Scienceis from the Latin rootscire, to know. The earliest origin of the word is realated to cutting or splitting apart. Knowing is, in a sense, the art of being able to seperate ideas from each other. Related terms include conscious, omniscient (all knowing) and less closely related to schizm and schedule.
Although science has been around for a long time, the related term for one who practices science, scientist, was only created in the early 19th century. Prior to this time a person who practiced science was addressed as a man of science, or a natural philosopher (see below). In 1833, William Whewell, a Master of Trinity College at Cambridge, was aproached by William Wordsworth, the poet, for a single better term, scientist was the response. (OOPS, That's wrong. Thony just sent me a correction. " At the 1833 meeting of British Association for the Advancement of Science, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the expounder of poetic tales about albatross murdering mariners and the construction of pleasure domes in Xanadu, who was also a philosopher of science largely responsible for having introduced Schelling’s Naturphilosophie into the English philosophical discourse, protested strongly about the use of the term (natural) philosopher for men of science. William Whewell, Cambridge polymath and himself both a man of science and a historian and philosopher of science, suggested using the term scientist, which he had coined parallel to the term artist."
Whewell was also frequently in correspondence with Michael Faraday, and created the scientific terms anode, cathode, and ion. A letter between the two discussing these three terms is in the Wren Library at Trinity College in Cambridge. I have tried to capture an image below, but the library does not allow flash and the image is taken through the glass case... my apologies that it is not clearer.
In spite of its creation at such a high academic level, the word scientist was not well accepted for a long time. Its eventual acceptance came first in America, but it seems even there it encountered fierce opposition to its formal use well into the Twentieth Century. In The American Language in 1921, H. L. Mencken wrote
The last-named scientist was coined by William Whewell, an Englishman, in 1840, but was first adopted in America. Despite the fact that Fitzedward Hall and other eminent philologists used it.
Despite this fact an academic and ineffective opposition to it still goes on. On the Style Sheet of the Century Magazine it is listed among the "words and phrases to be avoided." It was prohibited by the famous Index Expurgatorius prepared by William Cullen Bryant for the New York Evening Post, and his prohibition is still theoretically in force, but the word is now actually permitted by the Post. The Chicago Daily News Style Book, dated July 1, 1908, also bans it. The use of the word aroused almost incredible opposition in England. So recently as 1890 it was denounced by the London Daily News as "an ignoble Americanism," and according to William Archer it was finally accepted by the English only "at the point of the bayonet."
The term Natural Philosopher which scientist replaced had not been around long itself. Prior to the time of Galileo a Philosopher was indifferent to the observed facts, and dealt only with moral and logical theory. Galileo thought that,"The proper object of Philosophy is the great book of nature..." and not the words of other men. Eventually these new students of the "book of nature" became the "Natural Philosophers".
Despite several common assertions to the fact that Whewell coined the term in 1840, the OED lists an earlier use in print, "1834 Q. Rev. LI. 59 Science..loses all traces of unity. A curious illustration of this result may be observed in the want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings..in the last three summers... Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term,..; savans was rather assuming,..; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist, economist, and atheist but this was not generally palatable."
William Whewell is buried in Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge, UK. A memorial marker in the chapel is shown here and there is a statue in the ante-chapel
Negative numbers, and the equivalent word for negative were introduce by Brahmagupta, a Hindu mathematician around 600 AD. The Latin root of today's word is negare, to deny. The negative numbers, in this sense, denying or invalidating an equivalent positive quantity.
The negative numbers were themselves denied for a long part of mathematical history, and only slowly came to be accepted. The first record of the operational rules for what we today call positive and negative numbers came from the pen of Diophantus (around 250 AD) who referred to them as "forthcomings" and "wantings". His work may have been drawn from proposition five in Euclid's Book II of the Elements in which Euclid demonstrates with geometric figures what we would write in modern algebra as (a+b)(a-b)+b2 = a2. This, of course, is easily recast as the more common identity (a+b)(a-b)= a2 - b2. Diophantus would accept negatives only as a way of diminishing a greater quantity, but did not accept them as independent quantities and would not accept a solution that was negative. Al-Khwarizmi (850 AD), whose writings brought Arabic numerals to the west, used a similar approach with negatives allowed in-process but not as a final result.
