Lodovico Cigoli writes to Galileo to inform him that Father Christoph Clavius SJ, the senior mathematician at the Collegio Romano, had said that if the telescope revealed four
new ‘planets’ around Jupiter to Galileo, then Galileo must have put them in the telescope to begin with. Two months later, Clavius had observed Jupiter’s moons himself. *Albert Van Helden, Galileo and the telescope, The origins of the telescope, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam 2010
The original Galileo telescope, which is preserved today at the Museo Galileo in Florence, Italy. (They wouldn't let me look through it.)
1812 Thomas Jefferson writes to William Duanne. "The hand of age is upon me....last year it was the sight, this it is the hearing... but the mind is too weakened, When I was young, mathematics were the passion of my life. The same passion has returned upon me...
1814 The terms "commutative" and "distributive" were used (in French) by François Joseph Servois in a memoir published in Annales de Gergonne (volume V, no. IV) *Jeff Miller, Earliest Known Uses of Some of the Words of MathematicsServois was the son of Jacques-Ignace Servois, a merchant, and Jeanne-Marie Jolliet. He was ordained a priest at Besançon at the beginning of the Revolution, but in 1793 he gave up his ecclesiastical duties in order to join the army. In 1794, after a brief stay at the artillery school of Châlons-sur-Marne, he was made a lieutenant. While serving in several campaigns as staff officer, he devoted his leisure time to the study of mathematics. With the support of Legendre, he was appointed professor of mathematics at the artillery school of Besançon in July 1801. A few months later he transferred to the school at Châlons-sur-Marne; in 1802, to the artillery school at Metz: and in 1808, to the school at La Fère. After a brief return to Metz as professor at the artillery and engineering school, he was appointed curator of the artillery museum at Paris in 1816. He held the post until 1827, when he retired to his native village.
1831 Michael Faraday discovers induced electric current using a helix made of two coils each of 203 feet of insulated copper wire. "A sudden jerk was perceived when the battery communication was made and broken... it was one way when made, and the other when broken." *A history of physics in its elementary branches By Florian Cajori
1831 (exact date unknown, October ?) Galois, while in prison, writes a preface to his "Memoires". As late as 1906, it had never been published, and Jules Tannery, reviewing the yet unpublished works of Galois, left it out, regarding it as too much like drunken raving. The ending is a fascinating hope for the future of mathematical publishing:
Evariste Galois 1811–1832
By Laura Toti Rigatelli
1842 Arthur Cayley's acceptance to Trinity was announced on this day. He was twenty-one years old and accepted on his first sitting, a rare event. He was the youngest man admitted to Trinity in the 19th Century. * A. J. Crilly, Arthur Cayley: Mathematician Laureate of the Victorian Age
1847 Maria Mitchell sees a comet... the first woman astronomer in the United States discovered a comet. On this night in the Autumn of 1847, Maria looked at the sky through the telescope in her homemade observatory at Nantucket, Mass. and saw a star five degrees above the North Star where there had been no star before. She had memorized the sky and was sure of her observation. It occurred to her that this might be a comet. Maria recorded the presumed comet's coordinates. The next night the star moved again. This time she was sure it was a comet. For this discovery, she was awarded *New England Historical Society's gold medal by the king of Denmark. She became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. *TISMaria Mitchell with student at Vassar Observatory *New England Historical Society
1861 On Oct 1, a seemingly depressed Charles Darwin writes, "My Dear Lyell, ... I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything. One lives only to make blunders.–... I am
Ever yours
C. Darwin [I've had days like that myself]
1891 On Oct 1 Stanford University opened its doors after six years of planning and building. The prediction of a New York newspaper that Stanford professors would "lecture in marble halls to empty benches" was quickly disproved. The first student body consisted of 555 men and women, and the original faculty of 15 was expanded to 49 for the second year. The university’s first president was David Starr Jordan, a graduate of Cornell, who left his post as president of Indiana University to join the adventure out West.
The Stanfords engaged Frederick Law Olmsted, the famed landscape architect who created New York’s Central Park, to design the physical plan for the university. The collaboration was contentious, but finally resulted in an organization of quadrangles on an east-west axis. Today, as Stanford continues to expand, the university’s architects attempt to respect those original university plans. *Stanford Univ Web page
1895 On the first of October 1895, the first German institute of insurance science was founded at the University of Göttingen, as a result of joint efforts of Felix Klein (1849-1825) and his fellow student Ludwig Kiepert (1846-1934), who was then chairman of the Prussian Civil Service Association (today called Hannover Life Insurance).This was the first institute in Germany in which a curriculum in actuarial mathematics, insurance law, and insurance economics was offered. Successful studies led to the degree “Versicherungsverständiger” (insurance expert). The institute was divided into a mathematical section and an administrative section, and its first chairman was Wilhelm Lexis. *From Center for Statistics, History of Statistics in Gottingen.
