Instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the calendar has 365 days with an extra day every four years (the leap year) except in years divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400. Thus, the calendar year has an average length of 365.2422 days. It moved the day's date up from September 3rd to September 14th. Some other countries, including Russia, did not change until the twentieth century.*TIS
In 1755 William Hogarth’s satirical print, “An Election Entertainment,” was published. It contains a Tory sign bearing the inscription “Give us our eleven days.” (out the window). Despite thousands of tales of ignorant peasants protests and riots, there seems to be no true records of such an event. Historian Robert Poole has written, "the riots, like the Snarks, are universally known, but defy detection."
Voltaire wrote on this his famous wit, that Protestants preferred to disagree with the Sun than agree with the Pope… "
1858 The Donati Comet was first seen and named after its discoverer, Giovanni Battista Donati, at Florence earlier in the year. It was the second-brightest comet of the nineteenth century It reached perihelion on 30 Sep 1858. On Sep 14th, the night before his third debate with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln sat on the porch of the Jonesboro, Illinois hotel and viewed the comet with a friend. On Sept. 27,
It became the first comet to be photographed. The English photographer Warren De La Rue captured the comet on a collodion plate using a telescope at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.
1959 Bank of America accepts the ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system. This revolutionary system digitized checking for the Bank of America by creating a computer-readable font. A special scanner read account numbers preprinted on checks in magnetic ink. The system was developed at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California.*CHMAn early check, demonstrating the features developed by SRI: account numbers and Magnetic Ink Character Recognition.
1959 Life Magazine cover story is picture of the first seven Nasa Astronauts.
2015 Einstein was right, when large Gravitational events happen in space, they produce a gravitational wave pulsing through the universe at the speed of light. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories (LIGO) recorded the first evidence on this date of a gravitational wave which had resulted from a merging of a pair of black holes each of about 30 solar masses which had merged about 1.3 billion light years ago. As of December of 2018, LIGO has recorded eleven gravitational wave events, ten from mergers of black holes, and one from a collision of two neutron stars. *Wik, *The Perfectionists, Simon Winchester.
BIRTHS
1648 Caspar (or Kaspar) Neumann (14 September 1648 – 27 January 1715) was a German professor and clergyman from Breslau with a special interest in mortality rates. His collection and publication of the births and deaths in Breslaw were the foundation of E. Halley's, An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, drawn from curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw; with an Attempt to ascertain the Price of Annuities upon Lives presented to the Royal Society. Halley noted that no similar records existed of sufficient quantity in an area where the population was stable.
He first did an apprenticeship as a pharmacist. He finished his higher school education at Breslau's Maria-Magdalen grammar school. In 1667 he became a student of theology at the university of Jena, and on Nov. 30, 1673 was ordained as a priest, having been requested as a traveling chaplain for Prince Christian, the son of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Gotha. On his return home, following a two-year journey through western Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy, and southern France, he became a court-chaplain at Altenburg, and married the daughter of J. J. Rabe, physician in ordinary to the prince of Saxe-Friedenstein. In 1678 he was made the deacon of St. Maria-Magdalen in Breslau and became pastor in 1689. *Wik He was a student of Erhard Weigel
1713 Johann Kies (September 14, 1713—July 29, 1781) a German astronomer and mathematician. Born in Tübingen, Kies worked in Berlin in 1751 alongside Jérôme Lalande in order to make observations on the lunar parallax in concert with those of Nicolas Louis de Lacaille at the Cape of Good Hope.
From 1742 to 1754, at the recommendation of the mathematician Leonhard Euler, he was made professor of mathematics at Berlin's Academy of Sciences and astronomer at its observatory.
He subsequently taught also at the Collegium of Tübingen. From 1754 to 1755, Kies served as director of the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut in Heidelberg.
Kies was one of the first to propagate Newton's discoveries in Germany, and dedicated two of his works to the Englishman: De viribus centralibus (Tübingen, 1758) and De lege gravitatis (Tübingen, 1773). Kies is also the author of a work on lunar influences: De influxu lunae in partes terrae mobiles (Tübingen, 1769). He wrote many other works, both in French and in Latin, on astronomy.
