The true business of the philosopher(scientist), though not flattering to his vanity, is merely to ascertain, arrange and condense the facts. ~Sir John Leslie
The 100th day of the year; The first 3 primes add to 10 and the first 32 primes add to 102 = 100 *Prime Curios
And 100=1+2+3+4+5+6+7+(8•9) *jim wilder @wilderlab or 123 + 4 - 5 + 67 - 89 = 100 *Alexander Bogomolny @CutTheKnotMath There are many more of these, find your own. Using only + or - there is only one way using exactly 7 +/- signs. This classic old problem is generally credited to Henry Ernest Dudeney whose birthday is today (see below) .
The last proof in John Horton Conway's "On Numbers and Games" is: Theorem 100; "This is the last Theorem in this book.The Proof is Obvious."
How many legs does a centipede have? Although the name is derived from cent(100) and ped (foot) the answer is NOT 100! In fact, it seems that all centipedes have twice an odd number for the number of legs so they can't have 100. In "The Book of General Ignorance" it is said that one (or at lest one) variety of centipede had been found with 96 legs, this seems not to be supported by the folks who study the creatures. There are some types that seem to have 2*49 = 98 legs, but none have been found with 100 legs (and none are expected to be found)
West Virginia seems to have more communities with numerical names than anywhere else in the world. They have a Six, and an Eight, and they even have the only town in the US named Hundred. Originally named "Old Hundred" for a long lived early settler, Henry Church. The sign points out that Henry served for the British in the Revolutionary War, but doesn't include that he took up arms to fight against them in the War of 1812. Before he arrived at his assignment, the war ended, so he returned to his home in Hundred.
The smallest number whose name is spelled with:
3 letters is 1 (one)
4 letters is 4 (four)
5 letters is 3 (three)
10 letters is 24 (twenty-four)
25 letters is 1104 (one thousand one hundred four)
50 letters is 113,373 (one hundred thirteen thousand three hundred seventy-three)
and with 100 letters is 11,373,373,373 (eleven billion three hundred seventy-three million three hundred seventy-three thousand three hundred seventy-three)
West Virginia seems to have more communities with numerical names than anywhere else in the world. They have a Six, and an Eight, and they even have the only town in the US named Hundred. Originally named "Old Hundred" for a long lived early settler, Henry Church. The sign points out that Henry served for the British in the Revolutionary War, but doesn't include that he took up arms to fight against them in the War of 1812. Before he arrived at his assignment, the war ended, so he returned to his home in Hundred.In 1852, when Church was 102, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad opened, using the upper valley of Fish Creek as part of its passage across the mountains. It was probably around this time that the town was named, or renamed.
There was a time soon after the completion of the B&O Railroad when passengers would clamber to the car windows to catch a glimpse of "Old Hundred." He was a marvel of a man who, even after his hundredth birthday, labored in his fields to the delight of passersby.
Henry Church and his wife lived to be 109 and 106.
EVENTS
In 1661, Robert Hooke read his first publication, a pamphlet on capillary action, to the Society for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematical Experimental Learning. The Society had been constituted, to promote experimental philosophy, by at a meeting of a dozen scientists in Gresham College on 28 Nov 1660. The Society subsequently petitioned King Charles II to recognize it and to make a royal grant of incorporation. The Royal Charter, which was passed by the Great Seal on 15 Jul 1662, created the Royal Society of London. On 5 Nov 1662, Hooke was appointed its Curator of Experiments.*TIS
1751 Euler writes to Clairaut after receiving a paper from Clairaut that explained his error in a theory of the motion of the moon (Euler had thought Newton's inverse square law failed to explain motion of the moon...below). He describes Clairaut's work as "the most important and most profound discovery that has ever been made in mathematics." *Thomas L. Hankins, Jean d'Alembert: science and the Englightenment; pg 35 (In 1747 at a public session in the French Academy of Sciences Clairaut stated that Newton's theory of gravity was wrong. Euler and d’Alembert had simultaneously came to the same conclusion as all had been working on the motion of the moon as a special case of the three body problem. Clairaut suggested that the strength of gravity was proportional not to 1/r^2 , but the more complicated 1/r^2 +c/r^4 for some constant c. Over large distances, the c/r^4 term would effectively disappear, accounting for the utility of the inverse square law over large distances. He then began trying to find a value of c which could account for the moon's motion. He would continue to pursue this idea until May 17, 1749, when he made an equally dramatic announcement in which he claimed that Newton was right after all.)
Clairaut
1755 Simpson introduced error distributions. *VFR Simpson is best remembered for his work on interpolation and numerical methods of integration. However the numerical method known today as "Simpson's rule", although it did appear in his work, was something he learned from Newton as Simpson himself acknowledged. By way of compensation, however, the Newton-Raphson method for solving the equation f (x) = 0 is, in its present form, due to Simpson. Newton described an algebraic process for solving polynomial equations which Raphson later improved. The method of approximating the roots did not use the differential calculus. The modern iterative form xn+1 = xn - f (xn) / f '(xn) is due to Simpson, who published it in 1740. He also worked on probability theory and in 1740 published The Nature and Laws of Chance. Much of Simpson's work in this area was based on earlier work of De Moivre. In fact he was involved in a dispute with De Moivre over issues of priority on the topic of probability and annuities. He worked on the Theory of Errors and aimed to prove that the arithmetic mean was better than a single observation. His justification of this appeared in his 1757 memoir "An attempt to show the advantage arising by taking the mean of a number of observations in practical astronomy". *SAU
1790 First patent law enacted in the U.S. *VFR the first U.S. patent statute was signed into law by President Washington. Although a number of inventors were clamoring for patents and copyrights, the first session of the First Congress in 1789 acted on none of the petitions. On 8 Jan 1790, President Washington recommended in his State of the Union address that Congress give attention to the encouragement of new and useful inventions, and within the month, on 25 Jan 1790, the House appointed a committee to draft a patent statute. The bill was given a first reading to the House on 4 Mar 1790, and amendments reconciled with the Senate by 5 Apr 1790. The first patent issued under this statute was signed by George Washington on 31 Jul 1790 for Samuel Hopkins' process to make potash and pearl ash. *TIS
America’s first patent license. Samuel Hopkins, “Patent License 310,” National Museum of American History,
1793 Gaspard Monge was permitted to resign from the Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies of France in order to undertake the urgent task of supplying the French army with gunpowder. *VFR
1846 It was supposedly on this date that Charles Wheatstone, scheduled to speak at a Royal Society lecture, bolted from the stage in fright. Seemingly at ease in small gatherings, he had a phobia of public speaking. According to the myth, and his biographer, Brian Bowers suggests that the probably factual foundation of the event has been extended to mythic proportions. Speakers have sometimes said they were "lock-in" prior to their speeches to prevent them from doing a "Wheatstone." At the very least the date must be wrong (and thus part of the myth) since that day was Good Friday, and no lectures were planned. In the extended part of the myth, Faraday, who often delivered the timid Wheatstone's work to the Society, supposedly stepped in and gave a powerful lecture on the nature of light. *Sir Charles Wheatstone FRS: 1802-1875 By Brian Bowers
1882 The U.S. issued its first postage stamp honoring President James A. Garfield (1831–1881). His only claim to mathematical fame was a new proof of the Pythagorean Theorem.