1907 Delegates from 310 Esperanto societies throughout the world met to elect a committee to modify the language. Louis Couturat, influenced by Leibniz’s thought on the construction of a logical universal language, was elected one of the secretaries. *VFR
1934 Paul Erdos stops in Cambridge to visit with mathematical friends, particularly Harrold Davenport and Richard Rado, on his way to a position in Manchester. *Bruce Schechter, My Brain is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos
1954 IBM announced is 705 EDP, part of its 700 series of mainframe computers. A business-oriented machine, the 705 had magnetic core memory.*CHM
1957 Thalidomide was developed in West Germany and marketed in 1957 as a safe, over-the-counter sedative to treat insomnia, colds, and flu. It was also widely used off-label to combat morning sickness in pregnant women. It wasn’t until 1962 that the severe side effects were revealed, where it had caused the development of malformed limbs in babies. *rsc.org\: In the late 1950s and early 1960s, doctors in Germany and Australia began to notice an unusual spike in severe birth defects and miscarriages. In 1961, the link was definitively made between the drug and these birth defects, leading to its withdrawal from the market.
The most prominent and visible defects were severe limb malformations, such as shortened, underdeveloped, or missing arms and legs (a condition known as phocomelia). Other effects included malformations of the eyes, ears, heart, kidneys, and other internal organs.
In Germany alone, 10,000 babies were born affected by Thalidomide. Many were too damaged to survive for long. Today, fewer than 3,000 are still alive
1958 On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of US$100 million, three major research laboratories (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities *Wik
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1969 Concorde goes Mach 1 In 1969, the prototype French-built Concorde broke the sound barrier for the first time. The inaugural flight of the aircraft had taken place on 2 Mar 1969 in Toulouse, France, and its first commercial flight was on 21 Jan 1976. It was the first plane in the world to be entirely controlled by computer. As the only supersonic passenger aircraft, the Anglo-French Concorde remains a brilliant technological achievement, though its impact on international air travel has been limited by the high cost of buying and operating the aircraft. There was also widespread opposition from environmental groups on the grounds of the Concorde's noise on takeoff and its fuel consumption. Only British Airways and Air France have operated the aircraft. *TIS
1971 The first CT (Computed Tomography (CT) imaging is also known as "CAT scanning" (Computed Axial Tomography)Tomography is from the Greek word "tomos" meaning "slice" or "section" and "graphia" meaning "describing") scan of a patient was performed OTD in 1971 at the Atkinson Morley Hospital in Wimbledon and highlighted a brain cyst. The tomograph was built by British engineer Godfrey Hounsefield that year. *StoriaMedicina
1988 The game Connect Four Solved first by James D. Allen (Oct 1, 1988), and independently by Victor Allis (Oct 16, 1988). First player can force a win. Strongly solved by John Tromp's 8-ply database (Feb 4, 1995). Weakly solved for all boardsizes where width+height is at most 15 (Feb 18, 2006). *WikMisère Connect Four (don’t make four) was solved (Oct 2024). Steele & Larremore give constructive results for misère Connect-4 (and generalized misère Connect-k on w×h boards): perfect play is solved and outcomes depend on k,w,h.
A recent paper by Markus Böck (arXiv, 2025) revisits symbolic/Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) search and reports producing an explicit win/draw/loss lookup table for the classic 7×6 board (the paper says an ≈89.6 GB look-up table, computed on consumer-grade hardware). This goes beyond Tromp’s 8-ply database by producing a full table you can query for any legal position. *PBnotes
2008 A Metrolink engineer at the helm of a commuter train in Los Angeles, California, was found to have been text messaging seconds before colliding with a freight train. 25 people were killed in the accident and numerous others were injured. Many states have passed laws enforcing hands-free only cellular use that restricts drivers from the distracted driving inherent in hands-on texting and cellular phone calls. *CHM
2012 With God's grace, Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw will awake for her 100th birthday today . Happy Birthday to a Grand-Ol-Dame, and may a puzzle occupy her thoughts. (See 1912 Births below).
(she did indeed greet her 100th birthday, but Died: August 10, 2014, Didsbury, Manchester, United Kingdom ...... It's hard to keep a good woman down!)