Kies corresponded with Euler from 1747 to 1767. Their correspondence consists of 8 letters, all of which were written by Kies.
The crater Kies on the Moon is named in his honor. *TIA
1769 (Baron) Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 Sep 1769; 6 May 1859) was a German natural scientist, archeologist, explorer and geographer, who made two major expeditions to Latin America (1799-1804) and to Asia (1829). During the first, equipped with the best scientific instruments, he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants. He charted and made observations on a cold ocean current along the Peruvian coast, now named, the Humboldt Current. In geology, he made pioneering observations of stratigraphy, structure and geomorphology; he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. Humboldt named the Jurassic System. *TISBasalt prisms at Santa María Regla, Mexico by Alexander von Humboldt, *Wik
1837 Nicolai Vasilievich Bugaev (14 Sept 1837 , 11 June 1903) His research was mainly on analysis and number theory. Bugaev gave proofs of theorems stated without proof by Liouville. He wrote on algebraic integrals of certain differential equations. His work in Moscow was to lead to the creation of the Moscow school of the theory of functions of a real variable in 1911, eight years after his death by Egorov, one of his students. Sonin was another of Bugaev's pupils who went on to make a major contribution to mathematics.
Bugaev's most important work in number theory was based on an analogy between some operations in number theory and the operations such as differentiation and integration in analysis. Bugaev built a systematic theory of discontinuous functions which he called arithmology. *SAU
1858 Henry Burchard Fine (September 14, 1858 – December 22, 1928) born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. Fine began his time as a Princeton undergraduate studying Greek and Latin, but a mathematics tutor, George B. Halstead, convinced him to switch his considerable talents to mathematics. He ranked highest academically in his Class of 1880 for all four years, during which he caught the attention of President James McCosh. As a result, Fine was among a small group of highly talented undergraduates whom McCosh invited to his house for informal seminars and nurtured as future faculty.
After graduation, Fine remained at Princeton (then called the College of New Jersey) for a year of post-graduate work followed by three more years as a tutor. Then, as Germany was the leading center of mathematics scholarship, he went to the University of Leipzig to study mathematics with Felix Klein under whom he earned his PhD in one year.The mathematics building at Princeton is named in his honor. (
Fine Hall is the tallest building on the campus)
1887 Karl Taylor Compton (14 Sep 1887; 22 Jun 1954) American educator and physicist who directed development of radar during WW II. His research included the passage of photoelectrons through metals, ionization and the motion of electrons in gases, fluorescence, the theory of the electric arc, and collisions of electrons and atoms. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked him to chair the new Scientific Advisory Board. When the National Defense Research Committee was formed in 1940, he was chief of Division D (detection: radar, fire control, etc.) In 1941, he was in charge of those divisions concerned with radar within the new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Afterwards he was cited for personally shortening the duration of the war. (Brother of Arthur H. Compton, American Physicist and Nobel Laureate.)*TIS In the famous photo of physicists in the Solvay Conference, Compton is one of only two Americans Present.He was president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1930 to 1948.
1891 Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov (14 Sept 1891 , 20 March 1983) Vinogradov used trigonometric series to attack deep problems in analytic number theory.In analytic number theory, Vinogradov's method refers to his main problem-solving technique, applied to central questions involving the estimation of exponential sums. In its most basic form, it is used to estimate sums over prime numbers, or Weyl sums. It is a reduction from a complicated sum to a number of smaller sums which are then simplified. He also used this technique on the Dirichlet divisor problem, allowing him to estimate the number of integer points under an arbitrary curve. This was an improvement on the work of Georgy Voronoy.
In 1918 Vinogradov proved the Pólya–Vinogradov inequality for character sums.
