Wednesday, 8 April 2026

The Origin of "Read Euler..The Master of Us All."

Reposted from 2011:

"Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all."

 Some years ago in my high school class I quoted the famous "Read Euler" quote with the preamble, "As a great mathematician once said, ... and then the quote."..


A couple of days later a student mentioned laughingly that another student had thought the quote was created by me (???a great mathematician???).  The student paused for a minute and then responded, tentatively, "You didn't..(long pause)....did you?".

I was reminded of this because I have recently been learning more about Euler reading articles by Professor Ed Sandifer.. and especially enjoyed a footnote about the origin of the phrase on his article on Euler as a Teacher.


Let us start with the Great Quotation, dubiously attributed to Laplace by Guglielmo Libri about
1846:
Lisez Euler, lisez Euler, c'est notre maître à tous.
We traditionally translate this as
Read Euler, read Euler. He is the master of us all.
This gave Bill Dunham a title befitting his most excellent book, [Dunham 1998] but there are
other ways to translate it. Because maˆ itre =   master, teacher
and "notre … à tous" can mean "of us all" or "notre" can be assigned to modify "maître", leaving "à tous" to mean "all things", other valid translations include:
Read Euler, read Euler. He is our master in all things.
Read Euler, read Euler. He is the teacher of us all.
Read Euler, read Euler. He is our teacher in all things.
etc.
(Arjen Dijksman commented...
Professor Sandifer's column "How Euler did it" is a great source to learn about Euler.
Sandifer's alternative translation of "à tous" is however linguistically incorrect. "A tous" means "of us all".
"He is our master in all things" would be "C'est notre maître en tout" or "...en toutes choses" in French.


The footnote is about the quote at the beginning:
 Libri was a scoundrel, a forger, a book thief and an indifferent mathematician, [Rice 2003] but he did write a decent history of mathematics. In Libri's defense, note that he claims that he heard these words "de sa propre bouche", from Laplace's own mouth, not that Laplace actually wrote them down. [WikiQuote]






On This Day in Math - April 8

   




For Bourbaki, Poincaré was the devil incarnate. For students of chaos and fractals, Poincaré is of course God on Earth.
~Marshall Stone

The 98th day of the year, 98 is the smallest number that starts a sequence of three consecutive numbers with at least 3 prime divisors. (What would be the smallest number to start a sequence of four numbers with at least four prime divisors?)

98 is the sum of fourth powers of the first three integers, 14 + 24 + 34  Only one larger year day is the sum of the first 3 nth powers .

98 is the smallest composite number whose reversal 89 is a Fibonacci prime. (Students might consider variations of this, is there a prime whose reversal is a composite Fibonacci number, or a Fibonacci composite whose reversal is a prime, or .... GO FOR THE GOLD, a Prime Fibonacci number whose reversal is a prime Fibonacci number?)

98 is a ambinumeral, rotating it 180 degrees produces another integer, 86.

98 is a palindrome in base 5 (343) , and base 6 (242

If you take a number and add it to its reversal, such as 104 + 401 = 505, you get a palindrome.  And if you don't, just repeat the process.  75+57 = 132, and 132 + 231= 333.  If you try this process with 97, be patient.  It takes 24 steps to get a palindrome.... but you do get a palindrome.  



EVENTS

1019 Al-Biruni observed an eclipse of the sun at Lamghan, north of Kabul. He wrote:-
"... at sunrise we saw that approximately one-third of the sun was eclipsed and that the eclipse was waning."  The quality and detail of his observations allows his location to be closely determined.

1610 On 8 April Kepler received a copy of Galileo’s Sidereus nuncius, and a few days later the Tuscan ambassador in Prague transmitted Galileo’s request for an opinion about the startling new telescopic discoveries. What a contrast with 1597, when Kepler, an unknown high-school teacher, had sought in vain Galileo’s reaction to his own book! Kepler was now the distinguished imperial mathematician, whose opinion mattered; he responded generously and quickly with a long letter of approval.

He promptly published his letter as dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo; in accepting the new observations with enthusiasm, he also reminded his readers of the earlier history of the telescope, his own work on the regular solids and on possible inhabitants of the moon, and his arguments against an infinite universe. A few months later, in the second of the only three known letters that Galileo wrote directly to Kepler, the Italian astronomer stated, “I thank you because you were the first one, and practically the only one, to have complete faith in my assertions.” *Encyclopedia.com
Thony Christie sent me some corrections on Kepler's introduction to this document:
"I quote from Mario Biagioli's Galileo Courtier:

Kepler's dedication of his Conversation with the Sidereal Messenger to Giuliano de' Medici (the Medici ambassador in Prague […]) offers interesting clues about the ways in which scientific networks were often embedded in noble patronage networks. Kepler acknowledged that he obtained a copy of the Sidereus from Giuliano de' Medici and that, when called to the Medici palace in Prague on April 13 [note date!], he was read Galileo's invitation to respond to the Sidereus, an invitation which was reinforced by the ambassador's "own exhortations". It is important to not that Kepler did not receive the letter from Galileo but that it was read to him by the Medici ambassador.


As you can see the copy of the Sidereus was sent by Galileo to Giuliano de' Medici who gave it to Kepler with what amounted to an order to write a criticism of it.
As always during their rather brief and fragmentary correspondence Galileo's behavior towards Kepler was less than civil."
The University of Oklahoma has a digitized copy of Siderus Nunci with Galileo's signature on the title page



.


1794 Joseph and Mary Priestley sailed from England on April 8, 1794 and after a long and rough passage, reached New York on June 4th. They joined their sons who had preceded them and who were engaged in purchasing land in Pennsylvania where they hoped to found a settlement of English immigrants. Although Priestley was fully informed about this venture and had decided to join them in living in the settlement when it was established, he was not one of the planners and, in fact, was not overly enthusiastic about it.
During the 10 days he was in New York, he was visited by Governor Clinton and other leading citizens and several public expressions of welcome were made. However some of the local clergy used the occasion of Trinity Sunday, June 15th, to preach against Priestley's religious views. They appeared to fear his influence.
On June 18th, Priestley went on to Philadelphia where he was also honored and invited to stay. However, he was determined to press on to Northumberland to join his sons. At this time he seemed to have some idea that he would be able to live in the country, in Northumberland, and make frequent trips into the city of Philadelphia. *Bill Weston, A Brief Biography of Joseph Priestley

Mary Priestley died 17 September 1796. By 1801, Priestley had become so ill that he could no longer write or experiment. He died on the morning of 6 February 1804, aged seventy and was buried at Riverview Cemetery in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. 