His proof was in the New England Journal of Education April 1, 1876.
Halley's Comet, May 29 1910 *Wik
1910 Halley's comet began to be visible to the naked-eye on this date. Perihelion would be ten days later. Predictions of disaster about the potential demise of the human race when the Earth passed through the comet's tail set off fearful purchases of gas masks, and a plethora of scams such as anti-comet pills and even an anti-comet umbrella. *Wik
1915 Emmy Noether would frequently discuss abstract algebra via postcard with Ernst Fisher. The one below was sent on this date in 1915. *Wik
1943 ENIAC" Project Underway: Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania begin work on the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), a machine capable of the then-remarkable speed of 5,000 additions per second. ENIAC was shrouded in wartime secrecy since its main purpose was to compute "firing tables" for artillery shells. Before ENIAC, this was done by women (called "computers") working in large groups at mechanical desktop calculators. ENIAC was not completed until after the war (February 1946) but a generation of computer designers learned from its design and from the summer course given by Eckert and Mauchly at the Moore School. ENIAC could solve a wide range of general purpose computing problems, however, and was booked for two years in 1948. The ENIAC becomes public upon its completion in February 1946, when project leaders John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proudly show off 1,000 square feet of plugs, switches, and lights that calculate 1,000 times faster than other machines at the time. *CHM
ENIAC's six primary programmers, Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman, not only determined how to input ENIAC programs, but also developed an understanding of ENIAC's inner workings. The programmers were often able to narrow bugs down to an individual failed tube which could be pointed to for replacement by a technician.
1971 Lebanon issued a stamp honoring Hassan Kamel al-Sabbah (1894–1935). [Scott #C622] Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah (August 16, 1895 - March 31, 1935) was born in Nabatieh, Lebanon. He was an electrical and electronics research engineer, mathematician and inventor par excellence. He studied at the American University of Beirut. He taught mathematics at Imperial College of Damascus, Syria, and at the American University of Beirut. He is seen as being the father of the solar cell. He died in an automobile accident at Lewis near Elizabeth Town, N.Y
1984 Norway issues stamp commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of astronomer Christopher Hansteen.
BIRTHS
1651 Ehrenfried Tschirnhaus (10 April 1651 – 11 October 1708) was a German mathematician who worked on the solution of equations and the study of curves. He is best known for the transformation which removes the term of degree n-1 from an equation of degree n. *SAU Together with Leibniz he studied the unpublished papers of Descartes, Pascal and Roberval. His algebra, which Newton hoped to publish in an annotated translation, contains one of the earliest statements of the quadratic formula in a form identical to what we use today. *VFR
Tschirnhaus was the first person in the West to discover the secret to making true (hard-paste) porcelain. The Chinese and Japanese had been making porcelain for centuries, but no Western potter could duplicate the look and feel of porcelain, a ceramic that is white, translucent, impermeable to moisture, and rings like a bell when struck. *LH
Cream pot and cover, Meissen Porcelain factory, ca 1720, on display at Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 2011
1766 Sir John Leslie (10 Apr 1766; 3 Nov 1832 at age 66) Scottish physicist and mathematician who first created artificial ice. His practical scientific investigations led to his book Experimental Inquiry Into the Nature and Propagation of Heat (1804), dealing with the fundamental laws of heat radiation. Leslie gave the first correct description of capillary action (1802) and invented many instruments, most notably an accurate differential air thermometer, and also a hygrometer, a photometer, the pyroscope, atmometer(an instrument for measuring the rate of evaporation of water into the atmosphere) and aethrioscope (a meteorological device for measuring the chilling effect of a clear sky. The name is from the Greek word for clear αίθριος). In 1810, he devised a method of obtaining very low temperatures, by evaporating water in a receiver evacuated with an air-pump but containing a drying agent. His mathematical works include texts on geometry, trigonometry and The Philosophy of Arithmetic. *TIS
It is contended that Sir John Leslie provided both a theoretical discussion and a limited experimental confirmation of Ohm's Law in a paper written in 1791 and published in 1824, three years prior to Ohm's presentation in Die galvanische Kette mathematische bearbeitet. *American Journal of Physics
1838 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
1857 Henry Ernest Dudeney (pronounced with a long “u” and a strong accent on the first syllable, as in “scrutiny”) (10 April 1857 – 23 April 1930) He was England’s greatest maker of puzzles of mathematical interest, publishing six books of puzzles. His first work appears under the pseudonym “sphinx.” Although he never met Sam Loyd, they were in frequent correspondence and informally exchanged ideas. For samples of his puzzles see 536 Puzzles & Curious Problems, by Henry Ernest Dudeney (Edited, 1967, by Martin Gardner). *VFR Although Dudeney spent his career in the Civil Service, he continued to devise various problems and puzzles. Dudeney's first puzzle contributions were submissions to newspapers and magazines, often under the pseudonym of "Sphinx." Much of this earlier work was a collaboration with American puzzlist Sam Loyd; in 1890, they published a series of articles in the English penny weekly Tit-Bits. Dudeney later contributed puzzles under his real name to publications such as The Weekly Dispatch, The Queen, Blighty, and Cassell's Magazine. For twenty years, he had a successful column, "Perplexities", in the magazine The Strand, edited by the former editor of Tit-Bits, George Newnes. Dudeney continued to exchange puzzles with fellow recreational mathematician Sam Loyd for a while, but broke off the correspondence and accused Loyd of stealing his puzzles and publishing them under his own name. Some of Dudeney's most famous innovations were his 1903 success at solving the Haberdasher's Puzzle (Cut an equilateral triangle into four pieces that can be rearranged to make a square) and publishing the first known crossnumber puzzle, in 1926. In addition, he has been credited with inventing verbal arithmetic and discovering new applications of digital roots.
\[The Kindle edition of his classic "Canterbury Puzzles" is/was available for FREE..from Amazon ]
1910 Eižens Leimanis (April 10, 1905 – December 4, 1992) was a Latvian mathematician who worked on the three-body problem. He taught for many years at the University of British Columbia in Canada.
Leimanis received a master's degree and First Prize in Mathematics at the University of Latvia. He worked as an assistant professor at the University of Latvia where he delivered lectures in the courses such as theoretical mechanics, orbital theory, celestial mechanics, practical analysis and descriptive geometry. He also taught at the University of British Columbia from 1949 until 1974.