BIRTHS
1535 Giambattista della Porta (? Oct 1535 - 4 Feb 1615) Italian natural philosopher, experimenter and mathematician, though he also sought the miraculous or magical. He studied optics, including refraction (De refractione, 1593). Porta did not invent the telescope, regardless of his published claim. He was the first to propose adding a convex lens to the camera obscura, and first to recognize the heating effect of light rays. He wrote on cryptography in De furtivis literarum (1563), and his other books included mechanics, squaring the circle, description of a steam engine in De spiritali (1606). He formed the society, Accademia dei Segreti, dedicated to discussing and studying nature, meeting at his home, until closed by the Inquisition (about 1578). *TIS
1671 Luigi Guido Grandi (1 October 1671 – 4 July 1742) was an Italian Jesuit who worked on geometry and hydraulics.Grandi was the author of a number of works on geometry in which he considered the analogies of the circle and equilateral hyperbola. He also considered curves of double curvature on the sphere and the quadrature of parts of a spherical surface.In 1701 Grandi discussed the conical loxodrome, the curve that cuts the generators of a cone of revolution in a constant angle. He studied the curve the Witch of Agnesi in 1703. In fact his work of 1703 is important in introducing Leibniz's calculus into Italy.
In 1728 Grandi published Flores geometrici a work in which he defines the clelie curve. He named the curve after Countess Clelia Borromeo and dedicated his book to her. If the longitude and colatitude of a point P on a sphere is denoted by θ and φ and if P moves so that θ = m φ, where m is a constant, then the locus of P is a clelie. Grandi also applied the term "clelies" to the curves determined by certain trigonometric equations involving the sine function
a sin θ = b sin mφ
a sin θ = a - b sin mφ
Grandi also worked on hydraulics and was involved with a number of projects such as ones to drain the Chiana Valley and the Pontine Marshes. He also published a number of works on mechanics and astronomy. His practical work on mechanics included experimenting with a steam engine. *SAU
He is noted for the roses that he introduced. His idea was to find a geometrical definition of curves which resemble flowers. These curves are still part of our calculus courses, except now we use polar coordinates to define them.*VFR
1873 Alfreds Arnolds Adolfs Meders (1 Oct 1873 , 1944) Meders worked on differential geometry and mathematical analysis. He often published papers written in German, in German journals. For example he published the following three papers in Crelle's Journal: Über einige Arten Singularer Punkte von Raumkurven (1896); Zur Theorie der singularen Punkte einer Raumkurve (1899); and Analytische Untersuchung singularer Punkte von Raumkurven (1910). In Monatshefte für Mathematik he published: Über die Determinante von Wronski (1906); and Zur Differentiation bestimmter Integrale nach einem Parameter (1911).
Meders was also interested in the history of mathematics and he wrote an important paper Direkte und indirekte Beziehungen zwischen Gauss und der Dorpater Universität (Direct and indirect connections between Gauss and the University of Dorpat) in 1928. His interests went outside mathematics and he sometimes lectured on astronomy, meteorology and biology where he had a special interest in birds. *SAU
1898 Béla Kerékjártó (October 1, 1898, –June 26, 1946) was a Hungarian mathematician who wrote numerous articles on Topology. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Budapest. He taught at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Szeged from 1922, and at the University of Budapest from 1938. In 1923, he published one of the first books on Topology; Hermann Weyl wrote that this book completely changed his views of the subject.*Wik
1904 Otto Robert Frisch (1 Oct 1904; 22 Sep 1979) Austrian-British nuclear physicist, born in Vienna, who, with his aunt Lise Meitner, described the division of neutron-bombarded uranium into lighter elements. He named the process fission, borrowing a term from biology (1939). At the time, Meitner was working in Stockholm and Frisch (1934-39) at Copenhagen under Niels Bohr, who brought their observation to the attention of Albert Einstein and others in the United States. He did research with James Chadwick 1940-43, and was head of the Critical Assembly Group on the Los Alamos project 1943-46. After World War II, Frisch became a science writer on atomic physics for the layman. *TIS
Feischwas working in Copenhagen, at the Bohr Institute, when Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered fission at their lab in Berlin in December, 1938. Or rather, they discovered that when they bombarded uranium with neutrons, they produced barium as a byproduct. They had no idea what was going on. It was Frisch, working with his aunt Lise Meitner, who identified what had happened as the fission of uranium, and who in fact coined the very word "fission." Meitner had worked with Hahn for years (second image), and Frisch was visiting his aunt in Sweden at Christmas when she got a letter from Hahn, describing the experiment (third image) and his mystification at the results. Walking in the snow that fateful day, Meitner and Frisch figured out that the uranium atom must have split into two by-products, one of which was barium. Frisch, the next year, determined that a bomb using uranium 235, the scarce isotope of uranium, was a real possibility. His report, written with Rudolf Peierls, led to the formation of the Maud Committee in Great Britain, which in turn led to the establishment of the Manhattan Project in 1942 in the United States. Frisch worked at Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945, which was a pretty good trick, since he was in effect an enemy alien. He had to be granted British citizenship to do so. Frisch described all these happenings in a charming autobiography, full of colorful stories, with the equally charming title: What Little I Remember . Neither Frisch nor Meitner shared in the Nobel Prize awarded to Otto Hahn in 1944 for the discovery of nuclear fission.