  Priestley's epitaph reads:


Return unto thy rest, O my soul, for the
Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee.
I will lay me down in peace and sleep till
I awake in the morning of the resurrection.





1796 Gauss enters in his diary a note that he has proved quadratic reciprocity. He will prove it again seven times in his life. Euler stated the theorem in 1783 without proof. Legendre was the first to p  ublish a proof, but it was fallacious. Gauss became the first to publish a correct proof. The quadratic reciprocity theorem was Gauss's favorite theorem from number theory. He referred to it as the "aureum theorema" (golden theorem). The theorem says that if p and q are distinct odd primes, then the congruences x2=q (mod p) x2=p (mod q)are either both solvable, or both unsolvable except when they are both equal to 3 (mod 4). If they are both equal to 3 (mod 4) then one is solvable and the other is not *Mathworld, Wolfram

*Genial Guass Gottingen


1799 The date of the still uninterpreted cryptic entry "REV. GALEN" in Gauss’s scientific diary. *VFR
There is a previous insertion that also remains uninterpreted.He entered "Vicimus GEGAN" for October 21, 1796.


1829 After having met Niels Henrik Abel in Berlin, August Leopold Crelle had published his work in his journal, and tried to help him acquire a University position. After Abel returned to Norway he lived on gifts and loans that he never repaid. On the 8th of April, Crelle wrote to tell him that the University of Berlin had offered him a Professorship, not knowing that Abel had died of tuberculosis two days earlier. *John Derbyshire, Unknown Quantity




1940 Samuel F. B. Morse appears on a two cent stamp in the U.S.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was an American inventor and painter. He is best known for inventing the single-wire telegraph and Morse Code. Morse's invention was significant because it allowed for near-instant communication around the world. Although he didn't invent the telegraph, he developed it, commercialized it, and invented the code that bears his name. Morse was a Yale graduate who trained as an artist in England. 





1943 The Rockefeller Foundation review announced that the “differential analyzer” at MIT was built at a cost of $130,500.

Original wheel-and-disc integrator from Bush's differential analyzer on display at the MIT Museum, and the complete machine


*MIT EDU



1959  Today in 1959  a team of computer manufacturers, users, and university people led by Grace Hopper meets to discuss the creation of a new programming language that would be called COBOL.  The Painter Flynn.  



In 1947, the largest sunspot group recorded was observed on the sun's southern hemisphere. Its size was estimated at 7 billion square miles, or an area of 6100 millionths of the Sun's visible hemisphere. Sunspots are areas of somewhat cooler surface than the surrounding solar gases, and appear as dark spots on the solar surface. Astronomers measure the sizes of sunspots as millionth fractions of the Sun's visible area. Typically, a big sunspot measures 300 to 500 millionths, whereas the entire surface area of the Earth is only 169 millionths of the solar disk. *TIS 

As with all records, this one was broken on November 23, 2020.   It had 17 sunspots at its peak and covered an area six times the surface of the Earth.


1947 Super Sunspot

1920 solar array



1983  John Sculley is named president and CEO of Apple Computer after Steve Jobs convinced him to leave his position as president of PepsiCo. While Steve Jobs wanted the position of president for himself, then-CEO Mike Markkula did not think Jobs was ready to take on that responsibility.

Jobs wanted Sculley based on his success growing Pepsi’s marketshare against Coke. He wanted that same type of marketing success for Apple against IBM. Part of computer industry lore, Jobs reportedly asked Sculley, “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come with me and change the world?”

Ultimately, Sculley and Jobs entered into a power struggle, Sculley convinced Apple’s board of directors to strip Jobs of all power within the company, and Jobs left Apple. One has to wonder how the computer industry would be different today if Steve Jobs had been given lead of his company in 1983 instead of Apple opting for “adult supervision”. Recent history with companies such as Facebook, Google, and even Apple since Jobs’ return, has shown that visionaries can make great leaders of technology companies. *This Day in Tech History




1991 Java development begins in earnest:
On this day, Sun's Java team moves from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on its "Oak" development project (later re-named "Java.")*CHM

Java was born in June 1991 as a project called "Oak" under the development by a small team of engineers working for Sun Microsystems. They called themselves the Green Team: James Gosling, Mike Sheridan, and Patrick Naughton.

The language was initially called Oak after an oak tree that stood outside Gosling's office. Later the project went by the name Green and was finally renamed Java, from Java coffee, a type of coffee from Indonesia.





2004 Ben Green and Terence Tao published a proof that there are arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions of  prime numbers at arxiv.  The previously open conjecture dates back to work of Waring and Lagrange from the late 18th Century. Paul Erdos had conjectured in 1936, with his lifelong friend Paul Turan, that states that if the sum of the reciprocals of the members of a set A of positive integers diverges, then A contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions.  It was proven by Klaus Roth in 1952, and generalized to arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions by Szemerédi in 1975 in what is now known as Szemerédi's theorem.  

Erdős' conjecture on arithmetic progressions can be viewed as a stronger version of Szemerédi's theorem. Because the sum of the reciprocals of the primes diverges, the Green–Tao theorem on arithmetic progressions is a special case of the conjecture.

Although the proof asserts arbitrarily long such strings, the longest string presently known is 25 primes long 

43142746595714191+23681770*223092870n for n = 0,1, ... ,25.

Ben Green 

Terence Tao



2018 In geometric graph theory, the Hadwiger–Nelson problem, named after Hugo Hadwiger and Edward Nelson, asks for the minimum number of colors required to color the plane such that no two points at distance 1 from each other have the same color. The problem seems to date back to 1950, but there is some uncertainty about how it circulated until it reached Martin Gardner in 1960. At that time it was known that the minimum had to be at least three, as an equilateral triangle with sides of one unit would confirm. Within a year of the Gardner article, the brothers Leo and William Moser demonstrated a graph, now called the Moser Spindle, of seven vertices with each edge one unit in length that proved that a fourth color was necessary.
*Moser Spindle, *P. Honner, Quanta Magazine

It seems that around the same time, 1961 or so, John R. Isbell. demonstrated that using hexagons of "just under a unit diameter" we could demonstrate that the number could not be more than 7, and there it sat, for almost 70 years. Then, in 2018, a amateur mathematician Aubrey de Grey found a 1581-vertex, non-4-colorable unit-distance graph. The proof is computer assisted. Since then lots of people are attacking the problem and they are already whittling down the number of vertices for a five colored graph, but as of this moment, it seems the question is narrowed down to either 5, 6 or 7 colors. Place your bets! *Quanta Magazine, Wikipedia, The Mathematical Coloring Book.