Leimanis's life and study centered around the three-body problem but he also had many publications related to the history of mathematics, philosophy, and religion.
He lived until the age of 87 and was survived by his wife, six children, five grandchildren, and one great grandchild.*Wik
*SAU
DEATHS
1752 Joseph Louis Lagrange (25 Jan 1736, 10 Apr 1813 at age 77) He excelled in all fields of analysis and number theory and analytical and celestial mechanics. *SAU He made great contributions to the theory of numbers and to analytic and celestial mechanics. His most important book is Mécanique analytique (1788; "Analytic Mechanics"), the textbook on which all later work in this field is based. *TIS
1868 Giovanni Battista Amici (25 Mar 1786, 10 Apr 1868 at age 82) was an Italian physicist, microscopist, astronomer and optical instrument designer who is best known for his invention of the achromatic lens. He also introduced the Amici-Bertrand lens, a lens for the inspection of an objective's rear focal plane. The lens system he designed for a new type of microscope in 1837 improved the magnification, capable of up to 6000 times. In 1840, he also introduced an immersion system for microscopes; the lowermost lens was immersed in a drop of oil to reduce improve clarity. He improved the design of mirrors used in reflecting telescopes. As a biologist, he investigated the sexual function of flowers, in particular he clarified the mechanism of the pollination of orchids.*TIS
1914 Moritz Cantor, (23 August 1829 – 10 April 1920) historian of mathematics, . *VFR best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume (published 1880) traces the general history of mathematics up to 1200. The second volume traces the history up to 1668 (the year Newton and Leibniz were just about to embark on their mathematical researches). The third volume continues up to 1758 (Lagrange's work began shortly after this date). Cantor then, at the age of 69, as editor-in-chief, organised a team with nine further contributors to collaborate on the fourth volume (published 1908), continuing to 1799, the year of Gauss's doctoral thesis. (TIS) Many historians credit him for founding a new discipline in a field that had hitherto lacked the sound, conscientious, and critical methods of other fields of history. *Wik
1911 Sam Loyd (January 30, 1841 – April 10, 1911), Americas greatest puzzlist. As a chess composer, he authored a number of chess problems, often with interesting themes. At his peak, Loyd was one of the best chess players in the US, and was ranked 15th in the world.
Loyd is widely acknowledged as one of America's great puzzle writers and popularizers, often mentioned as the greatest. Martin Gardner featured Loyd in his August 1957 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American and called him "America's greatest puzzler". In 1898, The Strand dubbed him "the prince of puzzlers". As a chess problemist, his composing style is distinguished by wit and humor.
He is also known for lies and self-promotion, however, and he has been criticized on these grounds—Martin Gardner's assessment continues "but also obviously a hustler". Canadian puzzler Mel Stover called Loyd "an old reprobate", and Matthew Costello called him "puzzledom's greatest celebrity... popularizer, genius", but also a "huckster" and "fast-talking snake oil salesman".
His son edited several collections of the father’s puzzles, including the mammoth Cyclopedia of Puzzles, which he privately printed in 1914. It remains today the largest, most interesting collection of puzzles ever printed. For a selection see Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd, edited by Martin Gardner, Dover 1959 [p. xiv]. *VFR You can visit the Sam Loyd puzzle site here.
1930 William Edward Story (29 April 1850 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 10 April 1930 in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA) W.E. Story began his teaching career at Harvard as a tutor. With the establishment of Johns Hopkins University in 1876, Story was recruited by Daniel Coit Gilman as an Associate. J. J. Sylvester led the program in mathematics. Until 1879, Story was the only other instructor in mathematics besides Sylvester.
When Clark University was established in 1889, President G. Stanley Hall hired Oskar Bolza and Story to lead the mathematics department. Henry Taber was hired as docent, he had studied with Story at Johns Hopkins.[6] Solomon Lefschetz and other mathematicians contributed to making Clark the leading site for mathematics in the USA until 1892 when University of Chicago eclipsed it.
In the 1890’s he edited the short lived Mathematical Reviews.
Clark University ceased its graduate program in 1919 and Story retired in 1921.
1967 Oscar Chisini (March 4, 1889 – April 10, 1967) was an Italian mathematician. He introduced the Chisini mean (The arithmetic, harmonic, geometric, generalised, Heronian and quadratic means are all Chisini means, as are their weighted variants) in 1929. In 1929 he founded the Institute of Mathematics (Istituto di Matematica) at the University of Milan, along with Gian Antonio Maggi and Giulio Vivanti. He then held the position of chairman of the Institute from the early 1930s until 1959.The Chisini conjecture in algebraic geometry is a uniqueness question for morphisms of generic smooth projective surfaces, branched on a cuspidal curve. A special case is the question of the uniqueness of the covering of the projective plane, branched over a generic curve of degree at least five. *Wik
1974 G Waldo Dunnington (January 15, 1906, Bowling Green, Missouri – April 10, 1974, Natchitoches, Louisiana) was a writer, historian and professor of German known for his writings on the famous German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Dunnington wrote several articles about Gauss and later a biography entitled Gauss: Titan of Science (ISBN 0-88385-547-X). He became interested in Gauss through one of his elementary school teachers, Minna Waldeck Gauss Reeves, who was a great-granddaughter of Gauss.
Dunnington was also a translator at the Nuremberg trials. He ended his teaching career at Northwestern State University which houses his collection of Gauss-related material, believed to be the largest collection of its kind in the world. He became Dean of International Students there near the end of his life. *Wik *The Dunnington-Gauss award is given annually at Northwestern State University to the outstanding student in mathematics.
1988 Annie Hutton Numbers (6 March 1897 in Edinburgh, Scotland - 10 April 1988 in High Wycombe, England) After a brief spell teaching she was appointed as Assistant Lecturer and Demonstrator at the Department of Chemistry at Edinburgh University. While on the staff of the University, Numbers undertook research towards the degree of Ph.D. which she took in 1926 for the thesis The influence of substituents on the optical rotatory power of compounds. She left her post at the Department after 1930 to become a teacher in Ipswich and then in High Wycombe, retiring in 1965. *SAU
Annie Hutton Numbers was a scientist, teacher and lifelong-learner. She graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1918 with the degree of MA (Hons) in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy. In 1917 she joined the Edinburgh Mathematical Society, where she was a member for 16 years. *Wik
Who wouldn't want to have a math teacher whose name was Ms. Numbers?
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
This is not a math blog, except that it has to do with logic, or the lack thereof, but I teach kids, and this is a story my bright kids need to read.....and thanks to JD2718 in New York for passing this along.