Hahn and Meitner
1911 Zhou Weiliang (simplified Chinese: (October 1, 1911– August 10, 1995) was a Chinese mathematician born in Shanghai, known for his work in algebraic geometry.
He was a student in the USA, graduating from the University of Chicago in 1931. In 1932 he attended the University of Göttingen, then transferring to Leipzig where he worked with van der Waerden. They produced a series of joint papers on intersection theory, introducing in particular the use of what are now generally called Chow coordinates (which were in some form familiar to Arthur Cayley).
He married Margot Victor in 1936, and took a position at the National Central University in Nanjing. His mathematical work was seriously affected by the wartime situation in China. He taught at the National Tung-Chi University in Shanghai in the academic year 1946–47, and then went to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he returned to his research. From 1948 to 1977 he was a professor at Johns Hopkins University. *Wik
1912 Dame Kathleen Mary Ollerenshaw, née Timpson, DBE (1 October 1912, August 10, 2014, Didsbury, Manchester, United Kingdom ) is a British mathematician and politician. Deaf since the age of eight, she loved doing arithmetic problems as a child. As a young woman, she attended St Leonards School and Sixth Form College in St Andrews, Scotland where today the house of young male boarders is named after her. At the age of 19, she gained admittance to Somerville College, Oxford to study mathematics. She completed her doctorate at Somerville in 1945 on "Critical Lattices" under the supervision of Theo Chaundy. She wrote five original research papers which were sufficient for her to earn her DPhil degree without the need of a formal written thesis.
Ollerenshaw served as a Conservative Councillor for Rusholme for twenty-six years (1956–1981), was Lord Mayor of Manchester (1975–1976), and the prime motivator in the creation of the Royal Northern College of Music. She was made a Freeman of the City of Manchester and was an advisor on educational matters to Margaret Thatcher's government in the 1980s.
She has published at least 26 mathematical papers, her best-known contribution being to most-perfect pandiagonal magic squares. An annual public lecture at the School of Mathematics, University of Manchester is named in her honour.
An amateur astronomer, Ollerenshaw donated her telescope to Lancaster University, and an observatory there bears her name. She is an honorary member of the Manchester Astronomical Society and held the post of Vice President for a number of years. *Wik A wonderful article about her approaching her 100th
birthday is in Scientific American.
DEATHS
1768 Robert Simson (14 October 1687 – 1 October 1768) was a Scottish mathematician and professor of mathematics at the University of Glasgow. The pedal line of a triangle is sometimes called the "Simson line" after him. Edmond Halley suggested to him that he might devote his considerable talents to the restoration of the work of the early Greek geometers, such as Euclid and Apollonius of Perga. These are works that only survive in abbreviated accounts given by later mathematicians such as Pappus of Alexandria. He first studied Euclid's so-called porisms. Playfair's 1792 definition of porism is "a proposition affirming the possibility of finding such conditions as will render a certain problem indeterminate, or capable of innumerable solutions."
Simson's work on Euclid's porisms was published in 1723 in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, and his restoration of the Loci Plani of Apollonius appeared in 1749. Further work of his on porisms and other subjects including logarithms was published posthumously in 1776 by Lord Stanhope at his own expense. Simson also set himself the task of preparing an edition of Euclid's Elements in as perfect a form as possible, and his edition of Euclid's books 1-6, 11 and 12 was for many years the standard text and formed the basis of textbooks on geometry written by other authors. The work ran through more than 70 different editions, revisions or translations published first in Glasgow in 1756, with others appearing in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin, London, Cambridge, Paris and a number of other European and American cities. Recent editions appeared in London and Toronto in 1933 under the editorship of Isaac Todhunter, and in São Paolo in 1944. Simson's lectures were delivered in Latin, at any rate at the beginning of his career. His most important writings were written in that language, however, his edition of Euclid, after its first publication in Latin, appeared in English, as did a treatise on conic sections that he wrote for the benefit of his students.
the Simson line does not appear in his work but Poncelet in
Propriétés Projectives says that the theorem was attributed to Simson by Servois in the Gergonne's Journal. It appears that the theorem is due to William Wallace.