BIRTHS

1608 Honoré Fabri (8 April 1608 in Le Grand Abergement, Ain, France - 8 March 1688 in Rome, Italy)was a French Jesuit who worked on astronomy, physics and mathematics. His lecture
s on natural philosophy were published in 1646 as Tractatus physicus de motu locali. In this work he uses the parallelogram law for forces, correctly applying it to deduce the law of reflection and the motion of a body acted on simultaneously by two forces.*SAU (This seems to be one of the earlier statements of the law)



1732 David Rittenhouse (8 Apr 1732; died 26 Jun 1796 at age 64) American astronomer, instrument maker and inventor who was an early observer of the atmosphere of Venus. For observations for the transit of Venus on 3 Jun 1769, he constructed a high precision pendulum clock, an astronomical quadrant, an equal altitude instrument, and an astronomical transit. He was the first one in America to put spider web as cross-hairs in the focus of his telescope. He is generally credited with inventing the vernier compass and possibly the automatic needle lifter. He was professor of astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. Benjamin Franklin consulted him on various occasions. For Thomas Jefferson he standardized the foot by pendulum measurements in a project to establish a decimal system of weights and measures.*TIS I recently discovered a blog about Rittenhouse at The Renaissance Mathematicus by the wonderful Thony Christie that tells a wonderful story about Rittenhouse I had never heard.  So as not to spoil it, I'll tease you with the last line: "the man who worked so hard to witness a once in a lifetime event and then missed it."





1779 Johann Salamo Christoph Schweigger (8 Apr 1779; 6 Sep 1857 at age 78)
German physicist who invented the galvanometer (1820), a device to measure the strength of an electric current. He developed the principle from Oersted's experiment (1819) which showed that current in a wire will deflect a compass needle. Schweigger realized that suggested a basic measuring instrument, since a stronger current would produce a larger deflection, and he increased the effect by winding the wire many times in a coil around the magnetic needle. He named this instrument a “galvanometer” in honour of Luigi Galvani, the professor who gave Volta the idea for the first battery. Thomas Seebeck (1770-1831) named the innovative coil, Schweigger's multiplier. It became the basis of moving coil instruments and loudspeakers. *TIS

Schweigger's multiplier 



1903 Marshall Harvey Stone (April 8, 1903, New York City – January 9, 1989, Madras, India) was an American mathematician who contributed to real analysis, functional analysis, and the study of Boolean algebras. He is best known for the Stone-Weierstrass theorem on uniform approximation of continuous functions by polynomials.
Stone was the son of Harlan Fiske Stone, who was the Chief Justice of the United States in 1941–1946. Marshall Stone’s family expected him to become a lawyer like his father, but he became enamored of mathematics while he was a Harvard University undergraduate. He completed a Harvard Ph.D. in 1926, with a thesis on differential equations that was supervised by George David Birkhoff. Between 1925 and 1937, he taught at Harvard, Yale University, and Columbia University. Stone was promoted to a full Professor at Harvard in 1937. Stone did an outstanding job of making the Chicago department eminent again, mainly by hiring Paul Halmos, André Weil, Saunders Mac Lane, Antoni Zygmund, and Shiing-Shen Chern.*Wik



1903 Aurel Friedrich Wintner (8 April 1903, Budapest, Hungary – 15 January 1958, Baltimore, Maryland, USA) was a mathematician noted for his research in mathematical analysis, number theory, differential equations and probability theory. He was one of the founders of probabilistic number theory. He received his Ph.D from the University of Leipzig in 1928 under the guidance of Leon Lichtenstein. *Wik
In 1929 he published the first proofs of the basic facts in Hilbert space— the fundamental mathematical construct in the then-developing physical theory of quantum mechanics. [DSB 14, 454] *VFR



2020 Ann Elizabeth Fennema (née Hammer; April 8, 1928 – December 20, 2021) was an American educator specializing in the teaching of mathematics.

Fennema was born in El Dorado, Kansas, on April 8, 1928, and attended the local Methodist college for two years, before transferring to Kansas State University where she majored in psychology. She received her master's degree in education from the University of Wisconsin in 1952.

In 1962 Kathryn Clarenbach (a founder of NOW) sent out a questionnaire inquiring of unemployed or underemployed wives of university professors who were interested in a career. As a result of this process Fennema was asked to be a supervisor of student teachers. In this position she worked for Vere DeVault who encouraged her to pursue a doctorate in education and served as her dissertation adviser. She began in 1962 and received the degree in 1969 in curriculum and instruction in mathematics education. In 1962 "new math" was in vogue and many educators were thinking deeply about how to teach mathematical understanding to students. Fennema recognized the importance of a good foundation in mathematics was critical for all students leading to her interest in math education.

After finishing her PhD she was hired as a half time, non-tenured track, position. In 1970 the University created part-time tenured-track positions and Fennema obtained one of the positions.

Fennema and Julia Sherman applied for a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) research grant to examine factors in mathematics classroom that might be associated with gender, resulting in the "Fennema-Sherman studies". Fennema and her associates have spent over 25 years researching interactions of girls and young women in mathematics classrooms. One outgrowth of this was a questionnaire, the "Fennema-Sherman Scales" to enable researchers to gather data on the attitudes of young women towards mathematics, and the results from different sites compared. She and her colleagues have also developed an innovative method of teaching mathematics called Cognitively Guided Instruction. The Cognitively Guided Instruction (CGI) philosophy is detailed in Children's Mathematics which she co-authored with Thomas Carpenter, Megan Loef Franke, Linda Levi, and Susan Empson.

She retired from the University of Wisconsin at the end of the 1995–1996 academic year.

Fennema received the first Annual Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research on Women and Education from the American Educational Research Association (Special Interest Group for Research on Women in Education) in 1985. She received the Dora Helen Skypek Award from the Association for Women and Mathematics Education in 1986.

She received a Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Mount Mary College in 1994. She received the 2021 National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) Lifetime Achievement Award. *Wik




1929 François Georges René Bruhat ( 8 April 1929 – 17 July 2007) was a French mathematician who worked on algebraic groups. The Bruhat order of a Weyl group, the Bruhat decomposition, and the Schwartz–Bruhat functions are named after him.