Descartes, around 1636, used the French fausse, false, for negative solutions. Thomas Harriot had described negative roots as the solution to an alternate form of the equation with the signs of the odd powers changed. Today his idea would be expressed by saying that the appearance of -c as a root of f(x) was only to be understood to mean that c is a root of f(-x).
In Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty, by Morris Kline includes the following argument against negative numbers by Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), mathematician, theologian, and friend of Blaise Pascal; "Arnauld questioned that -1:1 = 1:-1 because, he said, -1 is less than +1; hence, how could a smaller be to a greater as a greater is to a smaller?"
Franz Lemmermeyer wrote in a posting to the Historia-Matematica newsgroup that Gleanings from the History of the Negative Number by PGJ Vrendenduin suggests that a number line with both positive and negative numbers could be found in the work of Wallis (1657).
Another posting to the same list quoted Kline's "Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times":
"Though Wallis was advanced for his times and accepted negative numbers, he thought they were larger than infinity but not less than zero. In his 'Arithmetica Infinitorum' (1665), he argued that since the ratio a/0, when a is positive, is infinite, then, when the denominator is changed to a negative number, as in a/b with b negative, the ratio must be greater than infinity."
Even as late as 1831, De Morgan would still write that one "must recollect that the signs + and - are not quantities, but directions to add and subtract."
According to a post from Laura Laurencich, the Incas had a method of indicating both positive and negative numbers on their quipus as documented by the Jesuit Priest Blas Valeria in 1618.
may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimensions,
and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality."
~ Edwin Abbott Abbott, Flatland
The 285th day of the year, 285 is a square pyramidal number (like a stack of cannonballs, or oranges with the base in a square)... Or.. the sum of the first nine squares. 285=∑9i=1(i2)
285 is 555 in base 7.
Not sure how rare this is, but just saw it on MAA's Number a Day and was intrigued, 285^2 = 81225 uses the same digits as 135^2 (18225) and 159^2 (25281).
A number is said to be anti-perfect if it is equal to the sum of the reverses of its proper divisors.
For example, 244 is anti-perfect since its proper divisors are 1, 2, 4, 61, 122 and the sum of their reversal is 1 + 2 + 4 + 16 + 221 = 244.
1793 At the University of North Carolina, the cornerstone was laid for “Old East,” the oldest state university building in the U.S.*VFR
Over an interior doorway in the Chapel Hill Courthouse and Post Office building, a mural by Dean Cornwell depicts the laying of the cornerstone of Old East by William Richardson Davie, "Grand Master of Free Masons of North Carolina, Trustee and Commissioner," assisted by other commissioners and "the Brethren of the Eagle and Independence Lodges." Cornwell, "The Dean of Illustrators" and President of the Society of Illustrators from 1922 to 1926, was an accomplished commercial illustrator, famous for his full-color print ads for Seagrams, Palmolive, General Motors, and Coca-Cola, as well as art for Cosmopolitan and other prominent magazines in the 1920s. He was also renowned for his patriotic war posters in the 1940s.
*The Carolina Story
1799 Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin (née Labrosse; 7 March 1775 – 14 June 1847) was a French balloonist and parachutist. She was the first to ascend solo and the first woman to make a parachute descent (in the gondola), from an altitude of 900 metres (3,000 ft) on 12 October 1799.
Labrosse first flew on 10 November 1798, one of the earliest women to fly in a balloon. She was the wife of André-Jacques Garnerin, a hydrogen balloonist and inventor of the frameless parachute.
1810 the German festival Oktoberfest was first held in Munich. Reaallly good ideas WILL spread.
1850, classes began at the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania, the first medical school entirely for women.*TIS
Originally called the Female Medical College of Pennsylvania, the college changed its name in 1867 to Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. The associated Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1861. Upon deciding to admit men in 1970, the college was renamed as the Medical College of Pennsylvania. *Wik
*Natl Lib of Medicine
1884 George Bruce Halsted presented his inaugural address before the Texas Academy of Science. He spoke of his teacher at Johns Hopkins, J. J. Sylvester, and related how the rumor started that Sylvester killed a student when he was at the university of Virginia. [Science, 22 February 1885; vol. 1, no. 8, p. 265] *VFR
In 1841, J. J. Sylvester was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Virginia — a notable appointment, since he was one of the first Jewish professors in an American university.