Vinogradov served as director of the Mathematical Institute for 49 years. For his long service he was twice awarded the order of The Hero of the Socialist Labour. The house where he was born was converted into his memorial – a unique honour among Russian mathematicians. As the head of a leading mathematical institute, Vinogradov enjoyed significant influence in the Academy of Sciences and was regarded as an informal leader of Soviet mathematicians, not always in a positive way: his anti-Semitic feelings led him to hinder the careers of many prominent Soviet mathematicians. *Wik
1906 Franz Rellich (September 14, 1906–September 25, 1955) was an Austrian-Italian mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equationsAmong Rellich's most important mathematical contributions are his work in the perturbation theory of linear operators on Hilbert spaces. Although the origins and applications of the problem are in quantum mechanics, Rellich's approach was completely abstract.
Rellich successfully worked on many partial differential equations with degeneracies. For instance, he showed that in the elliptic case, the Monge-Ampère differential equation, while not necessarily uniquely soluble, can have at most two solutions.
Particularly relevant to physics was Rellich's mathematical clarification of the outgoing Sommerfeld conditions.
.*Wik
1914 Robert Sinclair Dietz (14 Sep 1914; 19 May 1995) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer who set forth a theory (1961) of seafloor spreading (a term he coined), in which new crustal material continually upswells from the Earth's depths along the mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward at a rate of several inches per year. While a student Dietz identified the Kentland structure in Indiana as a meteoric impact site. His professors steered him toward marine geology. He became the founder and director of the Sea Floor Studies Section at the Naval Electronics Laboratory (1946-1963). He also achieved prominence by studying meteorite craters, both on Earth and on the moon and arguing that these impact craters were common. He died of a heart attack.*TIS While at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography he observed the nature of the Emperor chain of seamounts that extended from the northwest end of the Hawaiian Island–Midway chain and speculated over lunch with Robert Fisher in 1953 that something must be carrying these old volcanic mountains northward like a conveyor belt.
1920 Alberto Pedro Calderón (September 14, 1920- April 16, 1998) was one of the leading mathematicians of the 20th century. He was born in Mendoza, Argentina. His name is associated with the University of Buenos Aires, but first and foremost with the University of Chicago, where Calderón and his mentor, the distinguished analyst Antoni Zygmund, started one of the longest (more than 30 years) and most productive collaborations in mathematical history. Together they developed the ground-breaking theory of singular integral operators, thus creating the "Chicago School of (hard) Analysis" (sometimes simply known as the "Calderón-Zygmund School"); this has been one of the most influential movements in pure mathematics, but with remarkable applications to science and engineering as well. Calderón’s work, characterized by great originality, elegance and power reshaped the landscape of mathematical analysis and ranged over a wide variety of topics: from singular integral operators to partial differential equations, from interpolation theory to Cauchy integrals on Lipschitz curves, from ergodic theory to inverse problems in electrical prospection. Calderón’s work has also had a powerful impact on practical applications including signal processing, geophysics, and tomography. *Wik
1926 Hans-Joachim Bremermann (14 September, 1926 - 21 February, 1996) was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing new ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.
Bremermann came to the United States in 1952 and held a research associate position at Stanford University. In 1953, he was appointed a research fellow at Harvard University. He returned to Münster for 1954–55.
After returning to the United States, he was a mathematics researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1955–57), and then appointed assistant professor at the University of Washington, Seattle (1957–58). He then spent another year researching at Princeton (1958–59), this time in physics.
In 1959, he became an associate professor of mathematics at University of California, Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his career, being promoted to full professor in 1966. He held chairs at Berkeley in mathematics and biophysics. By the 1960s, his work had turned towards the theory of computation and evolutionary biology, in which he studied complexity theory, genetic search algorithms, and pattern recognition.