He was the son of physicist (and associate director of the École Normale Supérieure during the occupation) Georges Bruhat, and brother of physicist Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat.




1944 Michael George Aschbacher (born April 8, 1944) is an American mathematician best known for his work on finite groups. He was a leading figure in the completion of the classification of finite simple groups in the 1970s and 1980s. It later turned out that the classification was incomplete, because the case of quasithin groups had not been finished. This gap was fixed by Aschbacher and Stephen D. Smith in 2004, in a pair of books comprising about 1300 pages. Aschbacher is currently the Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Mathematics at the California Institute of Technology. *Wik






DEATHS

1461 Georg von Peuerbach, (30 May 1423, 8 Apr 1461 at age 37) Austrian mathematician and astronomer who promoted the use of Arabic numerals (introduced 250 years earlier in place of Roman numerals), especially in a table of sines he calculated with unprecedented accuracy. He died before this project was finished, and his pupil, Regiomontanus continued it until his own death. Peuerbach was a follower of Ptolomy's astronomy. He insisted on the solid reality of the crystal spheres of the planets, going somewhat further than in Ptolomy's writings. He calculated tables of eclipses in Tabulae Ecclipsium, observed Halley's comet in Jun 1456 and the lunar eclipse of 3 Sep 1457 from a site near Vienna. Peurrbach wrote on astronomy, his observations and devised astronomical instruments.*TIS
Peuerbach's Theoricae Novae Planetarum, (New Theories of the Planets- below) was composed about 1454 was published in 1473 by Regiomontanus' printing press in Nuremberg. While the book was involved in attempting a technical resolution of the theories of Eudoxus and Ptolemy, Peuerbach claimed that the movement of the planets was determined by the Sun, and this has been seen as a step towards the Copernican theory. This book was read by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler and became the standard astronomical text well into the seventeenth century.

1895 Richard Dudgeon, a Scottish-American machinist, died Apr. 8, 1895, at the age of around 76; his birth date is unknown.  Dudgeon came to New York at a young age from Scotland and, being mechanically gifted, was soon working in various shops in New York City. In 1851, he invented what he called a "portable hydraulic press", which indeed it was, although we would now call it a hydraulic jack. This was the first new heavy-lifting device since the jack-screw, which the Romans had used 1800 years earlier. Work the pump-handle a few dozen times and one could raise 100 tons into the air (or slowly lower it to the ground). When Henry Gorringe, in 1879-81, lowered the Cleopatra Needle obelisk in Alexandria, Egypt, and then raised it again in Central Park in New York City, he used two Dudgeon jacks to do the lowering and raising (first image;  you can see both jacks on top of the stacks of wooden timbers, just below the obelisk; a third Dudgeon jack was encased in lead and buried in the time capsule beneath the obelisk in Central Park).

Dudgeon's other technical innovation was a steam road carriage. He was not the first to make one (see our post on Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot), but his seems to have been the first that was actually functional. It was built by 1857 and Dudgeon would drive it from his home to his shop, in spite of the protests of passers-by and horses (he said he invented the device because he wanted to end the cruel treatment of horses by carriage owners, but I am not sure the horses appreciated this). Unfortunately for Dudgeon, in 1858 he put his wagon on temporary display in the New York Crystal Palace, built in 1853 in emulation of the original Crystal Palace in London, and on Oct. 5, 1858, the strangely flammable steel and glass fabric of the New York Palace burned to the ground, taking the steam carriage with it.*LH
Obelisk in Alexandria, intended for New York City, being lowered and supported by two Dudgeon hydraulic jacks, from Henry Gorringe, Egyptian Obelisks, 1882, 






1913 Julius (Gyula )König (16 December 1849 – 8 April 1913) was a Hungarian mathematician. His mathematical publications in foreign languages appeared under the name Julius König. His son Dénes Kőnig is the famous graph theorist. Kőnig worked in many mathematical fields. His work on polynomial ideals, discriminants and elimination theory can be considered as a link between Leopold Kronecker and David Hilbert as well as Emmy Noether. Later on his ideas were simplified considerably, to the extent that today they are only of historical interest.
Kőnig already considered material influences on scientific thinking and the mechanisms which stand behind thinking.*Wik One of his early ideas was a paper of 1872 which looked at intuitive ways to prove the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries. He published many research papers in analysis, but his greatest significance in this area comes from the excellent textbooks which he wrote on the topic.*VFR



1919 Roland Baron von Eötvös (27 Jul 1848, 8 Apr 1919 at age 70)was a Hungarian physicist who studied at Heidelberg where he was taught by Kirchhoff, Helmholtz and Bunsen. Eötvös introduced the concept of molecular surface tension and published on capillarity (1876-86). For the rest of his life he concentrated on study of the Earth's gravitational field. He developed the Eötvös torsion balance, long unsurpassed in precision, which gave experimental proof that inertial mass and gravitational mass, to a high degree of accuracy, are equivalent - which later was a major principle of Albert Einstein.*TIS






1925 Frank Stephen Baldwin (10 Apr 1838, 8 Apr 1925 at age 87) American inventor best-known for his development of the Monroe calculator. Baldwin began in 1870 to experiment with the design of mechanical calculators. The device was patented and marketed in 1875 (No. 159,244). The improved 1875 machine initiated the development of the second fundamental principle in rotary four-rules calculators which became known as "The Baldwin Principle." Baldwin developed many more calculators during his life. His last model was the forerunner of the Monroe machine. The Monroe Calculator Company was formed in 1912 and was a pioneer in electric adding machines. The Monroe Calculator was used extensively in the 1930's. *TIS




1968 Harold Delos Babcock (24 Jan 1882, 8 Apr 1968 at age 86) American astronomer who with his son, Horace, invented the solar magnetograph (1951), for detailed observation of the Sun's magnetic field. With their magnetograph the Babcocks measured the distribution of magnetic fields over the solar surface to unprecedented precision and discovered magnetically variable stars. In 1959 Harold Babcock announced that the Sun reverses its magnetic polarity periodically. Babcock's precise laboratory studies of atomic spectra allowed others to identify the first "forbidden" lines in the laboratory and to discover the rare isotopes of oxygen. With C.E. St. John he greatly improved the precision of the wavelengths of some 22,000 lines in the solar spectrum, referring them to newly-determined standards. *TIS
A new instrument for measuring and recording weak magnetic fields on the surface of the sun has been developed for use with the 150-foot solar telescope and 75-foot spectrograph of the Hale Solar Laboratory. Principal features include: a superior grating of high resolving power for use in the fifth-order spectrum; an electro-o tic analyzer for polarization; a double-slit detector for the longitudinal Zeeman effect; and a self-sync ronous system by which the disk of the sun is scanned in a raster of parallel traces, the results as to magnetic intensity and polarity being presented conformally on the screen of a cathode-ray tube and recorded by a camera. The noise level (about 0.1 gauss) is such that fields of the order of 1 gauss can be recorded readily. The method of calibration is described, and the possibility is pointed out of using the instrument, with a slight optical modification, for studying small Doppler shifts in the sun's atmosphere.