During his brief stay there (only a few months), a violent altercation occurred between Sylvester and one of his students.
Accounts differ slightly, but the core story is this: A student made an insulting remark (apparently anti-Semitic) during or after class. Sylvester struck the student with a ruler or cane in anger. The student retaliated — some say he drew a knife, others that he challenged Sylvester to a duel.
The confrontation ended abruptly, but no one was killed or seriously injured.
However, in the local rumor mill of Charlottesville, the story quickly grew into legend.
It was said that the “hot-tempered foreign professor” had killed a student and then fled the state to escape justice.
1988 Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT, the computer he designed after moving on from Apple Computer Inc., which he had founded with Steve Wozniak. Although the NeXT ultimately failed, it introduced several features new to personal computers, including an optical storage disk, a built-in digital signal processor that allowed voice recognition, and object-oriented languages that simplified programming. On a microprocessor with 8 megabytes of RAM, however, the NeXT ran too slowly to be popular. NeXT Computer Inc. eventually became NeXT Software Inc. and then was bought by Apple in 1997. *CHM
1996: A solar eclipse was broadcast live on the internet for the first time. * BBC Archive @BBCArchive
802,701 Oct. 12 was the date on the dial when the time-sled in the film The Time Machine (1960) slid to a stop in the land of the Eloi. The year, however, was 802,701 . The film was produced by George Pal, who had introduced the Golden Age of Sci-Fi into cinema by giving us Destination Moon (1950), When Worlds Collide (1951) and The War of the Worlds (1953); he then brought it to a close with The Time Machine, his finest effort, in my opinion. The film starred Rod Taylor as H. George Wells, builder of the time machine and bearing the name of the author of the original novel, H.G. Wells, who published the book The Time Machine in 1895. *Linda Hall Org
2024 The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered a new Mersenne prime number, 2^136279841-1. At 41,024,320 digits, it eclipses by more than 16 million digits the previous largest known prime number found by GIMPS nearly 6 years ago.
Here is the GINPS news release from Oct 21, 2024:
BLOWING ROCK, NC, October 21, 2024 -- The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) has discovered the largest known prime number, 2136,279,841-1, having 41,024,320 decimal digits. Luke Durant, from San Jose, California, found the prime on October 12th.
Luke is currently GIMPS' most prolific contributor. He is joined by thousands of volunteers using free GIMPS software available at www.mersenne.org/download/.
The new prime number, also known as M136279841, is calculated by multiplying together 136,279,841 twos, and then subtracting 1. It is over 16 million digits larger than the previous record prime number, in a special class of extremely rare prime numbers known as Mersenne primes. It is only the 52nd known Mersenne prime ever discovered, each increasingly more difficult to find. Mersenne primes were named for the French monk Marin Mersenne, who studied these numbers more than 350 years ago. GIMPS, founded in 1996, has discovered the last 18 Mersenne primes. Volunteers download a free program to search for these primes, with a $3000 award offered to anyone lucky enough to find a new prime. Prof. Chris Caldwell founded an authoritative web site on the largest known primes which is now maintained by volunteers, and has an excellent history of Mersenne primes
BIRTHS
1827 Josiah Parsons Cooke (October 12, 1827 – September 3, 1894) was an American scientist who worked at Harvard University and was instrumental in the measurement of atomic weights, inspiring America's first Nobel laureate in chemistry, Theodore Richards, to pursue similar research. Cooke's 1854 paper on atomic weights has been said to foreshadow the periodic law developed later by Mendeleev and others. Historian I. Bernard Cohen described Cooke "as the first university chemist to do truly distinguished work in the field of chemistry" in the United States. *Wik
1860 Elmer Sperry (12 Oct 1860; 16 Jun 1930) American electrical engineer and inventor of the gyrocompass. In the 1890's he made useful inventions in electric mining machinery, and patent electric brake and control system for street- or tramcars. In 1908, he patented the active gyrostabilizer which acted to stop a ship's roll as soon as it started. He patented the first gyrocompass designed expressly for the marine environment in 1910. This "spinning wheel" gyro was a significant improvement over the traditional magnetic compass of the day and changed the course of naval history. The first Sperry gyrocompass was tested at-sea aboard the USS Delaware in 1911 and established Sperry as a world leader in the manufacture of military gyrocompasses for the next 80 years. *TIS
1910 Ernests Fogels (12 October 1910 – 22 February 1985) was a Latvian mathematician who specialized in number theory. Fogels discovered new proofs of the Gauss-Dirichlet formula on the number of classes of positively definite quadratic forms and of the de la Vallée-Poussin formula for the asymptotic location of prime numbers in an arithmetic progression. Fogels retired in 1966 but continued his scientific work with research on the Hecke's L-functions, prime ideals and the Riemann hypothesis until his death on 22 February 1985 in Latvia.