In 1978 he gave the "What Physicists Do" series of lectures at Sonoma State University, discussing physical limitations to mathematical understanding of physical and biological systems. He continued work in mathematical biology through the 1980s, developing mathematical models of parasites and disease, neural networks, and AIDS epidemiology and pathology. He retired from the University of California in 1991.*Wik
1936 Leone Minna Burton (née Gold; 14 September 1936 – 1 December 2007) was a professor of education in mathematics and science, working in London teacher education colleges in the 1970s, the Open University in the 1980s and, from 1992, the University of Birmingham. At the South Bank Polytechnic (now London South Bank University), she helped establish the first MSc in Mathematics Education in the UK. After retiring in 2001 she became Honorary Professor at King's College London, and Visiting Fellow in the Cambridge University Faculty of Education. She was noted for her influence as a researcher and doctoral supervisor, setting up national and international research networks in the developing area of mathematics education.Leone Burton's contribution to mathematics education focused on researching the practices of working mathematicians and arguing their relevance for school teaching and learning. This research is included in what is now termed the field of ethnomathematics which examines how mathematics is related to the culture in which it is developed. At the Open University, Burton collaborated in creating innovative courses in teacher education, Developing Mathematical Thinking, that emphasized the role of problem solving in mathematics and argued that teachers should be aware of mathematical reasoning as well as mathematical content. A subsequent publication, Thinking Mathematically, written in 1982 with Mason and Stacey, brought these ideas to an international teacher audience focusing on teachers' own knowledge of using and applying mathematics.
From 1984 to 1988 Burton was international convenor for the International Organization of Women and Mathematics Education and visiting professor at institutions in Asia. She played a major role in shifting teachers’ perceptions in relation to girls and mathematics in the UK and other places around the world. Burton founded the monograph series International Perspective on Mathematics Education with the Greenwood Publishing group in 2001 which published three monographs between 2002 and 2006. This monograph series was subsequently renamed International Perspectives on Mathematics Education: Cognition, Equity and Society in honor of her pioneering work on equity and gender issues in mathematics education, edited by Bharath Sriraman, and published by Information Age Publishing.
Her final book, Mathematicians as Enquirers, used interviews to characterize the ways professional mathematicians learn, including enquiry, visualization and collaboration. This research showed that the ways mathematicians learn are consistent with principles recognized in mathematics education research as suitable for school learning.
DEATHS1638 Pierre Vernier (19 Aug 1584, 14 Sep 1638) French mathematician who developed the vernier scale, which enabled instruments to make more accurate linear or angular measurements. He first described it in a work entitled La construction, l'usage et les propriétés du cadran nouveau (1631)*. It consists of a small graduated scale or arc made to slide along a larger fixed scale or arc to enable determining the increment between two graduations of the larger scale. The ten divisions of the smaller, vernier scale are equal to nine of the fixed scale. For example, calipers with a larger scale graduated in tenths of inches can be read by use of the vernier scale to within one-hundredths of an inch. Vernier scales are also used on sextants and mercury
column barometers.*TIS
The vernier scale was invented in its modern form in 1631 by Vernier), but its use was described in detail in English in Navigatio Britannica (1750) by John Barrow, the mathematician and historian. In some languages, this device is called a nonius. It was also commonly called a nonius in English until the end of the 18th century. Nonius is the Latin name of the Portuguese astronomer and mathematician Pedro Nunes (1502–1578) who in 1542 invented a related but different system for taking fine measurements on the astrolabe (nonius) that was a precursor to the vernier. The French astronomer Jérôme Lalande (1732-1807) popularized the name of the instrument as a "vernier" in his book on astronomy (1764) *Wik
1712 Giovanni Domenico Cassini (8 Jun 1625, 14 Sep 1712) Italian-French astronomer who discovered (1675) the dark gap subdividing Saturn's rings into two parts, now known as Cassini's Division. He stated that Saturn's ring, believed by Huygens to be a single body, was actually composed of small particles. Cassini also discovered four of Saturn's moons: Iapetus (Sep 1671), Rhea (1672) and on 21 Mar 1684,* Tethys and Dione. He compiled new tables (1662) on the annual motion of the Sun. He observed shadows of four Galilean satellites on Jupiter (1664), and measured its rotation period by studying the bands and spots on its surface. He determined the period of rotation of Mars (1666), and attempted the same for Venus. His son Jacques was also an astronomer.*TIS (There were four consecutive Cassini generations to hold the post at the French Observatory. After Giovanni came Giovanni's son Jacques, then his grandson César-François Cassini de Thury, and finally his great grandson Jean-Dominique Cassini, Conte de Cassini.)