Just before the recent storm hit Haiti, Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote this blog about the Creole Pigs that were once literally everywhere in Haiti, and how they came NOT to be there. It is a story of the worst indifference to sustainable development, and needs to be shared. ... This is me sharing. Since Blogs come and go, I am copying the whole thing below, but I do encourage you to read the original: =================================================================================== Growing up in the United States, I grew up listening to my Haitian father speak longingly of two things that he said we couldn't get quite right in the US. The first were mangoes. Most of the mangoes that are found in the US are vaguely round like a Nerf football, and have a mostly deep reddish hue when ripe. They are beautiful, but to hear my father speak, are to the mango what the Red Delicious is to the apple: overproduced and vaguely generic.
The mango of his childhood, the Madame Francis mango, is flatter and green - like an overgrown lima bean. Even at its ripest it only hints at a dusky yellow color. It is also unique to Haiti. I've had it, and he's right; it is delicious; a queen among mangoes.
My father's other long lost food craving, pork from the Creole Pig, was also unique to Haiti. Unlike the pink pig encapsulated in the image of Wilbur, the pig from Charlotte's web, the Creole Pig was not pink. It, like the population of Haiti, was black and thus unlike American pigs did not sunburn. Raised by eighty to 85% of rural households, the relatively small but dense Creole pig subsisted not on grain, but on the detritus of the island's human population. It could thrive on the husk of rice, the cob of corn. In a nation without consolidated trash pickup the Creole pig acted as the nation's garbage men playing a key role in maintaining the fertility of the soil. And, because it was not dependent on feed for its survival, it functioned for the peasant population as a sort of mobile, literal piggy bank - the animals were sold or slaughtered to pay for school, for marriages, for unexpected medical expenses.
All of this is spoken in the past tense because between the 1970s and the 1980s the Creole pigs were systematically eradicated under pressure of the US government.
Like most of development history some of the facts are in contention, but this much is certain. In the 1970's the African Swine River Virus had spread from Spain to the Dominican Republic and then to Haiti by virtue of the Artibonite River which straddles the two countries.
Now comes the contentious part.
By 1982, says the United States government almost 1/3rd of Haiti's pig population was infected. A lot of Haitians (and many independent organizations) argue otherwise. What is not in contention is that the US, in fear of the virus spreading to its own pig population, pressured Haiti's government to seize all of the pigs and kill them.
Everyone who had pigs seized were supposed to be compensated in the form of replacement pigs - fat, pink pigs from the American Midwest, deemed 'better' by the USDA. These pigs needed clean drinking water (which 80% of Haitians did not have access to), 90 dollars a year in feed (in a nation where per capita income was 130 dollars a year), vaccination, and special roofed pens to serve as protection from the harsh Caribbean sun.
Does anyone see a problem with this?
Never mind the fact that many Haitians who had their pigs seized were never actually compensated (more on that in a second) - they couldn't have afforded the compensation anyway. In fact, many of those who received pigs found that their new pigs rapidly died.
So much for 'better'.
The eradication of the Creole pig only served to further impoverish Haitians. It forced many children to quit school, forced small farmers to mortgage and eventually lose their land, and forced many Haitians to cut down trees, rapidly increasing the Island's rate of deforestation, to create cash income from charcoal. All simply to save an already rich country from the small risk (and by most independent accounts the number of pigs infected in Haiti was much smaller than the 33% cited by the US) posed to it by a poor, tiny island nation.
It was, however, a boon to US pig farmers who generated millions in revenue according to grassroots international offloading these ill suited pigs on poor Haitian peasants. How?
In order to get a replacement pig, Haitians were required to pay a princely sum of $50 dollars per pig.
Frustra fit per plura, quod fieri potest per pauciora.
It is vain to do with more what can be done with less.
~William of Ockham
The 99th day of the year, If 99 divides some 4-digit number ABCD, then 99 also divides BCDA, CDAB, and DABC, every cyclic permutation of the number.
There are 9 ways to express 99 as p + 2q, where p and q are prime. (Students might wonder why this strange p+2q idea should be interesting. It is related to a conjecture of Emile Lemoine in 1890.
The conjecture states that any odd number greater than 5 can be written as p+2q where p and q are primes. Students might try to find the several numbers smaller than 99 that can be expressed in p+2q form over 10 ways.)
99 is the largest number that is equal to the sum of its digits plus the product of its digits: 99 = 9 + 9 + 9 * 9
and 99 is the alphanumeric value of THIRTEEN *Number Gossip
992 = 9801 and 98 + 01 = 99 so it is a Kaprekar number, named after D. R. Kaprekar, an Indian recreational mathematician.
And Jim Wilder adds that 99 is the sum of three squares, and also of three cubes. 99 = 3^2 + 3^2 + 9^2 = 2^3 + 3^3 + 4^3. I would add, in keeping with the theme of threes, that it is the sum of three primes, 89 + 7 + 3,
and David Marain @dmarain recently reminded me 1/992 = 0.000102030405060708091011121314151617181920212223242526272... The question for students, It must be a repeating decimal, when does it start to repeat?
(and there was something about bottles of beer on the wall, but they don't seem to be there anymore. Maybe someone took them down...)
EVENTS
1585 The Tiger (loaned to Ralegh by Queen Elizabeth) left the Portsmouth harbor bound for "the Virginias" carrying the settlers for the colony of Roanoke Island. Onboard for his second trip to the area was Thomas Harriot, the first known scientist in North America, and the first European to speak and record an indigenous language of the North American continent, a Carolina Algonquin dialect. *Robyn Arianrnod (Thomas Harriot, A Life in Science) More about Harriot and the Roanoke colony (or lost colony) here.
The Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588) includes descriptions of English settlements and financial issues in Virginia at the time. He is sometimes credited with the introduction of the potato to the British Isles. Harriot invented binary notation and arithmetic several decades before Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but this remained unknown until the 1920's. He was also the first person to make a drawing of the Moon through a telescope, on 5 August 1609, about four months before Galileo Galilei.
1626 English philosopher, Francis Bacon, died a month after performing his first scientific experiment. He stuffed a chicken with snow to see if this would cause it to spoil less rapidly. The chill he caught during this experiment led to his death. [A. Hellemans and B. Bunch. The Timetables of Science, p . 32]. *VFR
1673 Leibniz elected Fellow of the Royal Society of London, a position of which he was very desirous. [The Correspondence of Henry Oldenburg, 9, p. 583]. *VFR 1752 A letter from James Short is read to the Royal Society to inform them of a paper by Euler on "Correcting the Aberrations in the Object-Glasses of Refracting Telescopes." *Phil Trans. 1753 48:287-296 1790 John Dalton wrote to his cousin George Bewley asking for advice on his career and describing a physiological experiment on himself. *ScienceMuseumArchive @GalileosBalls
Dalton expresses his desire to “quit his present profession as teacher and enter upon some other…”. He asks his cousin’s advice about his plans: “I wish to enter upon the study of physics and science”. In the same letter, he describes his experiment on himself “to determine a near as might be the quantity of matter discharged from the body by insensible perspiration …evacuations solid, liquid, perspiration…” – so that from this we are even given an idea about what he ate and drank : loaf bread, cheese, oat bread, meal, meat, potatoes; beer, boiled milk and tea."
