urban landscape, standing as a monument to progress and ingenuity as well as symbolizing New York's ongoing cultural vitality. *Library of Congress

1843 Sir David Gill (12 June 1843 – 24 January 1914) Scottish astronomer known for his measurements of solar and stellar parallax, showing the distances of the Sun and other stars from Earth, and for his early use of photography in mapping the heavens. From his first training as a watchmaker, he progressed to the timekeeping requirements of astronomy. He designed, equipped, and operated a private observatory near Aberdeen. In 1877, Gill and his wife measured the solar parallax by observing Mars from Ascension Island. To determine parallaxes, he perfected the use of the heliometer, a telescope that uses a split image to measure the angular separation of celestial bodies. He later redetermined the solar parallax to such precision that his value was used for almanacs until 1968. *TIS

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

1855 Eduard Wiltheiss (12 June 1855 Worms, Germany – 7 July 1900 Halle) was a German mathematician who made major contributions to the theory of abelian functions *SAU

In April 1874, immediately following his Abitur examinations, Wiltheiss entered the University of Giessen to study mathematics. At Giessen his lecturers included R Baltzer, M Pasch and P A Gordan. Moritz Pasch was a geometer while Paul Gordan was famed for his work in invariant theory. However Gordan had undertaken research on abelian functions before becoming fascinated by invariant theory, and Wiltheiss went on to undertake research on that topic, making a major contribution to the theory of abelian functions. From Giessen Wiltheiss went to Berlin in 1876 to continue his mathematical studies. There he attended lectures by the three great mathematicians Weierstrass, Kummer, and Kronecker.

1888 Zygmunt Janiszewski, (June 12, 1888, Warsaw - January 3, 1920, Lviv) the father of Polish mathematics, born. At the end of World War I, Janiszewski was the driving force behind the creation of one of the strongest schools of mathematics in the world. This is all the more remarkable, given Poland's difficult situaltion at war's end.
Janiszewski devoted the family property that he had inherited from his father to charity and education. He also donated all the prize money that he received from mathematical awards and competitions to the education and development of young Polish students.
In mathematics, his main interest was topology.
He was the driving force, together with Wacław Sierpiński and Stefan Mazurkiewicz, behind the founding of the mathematics journal Fundamenta Mathematicae. Janiszewski proposed the name of the journal in 1919, though the first issue was published in 1920, after his death. It was his intent that the first issue comprise solely contributions by Polish mathematicians. It was Janiszewski's vision that Poland become a world leader in the field of mathematics—which she did in the interbellum.
His life was cut short by the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, which took his life at Lwów on 3 January 1920 at the age of 31. He willed his body for medical research, and his cranium for craniological study, desiring to be "useful after his death". *Wik

1904 Adolf Lindenbaum (12 June 1904 – ? August 1941) was a Polish-Jewish logician and mathematician best known for Lindenbaum's lemma and Lindenbaum–Tarski algebras.

He was born and brought up in Warsaw. He earned a Ph.D. in 1928 under Wacław Sierpiński and habilitated at the University of Warsaw in 1934. He published works on mathematical logic, set theory, cardinal and ordinal arithmetic, the axiom of choice, the continuum hypothesis, theory of functions, measure theory, point-set topology, geometry and real analysis. He served as an assistant professor at the University of Warsaw from 1935 until the outbreak of war in September 1939. He was Alfred Tarski's closest collaborator of the inter-war period. Around the end of October or beginning of November 1935 he married Janina Hosiasson, a fellow logician of the Lwow–Warsaw school. He and his wife were adherents of logical empiricism, participated in and contributed to the international unity of science movement, and were members of the original Vienna Circle. Sometime before the middle of August 1941 he and his sister Stefanja were shot to death in Naujoji Vilnia (Nowa Wilejka), 7 km east of Vilnius, by the occupying German forces or Lithuanian collaborators

1922 Margherita Hack, Knight Grand Cross OMRI ( 12 June 1922 – 29 June 2013) was an Italian astrophysicist and scientific disseminator. The asteroid 8558 Hack, discovered in 1995, was named in her honour.

An athlete in her youth, Hack played basketball and competed in track and field during the National University Contests, called the Littoriali under Mussolini's fascist regime, where she won the long jump and the high jump events.