Magnetogram




2005, Douglas Geoffrey Northcott, FRS (31 December 1916, London – 8 April 2005) was a British mathematician who worked on ideal theory.
... while a prisoner of war, ... Northcott was able to think about mathematics; indeed, thinking about mathematics probably helped him survive his war experiences. Sometimes he tried to reconstruct proofs of results that he had learnt as a student; at other; he attempted to build up a theory of integration for functions with values in a Banach space. He recorded his results about this theory in a notebook that he kept in his gas-mask case. On one occasion his gas-mask was stolen and he never saw it again, and so he had to start again. His second notebook survived the war and, in due course, provided material for his Ph.D. thesis and his fellowship dissertation. *SAU



2008 Graham Higman (19 Jan 1917 in Louth, Lincolnshire, England - 8 April 2008 in Oxford, England) is known for his outstanding work in all aspects of the theory of groups. He published on units in group rings, the subject of his doctoral thesis, in 1940 then there was a break in his publication record during the time he worked in the Meteorological Office. His 1948 papers are on somewhat different topics, being on topological spaces and linkages. They show the influences of Henry Whitehead and, to a lesser extent, Max Newman. *SAU



2024 Peter Ware Higgs (29 May 1929 -  8 April 2024) is an English theoretical physicist, the namesake of the Higgs boson. In the late 1960s, Higgs and others proposed a mechanism that would endow particles with mass, even though they appeared originally in a theory - and possibly in the Universe! - with no mass at all. The basic idea is that all particles acquire their mass through interactions with an all-pervading field, called the Higgs field. which is carried by the Higgs bosons. This mechanism is an important part of the Standard Model of particles and forces, for it explains the masses of the carriers of the weak force, responsible for beta-decay and for nuclear reactions that fuel the Sun. The particle was discovered on 4 July 2012 at the Large Hadron Accelerator.

On April 8 of 2024 just as the moon was totally darkening the skis over parts of the U S, Peter Higgs died at home in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was 94.





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

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

On This Day in Math - April 7

   





The 97th day of the year; The number formed by the concatenation of odd numbers from one to 97 is prime. (1+3+5+7+9+11+13+15+17+... 93+95+97  quick students, how many digits will it have?) *Prime Curios

And from Cliff Pickover, 97 is the largest prime that we can ever find that is less than the sum of square of its digits 92 + 72  > 97

There are 97 leap days every 400 years in the Gregorian Calendar

97 is the smallest prime that has a prime alphabetical value in its Roman numerals-based representation (XCVII): 24 + 3 + 22 + 9 + 9 = 67 *Number Gossip 

The longest whole-number name consisting entirely of alternating consonants and vowels is NINETY-SEVEN. However, if all integers are allowed, NEGATIVE NINETY-SEVEN would qualify.

Several  more number facts about 97 at the Extended Number Facts pages.




EVENTS

1646  Torricelli sends "The geometry of indivisibles" To Michelangelo Ricci.  He communicated the “universal theorem,” still considered the most general possible even today, which allows determination of the center of gravity of any figure through the relation between two integrals. *Encylopedia.com (Torricelli would use this method to find the volume of Torricelli's Trumpet (today often called Gabriel's Horn).  A finite solid volume with an infinite surface area.







*Weisstein, Eric W. "Gabriel's Horn." From MathWorld



1666 Perhaps the kindest rejection letter ever, John Pell to Samuel Morland. British Polymath Morland had considered writing a book on the "quadrature of curvlinear spaces" and sent a sample to Pell, who responded:

*A brief account of the life, writings, and inventions of Sir. S. Morland


1696  John Bernoulli, in a letter to Leibniz, becomes the first to use the term "integral". Bernoulli had preferred the letter I  for the integration symbol, but deferred to Leibniz preference, and adopted the script s, \( \int \) .  Florian Cajori, The History of Notation in the Calculus    (However.. I found this citation also credited to Cajori, :The word INTEGRAL first appeared in print by Jacob Bernoulli (1654-1705) in May 1690 in Acta eruditorum, page 218. He wrote, "Ergo et horum Integralia aequantur" (Cajori vol. 2, page 182; Ball). According to the DSB this represents the first use of integral "in its present mathematical sense."

Jacob Bernoulli
Johann (John) Bernoulli



1794 Joseph Priestley  forever left England and traveled to the United States. Only a few years before, on 14 Jul 1791, his laboratory, home and library were burned to destruction by a mob of people angry at his support of the French Revolution. His French colleague, Lavoisier, was executed a week  after Priestley left England. Priestley's discovery of oxygen was 20 years earlier, on 1 Aug 1774. During the last years of his life in America he spent his time quietly writing, and furthering the cause of Unitarianism in the new nation.

Thomas Jefferson to Joseph Priestley on 21 March 1801

Dear Sir

I learnt some time ago that you were in Philadelphia, but that it was only for a fortnight, & supposed you were gone. it was not till yesterday I rec would write eived information that you were still there, had been very ill but were on the recovery. I sincerely rejoice that you are so. yours is one of the few lives precious to mankind, & for the continuance of which every thinking man is solicitous.


Priestly is buried in Riverview Cemetery Northumberland, Northumberland County, Pennsylvania, USA







1794  On March 28, 1794, the president of the French commission that developed the metric system, Joseph Louis Lagrange, proposed using the day (French jour) as the base unit of time, with divisions déci-jour and centi-jour. 
In 1795, the French National Convention passed a law introducing the metric system, putting Legendre in charge of the transition to the new system. The final system, as introduced in 1795, included units for length, area, dry volume, liquid capacity, weight or mass, and currency, but not time. Decimal time of day had been introduced in France two years earlier, but was set aside at the same time the metric system was inaugurated, and did not follow the metric pattern of a base unit and prefixed units. 
On 22nd July 1799 the definitive standards of the metric system, the platinum metre and the platinum kilogramme, were ceremonially deposited in the French National Archives, and on 10th December 1799 a law was passed confirming their status as the only legal standards for measuring length and mass in France.