1810 Laplace announced his central limit theorem. Nowhere in his work did Laplace state a general theorem which would have corresponded to the CLT in today’s sense. He only treated particular problems concerning the approximation of probabilities of sums or linear combinations of a great number of random variables.
In probability theory, the central limit theorem (CLT) states that, under appropriate conditions, the distribution of a normalized version of the sample mean converges to a standard normal distribution. This holds even if the original variables themselves are not normally distributed. There are several versions of the CLT, each applying in the context of different conditions.
The theorem is a key concept in probability theory because it implies that probabilistic and statistical methods that work for normal distributions can be applicable to many problems involving other types of distributions.
This theorem has seen many changes during the formal development of probability theory. Previous versions of the theorem date back to 1811, but in its modern form it was only precisely stated as late as 1920.
*Wik
In 1895, a spectrogram made by American astronomer James Keeler proved that the rings of Saturn were indeed composed of meteoric particles, as predicted by James Maxwell. If the rings were solid, observations would show uniform rotation. However, Keeler's spectrogram of light reflected from Saturn's rings showed a Doppler shift indicating a variation in radial velocity. Thus, particles in the inner part of a ring, closer to Saturn, move at a different rotational speed from those in more distance parts of a ring, as predicted by Kepler's 3rd law. Keeler published A Spectroscopic Proof of the Meteoric Constitution of Saturn's Rings in the May 1895 issue of Astrophysical Journal, vol. 1, p.416, the journal he co-founded with George E. Hale.*TIS
Keeler was the first to observe the gap in Saturn's rings now known as the Encke Gap, using the 36-inch refractor at Lick Observatory on 7 January 1888. After this feature had been named for Johann Encke, who had observed a much broader variation in the brightness of the A Ring, Keeler's contributions were brought to light. The second major gap in the A Ring, discovered by Voyager, was named the Keeler Gap in his honor.*Wik
1921 New York Times carries article of St. Paul, Mn professor who claims relativity was invented in 1866 by someone calling themselves "Kinertia".
HT to Ash Jogalekar@curiouswavefn 1940 The German Army crossed the border and invaded Denmark. In response, the Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of Max von Laue and James Franck in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from stealing them. He placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. After the war, he returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The Nobel Society then recast the Nobel Prizes using the original gold. *Wik
In 1922, de Hevesy co-discovered (with Dirk Coster) the element hafnium (72Hf) (Latin Hafnia for "Copenhagen", the home town of Niels Bohr... he had met Bohr in England in 1918 and settled in Copenhagen in 1920).
While in Stockholm in 1943, de Hevesy received the Nobel Prize in chemistry. He was later inducted into the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and received the Copley Medal. His Nobel Prize was presented for his pioneering work in the use of isotopic indicators both in inorganic and life sciences .
1959 Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright died on this day in 1959. He was posthumously recognized as "the greatest American architect of all time" by the AIA *Shaun Usher @LettersOfNote In 1959, NASA announced the selection of America's first seven astronauts for project Mercury. Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton were chosen from 110 applicants. Their training program at Langley, which ranged from a graduate-level course in introductory space science to simulator training and scuba-diving. Project Mercury, NASA's first high profile program, was an effort to learn if humans could survive in space. NASA required astronaut candidates to be male, not older than 40 years of age, not more than 5' 11" height and in excellent physical condition. On 5 May 1961, Shepard became the first American in space. *TIS
In 1981, Nature published the longest scientific name in history. With 16,569 nucleotides, the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA is 207,000 letters long. *TIS
BIRTHS
1650 Jean Le Fevre, born in 1650 (*SAU gives 1652 for D.O.B.) in Lisieux and died in 1706 in Paris ,was a French astronomer. Worker weaver until the age of thirty years, Jean Le Fevre was an autodidact who acquired, during his leisure hours, great knowledge in mathematics and astronomy. He calculated several eclipses with great accuracy and accomplished excellent observations using instruments that had been provided. Le Fevre advised Picard through Philippe de La Hire. Le Fevre has successfully computed a table of the passage of the Moon from the meridian completed in 1680 in Paris where he was given a pension of the Academy of Sciences. Then he delivered the famous astronomical tables correctly represent the solar and lunar eclipses and continued writing the Knowledge of time. He knew better than calculating eclipses La Hire with whom he worked on a number of projects until he accused it of stealing astronomical tables that were published. *French Wikipedia.
1770 Thomas Johann Seebeck (9 Apr 1770; 10 Dec 1831 at age 61) German physicist who discovered (1821) that an electric current flows between different conductive materials that are kept at different temperatures, known as the Seebeck effect. It is the basis of the thermocouple and is considered the most accurate measurement of temperature. It is also a key component of the semi-conductor, the foundation of the modern computer business. Seebeck's work was the basis of German physicist Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854) discoveries in electricity and of French physicist Jean Charles Athanase Peltier (1785-1845), whose Peltier effect became well known as a way to use electricity to freeze water (air conditioning, refrigeration). *TIS
1791 George Peacock (9 Apr 1791; 8 Nov 1858 at age 67) English mathematician who, with fellow Cambridge undergraduates Charles Babbage and John Herschel brought reform to nomenclature in English mathematics. They formed the Analytical Society (1815) whose aims were to bring the advanced methods of calculus from Europe to Cambridge to replace the increasingly stagnant notation of Isaac Newton from the previous century. The Society produced a translation of a book of Lacroix in the differential and integral calculus. In 1830, he published Treatise on Algebra which attempted to give algebra a logical treatment, and which went at least partway toward the establishment of symbolic algebra. Instead of using only numbers he used objects, and showed the associativity and commutativity of these objects. reformed British Algebra, Dean of Ely Cathedral. *TIS
1806 The great Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel was born. In 1822, young Isambard began work in his father’s cramped little office in the City. The older Brunel, who had designed machines for making army boots and, significantly, a tunneling shield which made underwater tunneling possible, was involved in projects ranging from suspension bridges and dock installations to a projected canal in Panama. Three years later he began his greatest undertaking, the construction of the first tunnel under the Thames, from Rotherhithe to Wapping. His son hurled himself into it with the superhuman energy and resourcefulness that would mark his whole adult life. He was lucky to survive the desperate moment in 1828 when the river broke into the tunnel and a massive wave swept along it. Six of the workforce were killed and young Isambard was badly hurt and took months to recover. He went on to start a brilliantly successful separate career of his own and to create the Great Western Railway and the first transatlantic steamships. His father, knighted in 1841, died in 1849 at the age of eighty. The even more famous son lived on for only another ten years, to die at fifty-three in 1859. *History Today @HistoryToday