The Cassini spaceprobe, launched in 1997, was named after him and became the fourth to visit Saturn and the first to orbit the planet. It met it's end falling into the atmosphere of Saturn on the 15 September, 2017.
1835 The Rt. Rev. John Mortimer Brinkley D.D. (ca. 1763 (Baptized 31 Jan,1763, Woodbridge, Suffolk – 14 September 1835, Dublin) was the first Royal Astronomer of Ireland and later Bishop of Cloyne.
He graduated B.A. in 1788 as senior wrangler and Smith's Prizeman, was elected a fellow of the college and was awarded M.A. in 1791. He was ordained at Lincoln Cathedral in the same year, and in 1792 became the second Andrews Professor of Astronomy in the University of Dublin, which carried the new title of Royal Astronomer of Ireland. Together with John Law, Bishop of Elphin, he drafted the chapter on "Astronomy" in William Paley's Natural Theology. His main work concerned stellar astronomy and he published his Elements of Plane Astronomy in 1808. In 1822 he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1824. Brinkley's observations that several stars shifted their apparent place in the sky in the course of a year were disproved at Greenwich by his contemporary John Pond, the Astronomer Royal. In 1826, he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne in County Cork, a position he held for the remaining nine years of his life. Brinkley was elected President of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831, serving in that position for two years.
He died in 1835 at Leeson Street, Dublin and was buried in Trinity College chapel. He was succeeded at Dunsink Observatory by Sir William Rowan Hamilton. *Wik
1882 Georges Leclanché ( 9 October 1839 – 14 September 1882 ) French engineer who invented the wet cell Leclanché battery (1866), ancestor of the familiar carbon-zinc dry cell batteries used to power portable electric lights and electronic devices. His wet cell, provided an e.m.f. of about 1.5 volts. A porous pot containing manganese dioxide and a carbon rod as current collector was immersed in an electrolyte of ammonium chloride solution with a negative terminal of zinc metal. From 1867, Leclanché gave full-time attention to his invention, which was adopted the following year by the Belgian telegraph service. He opened a factory to manufacture the battery. In 1881, J.A. Thiebaut had the idea of packing the chemicals in a zinc cup. Carl Gassner made the first commercially successful "dry" cell.*TIS
1912 Georg Landsberg (30 Jan 1865 , 14 Sept 1912) studied the theory of functions of two variables and also the theory of higher dimensional curves. In particular he studied the role of these curves in the calculus of variations and in mechanics.
He worked with ideas related to those of Weierstrass, Riemann and Heinrich Weber on theta functions and Gaussian sums. His most important work, however was his contribution to the development of the theory of algebraic functions of a single variable. Here he studied the Riemann-Roch theorem.
He was able to combine Riemann's function theoretic approach with the Italian geometric approach and with the Weierstrass arithmetical approach. His arithmetic setting of this result led eventually to the modern abstract theory of algebraic functions.