1913 Subbaramiah Minakshisundaram (12 October 1913 - 13 August 1968), also known as Minakshi or SMS, was an Indian mathematician who worked on partial differential equations and heat kernels. In 1946, he worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, America, where he met Åke Pleijel. In 1949, the two wrote a paper together called, Some properties of the eigenfunctions of the Laplace-operator on Riemannian manifolds, in which they introduced the Minakshisundaram-Pleijel zeta function.
On the 13th of August 1968, Subbaramiah suffered a heart attack and died at the age of 55.
1954 Verdiana Grace Masanja (née Kashaga, born October 12, 1954 - ] is a Tanzanian mathematician specializing in fluid dynamics. She is the first Tanzanian woman to earn a doctorate in mathematics. She earned a second master's degree in physics and completed her doctorate in fluid dynamics at [Technische Universität Berlin]]. Her dissertation, A Numerical Study of a Reiner–Rivlin Fluid in an Axi-Symmetrical Circular Pipe, was jointly supervised by Wolfgang Muschik and Gerd Brunk.
Already, while a master's student, Masanja had become a lecturer at the University of Dar es Salaam, and on her return from Germany she became a professor there, and remained on the university's faculty until 2010. In 2006 she began teaching as well at the National University of Rwanda, and in 2007 became a professor there, as well as being appointed as the university's director of research, and as deputy vice chancellor and senior advisor at the University of Kibungo in Rwanda. In 2018 she returned to Tanzania as a professor of applied and computational mathematics at the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in Arusha.
Masanja has served as vice president for Eastern Africa of the African Mathematical Union, chaired the African Mathematical Union Commission on Women in Mathematics in Africa and the Tanzania Education Network, and has served as National Coordinator for Female Education in Mathematics in Africa.
DEATHS
1492 Piero della Francesca (June 1420, 12 Oct 1492) was an Italian artist who pioneered the use of perspective in Renaissance art and went on to write several mathematical treatises. In his own time he was also known as a highly competent mathematician. In his Lives of the most famous painters ... , Giorgio Vasari (1511-1572) says that Piero showed mathematical ability in his earliest youth and went on to write 'many' mathematical treatises. Of these, three are now known to survive. The titles by which they are known are: Abacus treatise (Trattato d'abaco), Short book on the five regular solids (Libellus de quinque corporibus regularibus) and On perspective for painting (De prospectiva pingendi). Piero almost certainly wrote all three works in the vernacular (his native dialect was Tuscan), and all three are in the style associated with the tradition of 'practical mathematics', that is, they consist largely of series of worked examples, with rather little discursive text. The Abacus treatise is similar to works used for instructional purposes in 'Abacus schools'. It deals with arithmetic, starting with the use of fractions, and works through series of standard problems, then it turns to algebra, and works through similarly standard problems, then it turns to geometry and works through rather more problems than is standard before (without warning) coming up with some entirely original three-dimensional problems involving two of the 'Archimedean polyhedra' (those now known as the truncated tetrahedron and the cuboctahedron). Four more Archimedeans appear in the Short book on the five regular solids: the truncated cube, the truncated octahedron, the truncated icosahedron and the truncated dodecahedron. (All these modern names are due to Johannes Kepler (1619).) Piero appears to have been the independent re-discoverer of these six solids. Moreover, the way he describes their properties makes it clear that he has in fact invented the notion of truncation in its modern mathematical sense. On perspective for painting is the first treatise to deal with the mathematics of perspective, a technique for giving an appearance of the third dimension in two-dimensional works such as paintings or sculptured reliefs. Piero is determined to show that this technique is firmly based on the science of vision (as it was understood in his time). He accordingly starts with a series of mathematical theorems, some taken from the optical work of Euclid (possibly through medieval sources) but some original to Piero himself. Some of these theorems are of independent mathematical interest, but on the whole the work is conceived as a manual for teaching painters to draw in perspective, and the detailed drawing instructions are mind-numbing in their repetitiousness. There are many diagrams and illustrations, but unfortunately none of the known manuscripts has illustrations actually drawn by Piero himself. None of Piero's mathematical work was published under his own name in the Renaissance, but it seems to have circulated quite widely in manuscript and became influential through its incorporation into the works of others. Much of Piero's algebra appears in Pacioli's Summa (1494), much of his work on the Archimedeans appears in Pacioli's De divina proportione (1509), and the simpler parts of Piero's perspective treatise were incorporated into almost all subsequent treatises on perspective addressed to painters. *SAU