 (The combination metric and decimal clock is at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, U.K. The metric is on the outside scale, the duodecimal is on the small  enamel dial inset above the center




*thepainterflynn
1827 John Walker, an English chemist, sells the first friction match that he had invented the previous year. Walker's “Friction Lights” had tips coated with a potassium chloride–antimony sulfide paste, which ignited when scraped between a fold of sandpaper. (HT the painter flynn)  The price of a box of 50 matches was one shilling. With each box was supplied a piece of sandpaper, folded double, through which the match had to be drawn to ignite it. He named the matches "Congreves" in honour of the inventor and rocket pioneer, Sir William Congreve. He did not divulge the exact composition of his matches.

Two and a half years after Walker's invention was made public, Isaac Holden arrived, independently, at the same idea of coating wooden splinters with Sulphur. The exact date of his discovery, according to his own statement, was October 1829. Previously to this date, Walker's sales-book contains an account of no fewer than 250 sales of friction matches, the first entry bearing the date 7 April 1827. Already comfortably well off, he refused to patent his invention, despite being encouraged to by Michael Faraday and others, making it freely available for anyone to make. He received neither fame nor wealth for his invention, although he was able to retire some years later. The credit for his invention was attributed only after his death.
Following the ideas laid out by the French chemist, Charles Sauria, who in 1830 invented the first phosphorus-based match by replacing the antimony sulfide in Walker’s matches with white phosphorus, matches were first patented in the United States in 1836, in Massachusetts, being smaller in size and safer to use. White phosphorus was later banned for public usage because of its toxicity. Today's modern matches were created by the Swedish chemist, Gustaf Erik Pasch.*Wik

1795, France adopted by law, the metre as the unit of length and the base of the metric system. Since there had been no uniformity of French weights and measures prior to the Revolution, the Academy of Sciences had been charged on 8 May 1790 to organise a better system. Delambre and Méchain measured an arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona, so that the metre could be defined as one ten-millionth part of the distance between the poles and the equator. *TIS
One of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’, or standard metre bars, can be found below a ground-floor window on the Ministry of Justice in Paris (Credit: PjrTravel/Alamy)






1880 Charles Darwin sent a letter to Francis Galton to call his attention to a letter and circular on “a queer subject” (fingerprinting) from Henry Faulds. Darwin suggests that Galton might want to present it at the Anthropological Institute, which he did. In his response the next day Galton says that he had taken several thumb prints several years before after “having heard of the Chinese plan with criminals.”. *Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton
Galton



1921 Albert Einstein attended a lecture on relativity at City College, New York.  The speaker was Edward Kasner, the mathematician who introduced the term "Googol" (10^100).
Einstein praised Kasner's talk and spoke for 20 minutes afterward. *Paul Halpern





1940  Booker T. Washington becomes the first African American to be depicted on a United States postage stamp.
*The Painter Flynn


1953 IBM 701 formally dedicated at a luncheon at which Oppenheimer was the principal speaker. It used electrostatic storage tubes, a magnetic drum, and magnetic tapes. In all, 19 of these ma­chines were built, and IBM was launched into the new world of electronic computers. [Goldstein, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, p. 328]*VFR
IBM 701 operator's console




1964 IBM Announces "System 360" Computer Family:
IBM announces the release of its "System 360" mainframe computer architecture--embodied in five new models--launching its most successful computer system of all time. Called the "360" because it was meant to address all possible sizes and types of customer with one unified software-compatible architecture, the 360 family of machines generated in excess of $100 billion in revenue for IBM.*CHM



1970 The Netherlands issued a set of five stamps designed with the aid of a computer. Journal of Recreational Mathematics, 4(1971), 20–23, . *VFR


1978 An editorial in the Pensacola Journal on minimum competency in English and mathematics stated, “After all, if you give the test to four students and four flunk, that’s a 50 percent failure rate.” [The AMATYC Journal, 13(1979), 59]

1981 The fastest computation of the 13th root of a 100-digit number is in 1 minute and 28.8 seconds by Willem Klein. [Guinness]

1989 To start his after-dinner remarks at a meeting of the Ohio Section of the MAA, Gerald Alexanderson told the following story that he had heard from Polya, who heard it from Lebesgue: At the coliseum in Rome the emperor ordered a lion to be brought into the arena with a Christian. The Christian whispered something in the lion’s ear and the lion became meek and whimpered away. This scene was repeated with increasingly ferocious lions. Finally the emperor told the Christian that he could go free if he would tell him what he was saying to the lion. The response was truly frightening: “After dinner you have to give a speech.”







BIRTHS

1768 François Joseph Français (7 April 1768 in Saverne, Bas-Rhin, France - 30 Oct 1810 in Mainz, Germany)  Much of François Français's work was published after his death by his brother who added to it in a way to make the contribution of each hard to distinguish. François worked on partial differential equations and his memoir of 1795 on this topic was developed further and presented to the Académie des Sciences in 1797. Lacroix praised Français' work and described it as making a major contribution to the study of partial differential equations; however, it was not published.*SAU


1809 James Glaisher FRS (7 April 1809 – 7 February 1903) was an English meteorologist, aeronaut and astronomer.

Born in Rotherhithe, the son of a London watchmaker, Glaisher was a junior assistant at the Cambridge Observatory from 1833 to 1835[2] before moving to the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, where he served as Superintendent of the Department of Meteorology and Magnetism at Greenwich for 34 years.

In 1845, Glaisher published his dew point tables for the measurement of humidity. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1849.

He was a founding member of the Meteorological Society (1850) and the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain (1866). He was president of the Royal Meteorological Society from 1867 to 1868. Glaisher was elected a member of The Photographic Society, later the Royal Photographic Society, in 1854 and served as the society's president for 1869–1874 and 1875–1892. He remained a member until his death. He was also President of the Royal Microscopical Society. He is most famous as a pioneering balloonist. Between 1862 and 1866, usually with Henry Tracey Coxwell as his co-pilot, Glaisher made numerous ascents to measure the temperature and humidity of the atmosphere at the greatest altitudes attainable at that time.