She was full professor of astronomy at the University of Trieste from 1964 to the 1st of November 1992, when Hack was placed "out of role" for seniority. She has been the first Italian woman to administrate the Trieste Astronomical Observatory from 1964 to 1987, bringing it to international fame.

Member of the most physics and astronomy associations, Margherita Hack was also director of the Astronomy Department at the University of Trieste from 1985 to 1991 and from 1994 to 1997. She was a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (national member in the class of mathematical physics and natural sciences; second category: astronomy, geodesic, geophysics and applications; section A: astronomy and applications). She worked at many American and European observatories and was for long time member of working groups of ESA and NASA. In Italy, with an intensive promotion work, she obtained the growth of activity of the astronomical community with access to several satellites, reaching a notoriety of international level.

Hack has published several original papers in international journals and several books both of popular science and university level. In 1994 she was awarded with the Targa Giuseppe Piazzi for the scientific research, and in 1995 with the Cortina Ulisse Prize for scientific dissemination.

In 1978, Margherita Hack founded the bimonthly magazine L'Astronomia, whose first issue came out in November 1979;[20] later, together with Corrado Lamberti, she directed the magazine of popular science and astronomy culture Le Stelle.

1937 Vladimir Arnold (12 June 1937 – 3 June 2010) won a Wolf prize for his work on dynamical systems, differential equations, and singularity theory. He died nine days before his birth date in 2010.

He entered Moscow State University in 1954 as an undergraduate student in the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics. He was awarded his first degree in 1959 with a dissertation On mappings of a circle to itself written with Kolmogorov as advisor. Speaking of his undergraduate years he said :-

The constellation of great mathematicians in the same department when I was studying at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics was really exceptional, and I have never seen anything like it at any other place. Kolmogorov, Gelfand, Petrovsky, Pontryagin, P Novikov, Markov, Gelfond, Lusternik, Khinchin and P S Aleksandrov were teaching students like Manin, Sinai, Sergi Novikov, V M Alexeev, Anosov, A A Kirillov, and me. All these mathematicians were so different! It was almost impossible to understand Kolmogorov's lectures, but they were full of ideas and were really rewarding! ... Pontryagin was already very weak when I was a student at the Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, but he was perhaps the best of the lecturers. *SAU

DEATHS

1835 Edward Troughton (October 1753 - June 12, 1835) English scientist and instrument maker. Troughton established himself as the leading maker of instruments in England. He began his instrument making career with instruments to aid navigation, for example, he designed the 'pillar' sextant, patented in 1788, the dip sector, the marine barometer and the reflecting circle built in 1796. Other instruments which he designed were for use in surveying. He designed the pyrometer, the mountain barometer and the large surveying theodolites. His famous instruments were astronomical ones. He made the Groombridge Transit Circle in 1805 and a six foot Mural Transit Circle in 1810 which was erected at the Observatory in Greenwich in 1812. *TIS Troughton was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society in 1809. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1810. *Wik

Mendoza repeating circle, made circa 1810 by Edward Troughton, London. On display at the Musée national de la Marine, Paris.

1885 (Henry Charles) Fleeming Jenkin (25 Mar 1833; 12 Jun 1885 at age 52) British engineer noted for his work in establishing units of electrical measurement. After earning an M.A. (1851), he worked for the next 10 years with engineering firms engaged in the design and manufacture of submarine telegraph cables and equipment for laying them. In 1861 his friend William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) procured Jenkin's appointment as reporter for the Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He helped compile and publish reports that established the ohm as the absolute unit of electrical resistance and described methods for precise resistance measurements. *TIS

Drawing of the first ever aerial tramway or telpher, designed and engineered by Fleeming Jenkin. It was installed in Glynde in Sussex in 1885 to transport clay, and was finished after Jenkin's death.

1900 Jean Frenet (7 February 1816 – 12 June 1900) was a French mathematician best remembered for the Serret-Frenet formulas for a space-curve and they were presented in his doctoral thesis at Toulouse in 1847. *SAU He wrote six out of the nine formulas, which at that time were not expressed in vector notation, nor using linear algebra.*Wik

1916 Silvanus Phillips Thompson FRS (19 June 1851 – 12 June 1916) was an English professor of physics at the City and Guilds Technical College in Finsbury, England. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1891 and was known for his work as an electrical engineer and as an author. Thompson's most enduring publication is his 1910 text Calculus Made Easy, which teaches the fundamentals of infinitesimal calculus, and is still in print. Thompson also wrote a popular physics text, Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism, as well as biographies of Lord Kelvin and Michael Faraday.