1813 Robert R Anstice (9 April 1813 in Madeley, Shropshire, England - 17 Dec 1853 in Wigginton (near Tring), Hertfordshire, England) During his time as vicor at Wigginton, Anstice became interested in the mathematical work of another rector, Kirkman, who had written on the subject of Steiner triple systems (as they are now called). In one of his papers Kirkman gave an elegant construction of a resolvable Steiner triple system on 15 elements (the famous Kirkman 15 schoolgirls problem), making use of what are now known as a Room square of order 8 and the Fano plane. Kirkman stated that the generalisation of this construction seemed very hard. *SAU
1816 Charles-Eugène Delaunay (9 Apr 1816; 5 Aug 1872 at age 56) French mathematician and astronomer whose theory of lunar motion advanced the development of planetary-motion theories. After 20 years of work, he published two volumes on lunar theory, La Théorie du mouvement de la lune (1860,1867). This is an important case of the three body problem. Delaunay found the longitude, latitude and parallax of the Moon as infinite series. These gave results correct to 1 second of arc but were not too practical as the series converged slowly. However this work was important in the beginnings of functional analysis. Delaunay succeeded Le Verrier as director of the Paris Observatory in 1870 but two years later he and three companions drowned in a boating accident. *TIS
1830 Eadweard Muybridge (9 Apr 1830; died 8 May 1904 at age 74) English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. For his work on human and animal motion, he invented a superfast shutter. Leland Stanford, former governor of California, hired Muybridge to settle a hotly debated issue: Is there a moment in a horse’s gait when all four hooves are off the ground at once? In 1972, Muybridge took up the challenge. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity. Another noteworthy event in his life was that he was tried (but acquitted) for the murder of his wife's lover. *TIS
Galloping horse, animated using photos by Muybridge (1887)
1834 Edmond N. Laguerre (9 April 1834 in Bar-le-Duc, France - 14 Aug 1886 in Bar-le-Duc, France)studied approximation methods and is best remembered for the special functions: the Laguerre polynomials.*SAU
He also investigated orthogonal polynomials . Laguerre's method is a root-finding algorithm tailored to polynomials. He laid the foundations of a geometry of oriented spheres (Laguerre geometry and Laguerre plane), including the Laguerre transformation or transformation by reciprocal directions.
In numerical analysis, Laguerre's method is a root-finding algorithm tailored to polynomials. In other words, Laguerre's method can be used to numerically solve the equation p(x) = 0 for a given polynomial p(x). One of the most useful properties of this method is that it is, from extensive empirical study, very close to being a "sure-fire" method, meaning that it is almost guaranteed to always converge to some root of the polynomial, no matter what initial guess is chosen. However, for computer computation, more efficient methods are known, with which it is guaranteed to find all roots. *Wik
1863 László Rátz (9 April 1863 in Sopron – 30 September 1930 in Budapest) was a Hungarian mathematics high school teacher best known for educating such people as John von Neumann and Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner. He was a legendary teacher of "Budapest-Fasori Evangélikus Gimnázium", the Budapest Lutheran Gymnasium, a famous secondary school in Budapest in Hungary.
Eugene Wigner recalled that, "Many teachers had great skill but none could invoke the beauty of the subject like Ratz."
1865 Charles Proteus Steinmetz (9 Apr 1865; 26 Oct 1923 at age 58) German-American electrical engineer and inventor whose theories and mathematical analysis of alternating current systems helped establish them as the preferred form of electrical energy in the United States, and throughout the world. In 1893, Steinmetz joined the newly organized General Electric Company where he was an engineer then consultant until his death. His early research on hysteresis (loss of power due to magnetic resistance) led him to study alternating current, which could eliminate hysteresis loss in motors. He did extensive new work on the theory of a.c. for electrical engineers to use. His last research was on lightning, and its threat to the new AC power lines. He was responsible for the expansion of the electric power industry in the U.S. In 1888 he was about to receive his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Breslau but fled the country to avoid arrest as a socialist. This hunchback with a high squeaky voice published several papers in mathematics, but earned his living as an electrical engineer. [A Century of American Mathematics, Part 1, p. 14]. *VFR.. His theories and mathematical analysis of alternating current systems helped establish them as the preferred form of electrical energy in the United States, and throughout the world.
Group tour of the Marconi Wireless Station in Somerset, New Jersey in 1921, including Steinmetz (center) and Albert Einstein (to his right)
1869 Élie-Joseph Cartan (9 Apr 1869; 6 May 1951 at age 82) French mathematician who greatly developed the theory of Lie groups and contributed to the theory of subalgebras. By 1904 Cartan was turning to papers on differential equations and from 1916 on he published mainly on differential geometry. Cartan also published work on relativity and the theory of spinors. He is certainly one of the most important mathematicians of the first half of the 20th century. *TIS
1878 Marcel Grossmann (9 April 1878 in Budapest, Hungary Died: 7 Sept 1936 in Zürich, Switzerland) was a classmate of Albert Einstein. When Einstein sought to formulate his ideas on general relativity mathematically, he turned to Grossmann for assistance. *VFR 1894 Cypra Cecilia Krieger Dunaj ( 9 April 1894. Jasło, Galicia, Austrian Empire{Poland}, 17 August 1974. Ontario, Canada) was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics from a Canadian university and only the third person to be awarded a mathematics doctorate in Canada. She is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952).
Her doctoral dissertation was On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties - on Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series. It was published in two parts, the first, On the summability of trigonometric series with localized properties, in 1928 and the second, On Fourier constants and convergence factors of double Fourier series, in 1930, both in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada.
Despite her credentials and experience, Krieger spent over a decade as a lecturer before being promoted to assistant professor in 1941. She taught courses in the Mathematics and Engineering departments - an average of 13 classes a week, some with as many as 75 students in each class. With such a demanding teaching schedule there was little time for research, yet she persevered, working on her own projects in the evenings.
Krieger is best known for her English translation of Sierpinski's Introduction to General Topology (1934) and General Topology (1952). In this latter book she presented a 30 page appendix on the theory of infinite cardinals and ordinals.
I should also mention her work for the Canadian Association of University Women. She strongly supported women having the chance to succeed in mathematics.
The Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship mentioned above was set up by the Canadian Mathematical Society in 1995. The reasons why the Society decided to name the prize for Krieger is described by Laura Turner
"... in an effort "to attach an appropriate name to this prestigious award" the decision was made to solicit input from Canadian Mathematical Society members as well, with each submitted name to be accompanied by an explanation of why it was suitable. It is not clear just how many submissions were received by either the Executive Committee or the ad hoc committee charged with the task of gathering information, receiving suggestions, and making recommendations for names to the Canadian Mathematical Society Board, but the decision was understood as nontrivial. According to the report of the ad hoc committee, at least three possible names were proposed for the lectureship. The Executive of the Canadian Mathematical Society, having considered the possibilities, proposed in December of 1994: "That the Prize for Outstanding Research by Women in Mathematics be named the Krieger-Nelson Prize Lectureship, pending consultation with the families." The motion was carried unanimously."