Their ascent on 5 September 1862 broke the world record for altitude but he passed out around 8,800 metres (28,900 feet) before a reading could be taken. One of the pigeons making the trip with him died. Estimates suggest that he rose to more than 9,500 metres (31,200 feet) and as much as 10,900 metres (35,800 feet) above sea level. Glaisher lost consciousness during the ascent and Coxwell lost all sensation in his hands. The valve-line had become entangled so he was unable to release the mechanism; with great effort, he climbed onto the rigging and was finally able to release the vent before losing consciousness. This allowed the balloon to descend to a lower altitude.

The two made additional flights. According to the Smithsonian Institution, Glaisher "brought along delicate instruments to measure the temperature, barometric pressure and chemical composition of the air. He even recorded his own pulse at various altitudes".

In 1871, Glaisher arranged for the publication of his book about the balloon flights, Travels in the Air, a collection of reports from his experiments. To ensure that numerous members of the general public would learn from his experiences, he included "detailed drawings and maps, colorful accounts of his adventures and vivid descriptions of his precise observations", according to one report.  

He died in Croydon, Surrey in 1903, aged 93. *Wik

James Glaisher (left) and Henry Tracey Coxwell Ballooning in 1864





1823 Guillaume-Jules Hoüel (April 7, 1823 in Thaon; June 14, 1886 in Périers) was a French mathematician. He entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1843. He originally did research on celestial mechanics, but later became interested in Non-Euclidean geometry and corresponded with Joseph Tilly.*Wik
Hoüel became interested in non-euclidean geometry once he had been made aware of the work of Bolyai and Lobachevsky. He published translations of many important works by Bolyai, Beltrami, Helmholtz and Riemann. He corresponded with Tilly on non-euclidean geometry. *SAU



1866 Erik Ivar Fredholm (April 7, 1866 – August 17, 1927)  Swedish mathematician who is remembered for Fredholm integral equations with applications in mathematical physics and actuarial science. His first paper (1890) was on a special class of functions inspired by the heat equation. His 1898 doctoral dissertation involved a study of partial differential equations motivated by an equilibrium problem in elasticity. Fredhlom also had a career in actuarial science and from 1902 onwards he studyied various questions in this area, including an elegant formula he proposed to determine the surrender value of a life insurance policy. He built a machine to solve differential equations. David Hilbert extended one of Fredholm's integral equations discoving Hilbert spaces on which would be built the quantum theory.*TIS





1897 Tatsujiro Shimizu (清水 辰次郎, Shimizu Tatsujirō, 7 April 1897 – 8 November 1992) was a Japanese mathematician working in the field of complex analysis. He was the founder of the Japanese Association of Mathematical Sciences.
Shimizu graduated from the Department of Mathematics, School of Science, Tokyo Imperial University in 1924, and stayed there working as a staff member. In 1932 he moved to Osaka Imperial University and became a professor. He made contributions to the establishment of the Department of Mathematics there. In 1949, Shimizu left Osaka and took up a professorship at Kobe University. After two years, he moved again to Osaka Prefectural University. From 1961 he was a professor at the Tokyo University of Science.[2][3]

In 1948, seeing the difficulty in publication of paper in mathematics, Shimizu started a new journal Mathematica Japonicae, for papers of pure and applied mathematics in general, on his own funds. The journal served as the foundation of the Japanese Association of Mathematical Sciences.
Shimizu remained active in mathematics into old age. He gave talks at the meeting of the Mathematical Society of Japan until 90 years old. He died in Uji City, Kyoto Prefecture, on November 8, 1992, at the age 95. *Wik


1923 Peter John Hilton (7 April 1923 – 6 November 2010) was a British mathematician, noted for his contributions to homotopy theory and for code-breaking during the Second World War. Hilton's principal research interests were in algebraic topology, homological algebra, categorical algebra, and mathematics education. He published 15 books and over 600 articles in these areas, some jointly with colleagues.*Wik




1959 Leopoldo Luis Cabo Penna Franca (7 April 1959, 19 September 2012) was a Brazilian mathematician who had a major impact in the development and analysis of innovative finite element methods. He worked mainly on stabilised methods for fluids, acoustics and solids, residual-free methods, and enriched methods for transport equations.
After the award of his Master's Degree, Franca wished to continue to study for a Ph.D. supported by CAPES and was able to undertake research at Stanford University in California.  Before the award of his Ph.D., Franca had over ten papers in print. His early papers were written with several fellow students and staff in the Division of Applied Mechanics, Durand Building, Stanford University. These included Franca's thesis advisor Thomas J R Hughes and Michel Mallet, Marc Balestra, Isaac Harari, together with the Brazilian post-doctoral student Abimael Fernando Dourado Loula who had been awarded his doctorate by the Federal University in Rio de Janeiro in 1979. 
In 2011 he briefly joined National Laboratory for Scientific Computing at the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia but, later in the same year, he joined the new IBM Research Laboratory in Brazil, the first IBM Research Laboratory in the Southern Hemisphere. It was established in June 2010, with locations in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Ulisses Mello, engineer and associate director at IBM Research, Brazil, led the Smarter Natural Resources & Discovery strategic group and it was this group that Franca joined as a senior research scientist. He worked on projects involving applications of computational mathematics and mechanics to the oil industry. While working for IBM, Franca was one of six members of staff who applied for a patent for Method to assess the impact of existing fractures and faults for reservoir management on 9 November 2012. Sadly Franca had died two months before the application for the patent was filed. *SAU



*SAU




DEATHS

1823 Jacques-Alexandre-César Charles 
(12 Nov 1746, 7 Apr 1823 at age 76) French mathematician, physicist, and inventor. When Benjamin Franklin visited France in 1779, Charles was inspired to study physics. He soon became an eloquent speaker to non-scientific audiences. His lectures and demonstrations attracted notable patrons and helped popularize Franklin's theory of electricity and other new scientific concepts. With Nicolas and Anne-Jean Robert, he made several balloon ascents, and was the first to use hydrogen for balloon inflation (1783). Charles invented most of the equipment that is still used in today's balloons.
 About 1787 he developed Charles's law concerning the thermal expansion of gases that for a gas at constant pressure, its volume is directly proportional to its absolute temperature. *TIS
Charles's law (also known as the law of volumes), describing how gases tend to expand when heated, was first published by natural philosopher Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac in 1802, but he credited it to unpublished work by Charles, and named the law in his honor. 
 Around 1787 Charles did an experiment where he filled five balloons to the same volume with different gases. He then raised the temperature of the balloons to 80 °C (not at constant temperature) and noticed that they all increased in volume by the same amount. This experiment was referenced by Gay-Lussac in 1802 when he published a paper on the precise relationship between the volume and temperature of a gas. Charles' law states that under constant pressure, an ideal gas' volume is proportional to its absolute temperature. The volume of a gas at constant pressure increases linearly with the absolute temperature of the gas. The formula he created was V1/T1 = V2/T2.