First page of the Trattato d'Abaco
1912 Lewis Boss (26 Oct 1846, 12 Oct 1912) American astronomer best known for his compilation of two catalogues of stars (1910, 1937). In 1882 he led an expedition to Chile to observe a transit of Venus. About 1895 Boss began to plan a general catalog of stars, giving their positions and motions. After 1906, the project had support from the Carnegie Institution, Washington, D.C. With an enlarged staff he observed the northern stars from Albany and the southern stars from Argentina. With the new data, he corrected catalogs that had been compiled in the past, and in 1910 he published the Preliminary General Catalogue of 6,188 Stars for the Epoch 1900. The work unfinished upon his death was completed by his son Benjamin in 1937*TIS
1915 Edith Cavell (born December 4, 1865, Swardeston, Norfolk, England—died October 12, 1915, Brussels, Belgium) was an English nurse who became a popular heroine of World War I and was executed for assisting Allied soldiers in escaping from German-occupied Belgium.
Cavell entered the nursing profession in 1895 and in 1907 was appointed the first matron of the Berkendael Institute, Brussels, where she greatly improved the standard of nursing. After the German occupation of Belgium, she became involved in an underground group formed to help British, French, and Belgian soldiers reach the Netherlands, a neutral country. The soldiers were sheltered at the Berkendael Institute, which had become a Red Cross hospital, and were provided with money and guides by Philippe Baucq, a Belgian. About 200 men had been aided when, in August 1915, Cavell and several others were arrested.
The group was brought before a court-martial on October 7, 1915. On October 9, Cavell, after making a full confession, was sentenced to death. Three days later she and Baucq were shot, despite the efforts of the U.S. and Spanish ministers to secure a reprieve. Though legally justified, her execution on a charge that did not include espionage was considered outrageous and was widely publicized by the Allies.. *Britannica
Almost a century after her death, I had the opportunity to spend ten years teaching in East Anglia on the Lakenheath AFB, only a short ride to Norfolk. Riding or walking around the city I was aware of the number of people who passed her memorial who would bend a knee or sign the cross as they passed the memorial to a woman who died forty to fifty years before they were born. *PB
1926 Edwin Abbott Abbott (20 Dec 1838, 12 Oct 1926) His most famous work was Flatland: a romance of many dimensions (1884) which Abbott wrote under the pseudonym of A Square. The book has seen many editions, the sixth edition of 1953 being reprinted by Princeton University Press in 1991 with an introduction by Thomas Banchoff. Flatland is an account of the adventures of A Square in Lineland and Spaceland. In it Abbott tries to popularise the notion of multidimensional geometry but the book is also a clever satire on the social, moral, and religious values of the period. More recently, in 2002, an annotated version of Flatland has been produced with an introduction and notes by Ian Stewart who gives extensive discussion of mathematical topics related to passages in Abbott's text. *SAU
In a bold statement of personal opinion I add: This book should be read by every teacher and every student of mathematics.
1936 William Sheppard read Mathematics at Cambridge and then went on to study Law. He was appointed to the Department of Education. His mathematical interests were mainly in Statistics. *SAU
was an Australian-British civil servant, mathematician and statistician remembered for his work in finite differences, interpolation and statistical theory, known in particular for the eponymous Sheppard's corrections.*Wik
1984 Georgii Dmitrievic Suvorov (19 May 1919, 12 Oct 1984) made major contributions to the theory of functions. He worked, in particular, on the theory of topological and metric mappings on 2-dimensional space. Another area on which Suvorov worked was the theory of conformal mappings and quasi-formal mappings. His results in this area, mostly from the late 1960s when he was at Donetsk, are of particular significance. He extended Lavrentev's results in this area, in particular Lavrentev's stability and differentiability theorems, to more general classes of transformations. One of the many innovations in Suvorov's work was new methods which he introduced to help in the understanding of metric properties of mappings with bounded Dirichlet integral. *SAU
2006 Gerard J. Murphy (12 November 1948 – 12 October 2006) MRIA was a prolific Irish mathematician. His textbooks are internationally acclaimed, and translated into different languages. He died from cancer in October 2006, at the age of 57.