One of his most important works was Theorie der algebraischen Funktionen einer Varaiblen (Leipzig, 1902) which he wrote jointly with Kurt Hensel. This work remained the standard text on the subject for many years. *SAU
1916 Pierre-Maurice-Marie Duhem (10 Jun 1861, 14 Sep 1916) was a French physicist, philosopher of science and mathematician who emphasized a history of modern science based on evolutionary metaphysical concepts. He had a wide variety of mathematical interests from mechanics and physics to philosophy and the history of mathematics. Duhem studied magnetism following the work of Gibbs and Helmholtz and also worked on thermodynamics and hydrodynamics producing over 400 papers. He maintained that the role of theory in science is to systematize relationships rather than to interpret new phenomena.*TIS
1925 Charles Tweedie (27 June 1868 , 14 Sept 1925) studied at Edinburgh, Göttingen and Berlin. He returned to Edinburgh as assistant to Prof. George Chrystal. In the autumn of 1892 he became an assistant in the mathematics department at the University of Edinburgh under Professor Chrystal and became an official soon after, as Chrystal's right-hand man.He served as a Schools Inspector and published works on the History of Mathematics. He became President of the EMS in 1903 and an honorary member in 1915. *SAU
1926 Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer (13 Feb 1852, 14 Sep 1926) Danish astronomer who compiled the New General Catalog of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, (NGC) in 1888. When he became Director of the Armagh Observatory in 1882, financially it was destitute, with no prospect of replacing its aging instruments. Though Dreyer obtained a new 10-inch refractor by Grubb, the lack of funding for an assistant, precluded him from a continuation of traditional positional astronomy. Instead he concentrated on the compilation of observations made earlier. The NGC he listed 7840 objects and in its supplements (1895, 1908) he added a further 5386 objects. It still remains one of the standard reference catalogs.*TIS
1932 Ernest Julius Wilczynski (13 Nov 1876 , 14 Sept 1932) began his research career as a mathematical astronomer. This interest lasted until he was appointed to Berkeley. By that time he had published over a dozen papers in astronomy, but his interests moved towards differential equations which arose in his study of the dynamics of astronomical objects. From there his interests became pure mathematical interests in differential equations. However, Wilczynski's main work was in projective differential geometry and ruler surfaces. He extended Halphen's work, devised new methods and extended the theory of curves to surfaces.*SAU
1973 Eleanor Pairman Brown (8 June 1896, 14 Sept 1973) graduated from Edinburgh. She went to London where she worked with Karl Pearson and then went to the USA where she gained a doctorate from Radcliffe College ( only the third woman to receive a doctorate in math from Radcliffe College in Massachusetts ) *SAU Eleanor Pairman graduated with an MA in 1917 with first class honors in mathematics and natural philosophy, after which she was awarded a three-year Vans Dunlop scholarship which permitted her to continue her studies at any university. Pairman read two papers at meetings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society early in 1918.
In 1918 Pairman joined the staff of Karl Pearson's Department of Applied Statistics, which comprised the Biometric Laboratory and Francis Galton Laboratory for National Eugenics, at University College London. Pairman's role in the Galton Laboratory was that of a human computer. She was referenced as one of a number of women contributors in the 1917 Galton Laboratory publication A study of the long bones of the English skeleton Part I, co-authored by Julia Bell and Karl Pearson and which sought to identify "racial differences in man".
In 1919, Pairman co-authored with Karl Pearson the paper "On Corrections for the Moment-Coefficients of Limited Range Frequency Distributions When there are Finite or Infinite Ordinates and Any Slopes at the Terminals of the Range" published in the journal Biometrika.
One of her instructors, Cargill G. Knott, wrote a letter of recommendation saying: "With fitting opportunity she has every promise of a distinguished and useful career." Pairman arrived in New York on 12 October 1919 and went on to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study at Radcliffe College, an all-women's college closely associated with the all-male Harvard College. There she studied under George David Birkhoff. Her thesis was titled 'Expansion Theorems for Solution of a Fredholm's Linear Homogeneous Integral Equation of the Second Kind with Kernel of Special Non-Symmetric Type' and was awarded a PhD in 1922. When she received her doctorate she was only the third woman to be awarded a PhD in mathematics from Radcliffe College. In that same year she married a fellow grad student, Bancroft Brown.
The couple moved to Hanover, N.H. in 1922 so Bancroft could assume a teaching position at Dartmouth College, which, at the time, was a men's school with an all-male faculty but occasionally admitting women as graduate students. Later, Pairman published a joint paper with Rudolph E. Langer in 1927.