*Wik

1889 Paul David Gustav du Bois-Reymond (2 December 1831 – 7 April 1889) was a German mathematician who was born in Berlin and died in Freiburg. He was the brother of Emil du Bois-Reymond.
His thesis was concerned with the mechanical equilibrium of fluids. He worked on the theory of functions and in mathematical physics. His interests included Sturm–Liouville theory, integral equations, variational calculus, and Fourier series. In this latter field, he was able in 1873 to construct a continuous function whose Fourier series is not convergent (more specifically, that diverges at every point). His lemma defines a sufficient condition to guarantee that a function vanishes almost everywhere.
Du Bois-Reymond also established that a trigonometric series that converges to a continuous function at every point is the Fourier series of this function.
He developed a theory of infinitesimals in Über die Paradoxen des Infinitär-Calcüls ("On the paradoxes of the infinitary calculus") in 1877. He wrote,
The infinitely small is a mathematical quantity and has all its properties in common with the finite ... A belief in the infinitely small does not triumph easily. Yet when one thinks boldly and freely, the initial distrust will soon mellow into a pleasant certainty ... A majority of educated people will admit an infinite in space and time, and not just an "unboundedly large". But they will only with difficulty believe in the infinitely small, despite the fact that the infinitely small has the same right to existence as the infinitely large ...
*Wik



1933 Raymond Edward Alan Christopher Paley,(7 January 1907 – 7 April 1933)  was killed at age 26 in an avalanche while skiing near Banff, Alberta, Canada. G. H. Hardy wrote of this young analyst: “There is something very intimidating to an older man in such youthful quickness and power, and of all the people who frightened me when I came back to Cambridge, Paley was the man who frightened me the most.” [Collected Papers of G. H. Hardy, vol. 7, p. 745.]*VFR (He was buried in Banff)
His contributions include the Paley construction for Hadamard matrices (closely related to the Paley graphs in graph theory) and his collaboration with Norbert Wiener in the Paley–Wiener theorem (harmonic analysis). He collaborated with A. Zygmund on Fourier series (see also Paley–Zygmund inequality) and worked with J. E. Littlewood on what became known as Littlewood–Paley theory, an application of real-variable techniques in complex analysis. 
Paley graphs are an important family of graphs in combinatorics and graph theory. They are examples of quasi-random graphs: explicit, deterministic networks exhibiting properties we typically expect to see asymptotically in random graphs.
Consider a prime power p congruent to 1 (mod 4), and let vertices be the elements of the finite field of order p.  Two distinct vertices are adjacent if their difference is a non-zero square in the field.  This is the p–Paley graph.

For example, in the case of p = 5, the finite field has elements 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, and the non-zero squares are 1 and 4 (which equals -1 (mod 5)). So differences should be 1 or -1. Thus, in the 5-Paley graph each vertex i is adjacent to i+1 and i-1 (mod 5). This is just the 5-cycle, as depicted below. *Wik





1934 Ernst Paul Heinz Prüfer (10 Nov 1896 in Wilhelmshaven, Germany - 7 April 1934 in Münster, Germany)proved important results about abelian groups.*SAU
He worked on abelian groups, algebraic numbers, knot theory and Sturm-Liouville theory. His advisor was Issai Schur.
He is remembered for the Prüfer sequence (also known as a Prüfer code; it has broad applications in graph theory and network theory).*Wik




1986 : Leonid Vitalyevich Kantorovich (19 Jan 1912, 7 Apr 1986 at age 74)  Soviet mathematician and economist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize for Economics with Tjalling Koopmans for their work on the optimal allocation of scarce resources. Kantorovich's background was entirely in mathematics but he showed a considerable feel for the underlying economics to which he applied the mathematical techniques. He was one of the first to use linear programming as a tool in economics and this appeared in a publication Mathematical methods of organising and planning production which he published in 1939. The mathematical formulation of production problems of optimal planning was presented here for the first time and the effective methods of their solution and economic analysis were proposed *TIS




2014  James Alexander "Sandy" Green FRS (26 February 1926 – 7 April 2014) was a mathematician and Professor at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick, who worked in the field of representation theory.
He was born in February 1926 in Rochester, New York, but moved to Toronto with his emigrant Scottish parents later that year. The family returned to Britain in May 1935 when his father, Frederick C. Green, took up the Drapers Professorship of French at the University of Cambridge.
He won a scholarship to the University of St Andrews and matriculated aged 16 in 1942. He took an ordinary BSc in 1944, and then, after scientific service in the war, was awarded a BSc Honours in 1947. He gained his PhD at St John's College, Cambridge in 1951, under the supervision of Philip Hall and David Rees.
In the summer of 1944, he was conscripted for national scientific service at the age of eighteen, and was he was assigned to work at Bletchley Park, where he acted as a human "computer" carrying out calculations in Hut F, the "Newmanry", a department led by Max Newman, which used special-purpose Colossus computers to assist in breaking German naval codes.
His first lecturing post (1950) was at the University of Manchester, where Newman was his Head of department. In 1964 he became a Reader at the University of Sussex, and then in 1965 was appointed as a professor at the newly formed Mathematics Institute at Warwick University, where he led the algebra group. He spent several periods as a visiting academic in the United States, beginning with a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey in 1960–61, as well as similar visits to universities in France, Germany and Portugal.[citation needed] After retiring from Warwick he became a member of the faculty and Professor Emeritus at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Oxford, in whose meetings he participated actively. His final publication was produced at the age of eighty.
Green found all the characters of general linear groups over finite fields (Green 1955) and invented the Green correspondence in modular representation theory. Both Green functions in the representation theory of groups of Lie type and Green's relations in the area of semigroups are named after him. His final publication (2007) was a revised and augmented edition of his 1980 work, Polynomial Representations of GL(n).
Green met his wife, Margaret Lord, at Bletchley Park, where she worked as a Colossus operator, also in the Newmanry section (Hut F). The couple married in August 1950, and have two daughters and a son. Up to his death, he lived in Oxford.
He was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1968 and the Royal Society in 1987 and was awarded two London Mathematical Society prizes: the Senior Berwick Prize in 1984 and the de Morgan Medal in 2001.





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