1900 Hendrik Douwe Kloosterman (9 April 1900 in Rottevalle, The Netherlands - 1968 in Leiden, The Netherlands) The group he studied was the special linear group of 2 by 2 matrices over the ring of integers modulo pn. Schur had solved the problem for the case n = 1, where the matrices are over a prime field, and the case of n = 2 had been solved in the 1930s. Kloosterman solved the general case in two papers The behaviour of general theta functions under the modular group and the characters of binary modular congruence groups which occupy 130 pages of the Annals of Mathematics in 1946. *SAU
1919 John Presper Eckert (9 Apr 1919; died 3 Jun 1995 at age 76) American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the first commercial computer company (the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory. *Wik Thanks to Arjen Dijksman)
1921 Mary Jackson (née Winston; April 9, 1921 – February 11, 2005) was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
After 34 years at NASA, Jackson had earned the most senior engineering title available. She realized she could not earn further promotions without becoming a supervisor. She accepted a demotion to become a manager of both the Federal Women's Program, in the NASA Office of Equal Opportunity Programs and of the Affirmative Action Program. In this role, she worked to influence the hiring and promotion of women in NASA's science, engineering, and mathematics careers.
Jackson's story features in the 2016 non-fiction book Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. She is one of the three protagonists in Hidden Figures, the film adaptation released the same year.
In 2019, Jackson was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.In 2021, the Washington, D.C. headquarters of NASA was renamed the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters.
1928 Tom Lehrer, ( born Apr. 9, 1928, ) is an American mathematician turned song-writer. Lehrer studied mathematics at Harvard, but in the 1950s he began performing satirical songs that he had written, accompanying himself on the piano.
In 1953, he released his first album, Songs of Tom Lehrer, which he sold from his home by mail. His tunes embraced such warm topics as dope-peddling, southern conservatism, and obsession with the dead, and consequently, his songs were seldom played on the radio. His reputation was therefore slow to spread, but spread it did, and by 1959, when he released his second album, he was moderately well-known, at least on college campuses. His appeal to his audiences lay mostly in the cleverness of his song-writing, his deft piano playing, and his nimble tongue; his appeal to us lies in all this plus the fact that many of his subjects were scientific. His song "Elements", from his second album in 1959, is nothing but a list of the 102 then-known chemical elements, sung to the tune of the “Major General” song from Pirates of Penzance, but it is just brilliant. You can see him perform it on this YouTube video, a recording of a performance he gave in Copenhagen 1967, one of the few times he was recorded on film.
Other songs with a scientific theme are "Lobachevski”, which is not so much about the mathematician as it is about plagiarism, and "Who's Next", about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Considering that most of these songs were written over 60 years ago, they have a remarkable timeliness still today. Even "Vatican Rag," Lehrer's modest contribution to the reform of the Catholic liturgy, is just as funny today as it was during the days of Vatican II.
Perhaps Lehrer's most barbed satiric piece is "Werner von Braun," which took serious issue with scientists who lack social responsibility, whose "allegiance is ruled by expedience." "Once ze rockets go up, who cares where zay come down. That's not my department, says Werner von Braun."
Lehrer ceased public appearances in 1974 and has turned down, with only several exceptions, all requests to reprise his performances of the 1960s. He is reputed to have said that the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Henry Kissinger in 1973 made political satire obsolete. He seems to have been quite happy teaching mathematics at UC-Santa Cruz until his retirement. *LH
But for Math Teachers who have lived through 40+ years of Math Wars as student and teacher, their is only NEW Math.
1931 Heisuke Hironaka (9 Apr 1931, ) Japanese mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal in 1970 for his work in algebraic geometry giving a number of technical results, including the resolution of certain singularities and torus imbeddings with implications in the theory of analytic functions, and complex and Kähler manifolds. In simple terms, an algebraic variety is the set of all the solutions of a system of polynomial equations in some number of variables. Nonsingular varieties would be those that may not cross themselves. The problem is whether any variety is equivalent to one that is nonsingular. Oscar Zariski had shown earlier that this was true for varieties with dimension up to three. Hironaka showed that it is true for other dimensions.
As visiting professor at Seoul National University in 2008–2009, Hironaka mentored undergraduate student June Huh, a former high school drop-out and aspiring poet, encouraging his interest in pursuing math for graduate school. Huh won a fields medal in 2022 for the linkages he found between algebraic geometry and combinatorics.
His daughter, Eriko, is also a mathematician.
DEATHS
1348 William of Ockham (about 1288 in Ockham (near Ripley, Surrey), England - 9 April 1348 in Munich, Bavaria (now Germany))was an English Philosopher of the Early 14th Century. He is most remembered today for the quotation "Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem . The direct translation is close to "Entities ought not to be multiplied except from necessity." Occam's razor has become a scientific rule of thumb for deciding between two theories to explain a single phenomenon. Given two otherwise equal theories, the more simple one is the better.*SAU The modern spelling is Ockham, and the remains of the estate is located off the M25 in London near Woking. All Saints Church, which dates to the 13th century, contains a modern stained-glass window of William of Occham. There is also a statue. Behind the church is a gate into the grounds of Ockham Park, but it is private land. It may be of interest to students of mathematics and computer science that Ada Lovelace's husband, also named William, was the Baron of Ockham in the 19th century.
Ockham is a rural and semi-rural village in the borough of Guildford in Surrey, England.
William of Ockham depicted on a stained glass window at All Saints' Church, Ockham.