Gerard's research was in functional analysis. In recent times his research was on quantum groups and non-commutative geometry, subjects of importance both for mathematics and physics. He authored more than 70 original mathematical papers, singly or with colleagues in Ireland, Europe and North America. He will also be remembered for his book, C*-algebras and Operator Theory, which was published in 1990 to worldwide acclaim.
Gerard's principal interests were in the general theory of C*-algebras, the spectral and index theory of Toeplitz operators on Hardy spaces of ordered groups and bounded symmetric domains, and the C*-algebra approach to quantum groups.
"Gerard Murphy, like Pythagoras and Boole before him, discovered new mathematical truths, truths that will last forever. Generations of future students and researchers will build on and develop these results." Associate Professor Des MacHale, University College Cork *Wik
2009 Israel Gohberg ( 23 August 1928 – 12 October 2009) was a Bessarabian-born Soviet and Israeli mathematician, most known for his work in operator theory and functional analysis, in particular linear operators and integral equations.
He studied at the Kyrgyz Pedagogical Institute in Bishkek and at Moldova State University in Chișinău, completed his doctorate at Leningrad State University on a thesis advised by Mark Krein (1954), and attended Moscow State University for his habilitation degree.
Gohberg joined the faculty at the Teacher's college in Soroca and the Teachers college in Bălți before returning to Chișinău where he was elected into the Academy of Sciences and also being appointed head of functional analysis at Moldova State University (1964–73). After moving to Israel, he joined Tel Aviv University (1974) and was at the Weizmann Institute at Rehovot. Since then he also had positions at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (1983), as well as at the University of Calgary and the University of Maryland, College Park.
He founded the Integral equations and operator theory journal (1983).
Gohberg was the visionary and driving force of the International Workshop on Operator Theory and its Applications, or IWOTA, starting with its first meeting on August 1, 1981. He became a lifetime president of the IWOTA Steering Committee and a founder of the Springer / Birkhäuser Verlag book series Operator Theory: Advances and Applications (OTAA).
Gohberg was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 1992. He received honorary doctorates from the Darmstadt University of Technology in 1997; from the Vienna University of Technology in 2001; from West University of Timișoara in 2002; from Moldova State University, Chișinău, Moldova in 2002; from Alecu Russo State University, Bălți, Moldova in 2002; and from Technion, June 2008. He also was awarded the M.G. Krein Prize of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in 2008, and was elected SIAM Fellow in 2009.
He died in Ra'anana in 2009.
2011 Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941; found dead October 12, 2011), was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the 'R' in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr. *Wik
2011 Pierre Lelong (14 March 1912 Paris – 12 October 2011) was a French mathematician who introduced the Poincaré–Lelong equation, the Lelong number and the concept of plurisubharmonic functions.
Lelong earned his doctorate in 1941 from the École Normale Supérieure, under the supervision of Paul Montel. On 5 June 1981 Lelong received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Mathematics and Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1985.
Lelong has made many pioneering contributions in mathematics. Especially of great impact is his work on the Poincaré-Lelong equation, closed positive currents and Lelong numbers. The best way to understand this very important part of his work is to look at it from the historic perspective of constructing meromorphic functions on abstractly defined complex manifolds and see how his contributions fit in a pivotal way into the global landscape in the theory of several complex variables.
The theory of several complex variables studies complex-analytic objects such as holomorphic and meromorphic functions and maps, complex-analytic subvarieties, holomorphic vector bundles, and coherent analytic sheaves. When a complex-analytic manifold or space is projective algebraic, by definition it is embedded inside a complex projective space and there are many complex- analytic objects on it which are constructed from those on the complex projective space. When a complex-analytic manifold is abstractly defined by piecing together local holomorphic charts, the construction of complex-analytic objects on it is a problem of fundamental importance
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
.jpg)
.jpg)