About 1950, Pairman started focusing on teaching mathematics to blind students, learning Braille and learning how to make diagrams using her sewing machine and other household items. Her daughter Margaret later wrote, “Geometry was a particular problem, because you really need diagrams. Braille is done on paper like thin cardstock. So she rounded up all kinds of household implements like pinking shears and pastry wheels and such and created diagrams that could be felt with the fingers, like the Braille symbols. Apparently nobody had ever done this before."
2011 Rudolf Ludwig Mössbauer (31 Jan 1929 - 14 September 2011) German physicist and co-winner (with American Robert Hofstadter) of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1961 for his researches concerning the resonance absorption of gamma-rays and his discovery in this connection of the Mössbauer effect. The Mössbauer effect occurs when gamma rays emitted from nuclei of radioactive isotopes have an unvarying wavelength and frequency. This occurs if the emitting nuclei are tightly held in a crystal. Normally, the energy of the gamma rays would be changed because of the recoil of the radiating nucleus. Mössbauer's discoveries helped to prove Einstein's general theory of relativity. His discoveries are also used to measure the magnetic field of atomic nuclei and to study other properties of solid materials. *TIS
Rudolf Mössbauer was an excellent teacher. He gave highly specialized lectures on numerous courses, including Neutrino Physics, Neutrino Oscillations, The Unification of the Electromagnetic and Weak Interactions and The Interaction of Photons and Neutrons With Matter. In 1984, he gave undergraduate lectures to 350 people taking the physics course. He told his students: “Explain it! The most important thing is, that you are able to explain it! You will have exams, there you have to explain it. Eventually, you pass them, you get your diploma and you think, that's it! – No, the whole life is an exam, you'll have to write applications, you'll have to discuss with peers... So learn to explain it! You can train this by explaining to another student, a colleague. If they are not available, explain it to your mother – or to your cat!” *Wik
2018 Branko Grünbaum ( October 2, 1929 in Osijek , Croatia ; September 14, 2018 in Seattle , Washington) was an Israeli mathematician of Yugoslavian descent who worked on discrete geometry.
A scholarship allowed Grünbaum to spend from September 1958 to June 1960 at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, USA. Branko and Zdenka, with their son Ram, sailed on the T.S.S. Olympia arriving in New York on 5 September 1958 having left Lisbon exactly one month earlier. From New York they travelled by train to Princeton. After two years at Princeton, they spent one year in Seattle at the University of Washington where their second son Daniel Grünbaum was born on 2 November 1960. The family had spent the summer of 1960 at the University of California, Los Angeles, living during this time in Santa Monica. While in Seattle, Grünbaum accepted a position at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
There now arose a complication with his marriage. Branko and Zdenka's Orthodox Jewish marriage had been annulled because Branko's mother was not Jewish. In the City of Seattle, on 5 September 1961, Branko Grünbaum and Zdenka Bienenstock were married by a Justice of the Peace at 9:30 a.m. just before they left the United States for Jerusalem. Back at the Hebrew University his career went extremely well and he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1964. By this time he had over fifty publications and, let us note at this point, that he carried on with a remarkably high publication rate throughout his life; MathSciNet list 271 publications in total.
Grünbaum now felt slightly uneasy in Israel since, despite having a Jewish father, he had been declared a non-Jew since his mother was not Jewish. This eventually contributed to his decision to leave Israel and emigrate to North America. In 1965 he went to Michigan State University to spend a sabbatical year. While there he learnt of another marriage being annulled in similar circumstances to his own and the Israeli immigrant from the mixed marriage had her passport and citizenship revoked; this tipped the balance. It was not an easy decision, however, since Zdenka had been half way through her Ph.D. studies in Chemistry when they left Israel and she would have liked to have returned to complete the degree. Grünbaum had two possible places in North America which were particularly attractive because of his interest in geometry, the University of Toronto where Donald Coxeter was a professor, and the University of Washington in Seattle where he could work with Victor Klee. He chose the University of Washington where he was appointed to a full professorship in 1966 and remained there for the rest of his career until he retired in 2001. *SAU
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