He also wrote popular biographies of Faraday and Lord Kelvin. At his death he was professor at City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury (London). Thompson’s particular gift was in his ability to communicate difficult scientific concepts in a clear and interesting manner. He attended and lectured at the Royal Institution giving the Christmas lectures in 1896 on Light, Visible and Invisible with an account of Röntgen Light. He was an impressive lecturer and the radiologist AE Barclay said that: “None who heard him could forget the vividness of the word-pictures he placed before them.”

1980 Egon Sharpe Pearson, (Hampstead, 11 August 1895 – Midhurst, 12 June 1980) was the only son of Karl Pearson, and like his father, a leading British statistician.
He went to Winchester School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and succeeded his father as professor of statistics at University College London and as editor of the journal Biometrika.
Pearson is best known for development of the Neyman-Pearson lemma of statistical hypothesis testing.
He was President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1955–56, and was awarded its Guy Medal in Gold in 1955. He was awarded a CBE in 1946.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in Mar 1966. His candidacy citation read: "Known throughout the world as co-author of the Neyman-Pearson theory of testing statistical hypotheses, and responsible for many important contributions to problems of statistical inference and methodology, especially in the development and use of the likelihood ratio criterion. Has played a leading role in furthering the applications of statistical methods - for example, in industry, and also during and since the war, in the assessment and testing of weapons." *Wik

1985 Hua Luogeng or Hua Loo-Keng (Chinese: 华罗庚; Wade–Giles: Hua Lo-keng; 12 November 1910 – 12 June 1985) was a Chinese mathematician and politician famous for his important contributions to number theory and for his role as the leader of mathematics research and education in the People's Republic of China. He was largely responsible for identifying and nurturing the renowned mathematician Chen Jingrun who proved Chen's theorem, the best known result on the Goldbach conjecture.

[Chen's theorem states that every sufficiently large even number can be written as the sum of either two primes, or a prime and a semiprime (the product of two primes). Chen's theorem represents the strengthening of a previous result due to Alfréd Rényi, who in 1947 had shown there exists a finite K such that any even number can be written as the sum of a prime number and the product of at most K primes.]

n addition, Hua's later work on mathematical optimization and operations research made an enormous impact on China's economy. He was elected a foreign associate of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1982. He was elected a member of the standing Committee of the first to sixth National people's Congress, Vice-chairman of the sixth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (April 1985) and vice-chairman of the China Democratic League (1979). He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1979.

Hua did not receive a formal university education. Although awarded several honorary PhDs, he never got a formal degree from any university. In fact, his formal education only consisted of six years of primary school and three years of secondary school. For that reason, Xiong Qinglai, after reading one of Hua's early papers, was amazed by Hua's mathematical talent, and in 1931 Xiong invited him to study mathematics at Tsinghua University.

2007 June 12 Donald Jeffry Herbert (July 10, 1917 – June 12, 2007), was an American television personality better known as Mr. Wizard – died June 12, 2007, at age 89. Herbert's first 34 years of life gave no hint of his future career. Going then by his given name of Donald Kemske, he grew up and was educated in rural Wisconsin, majored in general science and English at what is now UW-La Crosse, and was considering an acting career, when the War broke out. He enlisted, took flight training, and ending up flying over 50 missions as a B-24 bomber pilot, surviving the war, and coming out as a decorated captain. Peacetime found him working for radio stations in Chicago as an actor for children's on-air theater. As television reared its cathode-ray-tube head in the late 1940s, Herbert (having dropped the Kemske from his name) got the idea of a science show for kids. He pitched the concept to station KNBQ in Chicago, they apparently liked the idea, and Meet Mr. Wizard went on the air on Mar. 3, 1951. *Linda Hall Org

I admit, I was a regular fan during the mid to late fifty's.

Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert) doing a demonstration with a birthday candle with Rita, “Science in a Candle,” Meet Mr. Wizard, 1964