The University of St Andrews awarded Simson an honorary Doctorate of Medicine in 1746.
In 1753 Simson noted that, as the Fibonacci numbers increased in magnitude, the ratio between adjacent numbers approached the golden ratio, whose value is
(1 + √5)/2 = 1.6180 . . . . *SAU
1919 Philip Edward Bertrand Jourdain (16 October 1879 – 1 October 1919) was a British logician and follower of Bertrand Russell. He corresponded with Georg Cantor and Gottlob Frege, and took a close interest in the paradoxes related to Russell's paradox, formulating the card paradox version of the liar paradox. He also worked on algebraic logic, and the history of science with Isaac Newton as a particular study. He was London editor for The Monist. *Wik
1924 John Edward Campbell (27 May 1862, Lisburn, Ireland – 1 October 1924, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England) remembered for the Campbell-Baker-Hausdorff theorem which gives a formula for multiplication of exponentials in Lie algebras. *SAU
Campbell made his most notable contribution to mathematics in 1897 by introducing a formula for multiplication of exponentials in Lie algebras. This formula was later elaborated by Henri Poincaré (1899) and Henry Frederick Baker (1902). It was later systematised geometrically by Felix Hausdorff (1906) and became known as Baker-Campbell-Hausdorff formula.
In 1903, Campbell published a book on Introductory Treatise on Lie's Theory of Finite Continuous Transformation Groups where he popularised the ideas of Sophus Lie. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1905, and served as president of the London Mathematical Society from 1918 to 1920. He was tutor to the future literary scholar C. S. Lewis in 1917, assisting Lewis with Responsions in mathematics as part of the entrance requirements for Oxford University/. Campbell was the first mathematician from Oxford who was invited, shortly before his death, by the Cambridge University to examine the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos. *Wik
1972 Francisco José Duarte (6 Jan 1883, 1 Oct 1972) Duarte's most important work in mathematics was done in algebra, number theory and mathematical analysis. His first work in mathematics was about which he presented to the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1907. He published papers on the general solution of a diophantine equation of the third degree x3 + y3 + z3 - 3xyz = v3, simplified Kummer's criterion and gave a simple proof of the impossibility of solving the Fermat equation x3 + y3 + z3 = 0 in nonzero integers. He also observed that the interpolation formula of Everett is a consequence of the interpolation formula of Gauss. In 1908 he published an article where he calculated π to 200 decimal places.
His main three books are: Monograph on the numbers π and e. Historical and bibliographical notes (Spanish) (Bol. Acad. Cien. Fis. Mat. Nat. 11(1948)), with 27 chapters on 250 pages, which contains more information on π and e than has ever before been collected in one place; Lessons on Infinitesimal Analysis (Caracas 1943, 606 pp.) (Spanish) containing material from courses in analysis at UCV during his first three or four years there; and Bibliography of Euclid, Archimedes, Newton (Acad. Cien. Fis. Mat. Nat., Caracas 1963, 163 pp.) (Spanish) which was also done in the 19th century.
Many mathematicians are interested in recreational mathematics. Duarte also contributed to that part of mathematics and proposed problems and solutions to the American Mathematical Monthly for several years, and also to the journal Ciencia y Ingenieria (Science and Engineering) published in Mérida. *SAU
1990 John Stewart Bell FRS (28 June 1928 – 1 October 1990) was a physicist from Northern Ireland (Ulster), and the originator of Bell's theorem, a significant theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories.*Wik
1996 Herbert Karl Johannes Seifert (May 27, 1907, Bernstadt – October 1, 1996, Heidelberg) was a German mathematician known for his work in topology. Seifert did other important work related to knot invariants. In 1934 he published results, using surfaces today called Seifert surfaces, which he used to calculate homological knot invariants. Another topic which Seifert worked on was the homeomorphism problem for 3-dimensional closed manifolds. *SAU
a Seifert surface is an orientable surface whose boundary is a given knot or link. Such surfaces can be used to study the properties of the associated knot or link. For example, many knot invariants are most easily calculated using a Seifert surface.
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
Since it is often much easier to find Gp and the incenter of inscribable polygons, this provides a clever way to find G
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