1564 Georg Hartmann (sometimes spelled Hartman; February 9, 1489 – April 9, 1564) was a German engineer, instrument maker, author, printer, humanist, churchman, and astronomer. After finishing his studies, he travelled through Italy and finally settled in Nuremberg in 1518. There he constructed astrolabes, globes, sundials, and quadrants. In addition to these traditional scientific instruments Hartmann also made gunner's levels and sights. Hartmann was possibly the first to discover the inclination of Earth's magnetic field. He died in Nuremberg. His two published works were Perspectiva Communis (Nuremberg, 1542), a reprint of John Peckham's 1292 book on optics and Directorium (Nuremberg, 1554), a book on astrology. He also left Collectanea mathematica praeprimis gnomonicam spectania, 151 f. MS Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Quarto, Saec. 16 (1527–1528), an unpublished work on sundials and astrolabes that was translated by John Lamprey and published under the title of Hartmann's Practika in 2002. *Wik
One of four extant brass astrolabes manufactured by Hartmann and his artisans in 1537, and John Peckham's Perspectiva Communis by /science Photo Library
1626 Francis Bacon (22 Jan 1561, 9 Apr 1626 at age 65)English philosopher remembered for his influence promoting a scientific method. He held that the aim of scientific investigation is practical application of the understanding of nature to improve man's condition. He wrote that scientists should concentrate on certain important kinds of experimentally reproducible situations, (which he called "prerogative instances"). After tabulating such phenomena, the investigator should also aim to make a gradual ascent to more and more comprehensive laws, and will acquire greater and greater certainty as he or she moves up the pyramid of laws. At the same time each law that is reached should lead him to new kinds of experiment, that is, to kinds of experiment over and above those that led to the discovery of the law. *TIS
1643 Benedetto Castelli (1578 – April 9, 1643), born Antonio Castelli, was an Italian mathematician. Benedetto was his name in religion on entering the Benedictine Order. Born in Brescia (Tartaglia's home town also), he studied at the University of Padua and later became an abbot at the Benedictine monastery in Monte Cassino. He was a long-time friend and supporter of his teacher, Galileo Galilei, and in turn teacher to Galileo's son. He assisted Galileo's study of sunspots and participated in the examination of the theories of Nicolaus Copernicus. On 5 December 1610 Castelli wrote to Galileo
If the position of Copernicus, that Venus revolves around the sun, is true (as I believe), it is clear that it would necessarily sometimes be seen by us horned and sometimes not, even though the planet maintains the same position relative to the sun. ... Now I want to know from you if you, with the help of your marvellous glasses, have observed such a phenomenon, which will be, beyond doubt, a sure means to convince even the most obstinate mind. I also suspect a similar thing with Mars near the quadrature with the sun; I don't mean a horned or non-horned shape, but only a semicircular and a more full one.
It is now impossible to prove whether this idea occurred to both Galileo and Castelli at the same time, or whether this letter of Castelli made Galileo turn his telescope on Venus to see if it showed phases. Certainly by 11 December Galileo had discovered that Venus did indeed appear as a crescent for on that day he wrote to Giuliano d'Medici expressing the discovery in code. It is of little consequence which scenario is correct, for in either case Castelli came up with one of the most important ideas of the time.
Castelli was most interested in mathematics and hydraulics. He was appointed as a mathematician to the University of Pisa, replacing Galileo, and later at the University of Rome La Sapienza.
Castelli published Mensuration of Running Water, an important work on fluids in motion, and then his Geometrical Demonstrations of the Measure of Running Waters.
Castelli died in Rome. His students included Giovanni Alfonso Borelli and Evangelista Torricelli, the inventor of the barometer and an early proponent of the air pump. *Wik *SAU
Risposta alle opposizioni, Galileo's principal text on the controversy over floating bodies. Like several of his polemics of his period, it appeared under the name of a colleague, in this case his pupil and friend Castelli. This work was written as a reply to two attacks by Colombe and Grazia on Galileo's 1612 treatises on floating bodies.
1754 Christian von Wolfe (baron) (24 Jan 1679, 9 Apr 1754 at age 75) philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who worked in many subjects but who is best known as the German spokesman of the Enlightenment, the 18th-century philosophical movement characterized by Rationalism. Wolff's first interest was mathematics. Though he made no original contribution to the discipline, he was important in the teaching of mathematics and instrumental in introducing the new mathematics into German universities. Later, as a philosopher, he developed the most impressive coherent system of his century. Thoroughly eclectic, influenced by Leibniz and Descartes, yet he continued fundamental themes of Aristotle. His system was important in making the discoveries of modern science known in Germany. *TIS
1920 Moritz Benedikt Cantor (23 Aug 1829 in Mannheim, Baden (now Germany)- 9/10 April 1920 in Heidelberg, Germany) best remembered for the four volume work Vorlesungen über Geschichte der Mathematik which traces the history of mathematics up to 1799. The first volume was published in 1880 and the last volume appeared in 1908. *SAU
Many historians credit him for founding a new discipline in a field that had hitherto lacked the sound, conscientious, and critical methods of other fields of history.
1951 Vilhelm F(riman) K(oren) Bjerknes (14 Mar 1862, 9 Apr 1951 at age 89) was a Norwegian meteorologist and physicist, one of the founders of the modern science of weather forecasting. As a young boy, Bjerknes assisted his father, Carl Bjerknes (a professor of mathematics) in carrying out experiments to verify the theoretical predictions that resulted from his father's hydrodynamic research. After graduating from university, Bjerknes moved on to his own work applying hydrodynamic and thermodynamic theories to atmospheric and hydrospheric conditions in order to predict future weather conditions. His work in meteorology and on electric waves was important in the early development of wireless telegraphy. He evolved a theory of cyclones known as the polar front theory with his son Jakob. *TIS
Vilhelm Bjerknes with his wife Honoria and his first two children, Karl Anton and Jacob Bjerknes, circa 1898
Vilhelm Bjerknes with his brother Ernst Wilhelm Bjerknes (left) and his sister-in-law, Norway's first female professor, Kristine Bonnevie at her cabin Snefugl (snowbird?) at Mysuseter circa 1946,
1953 Hans Reichenbach (26 Sept 1891 in Hamburg, Germany - 9 April 1953 in Los Angeles, California, USA) wrote on induction, probability and the philosophy of science. However, in the United States he also wrote major works on the philosophical foundations of quantum mechanics and on time. "...Let us assume that the three dimensions of space are visualized in the customary fashion, and let us substitute a color for the fourth dimension. Every physical object is liable to changes in color as well as in position. An object might, for example, be capable of going through all shades from red through violet to blue. A physical reaction between any two bodies is possible only if they are close to each other in space as well as in color. Bodies of different colors would penetrate each other witout interference ... "*SAU
1983 Yozo Matsushima (February 11, 1921 – April 9, 1983) was a Japanese mathematician. The first paper published by Matsushima contained a proof that a conjecture of Hans Zassenhaus was false. Zassenhaus had conjectured that every semisimple Lie algebra L over a field of prime characteristic, with [L, L] = L, is the direct sum of simple ideals. Matsushima constructed a counterexample. He then developed a proof that Cartan subalgebras of a complex Lie algebra are conjugate. However, Japanese researchers were out of touch with the research done in the West, and Matsushima was unaware that French mathematician Claude Chevalley had already published a proof. When he obtained details of another paper of Chevalley through a review in Mathematical Reviews, he was able to construct the proofs for himself. *Wik
2001 James Ray Vanstone (born August 12, 1933 near Owen Sound in Ontario , Canada ; died April 9, 2001 in Florida ) was a Canadian mathematician who dealt with differential geometry and multilinear algebra , especially in connection with relativity theory .
Vanstone studied at the University of Toronto, earning his bachelor's and master's degrees. He received his doctorate in 1959 from the University of Natal in South Africa under Hanno Rund ( Generalized Metric Differential Geometry ). He became a lecturer in 1959 , an assistant professor in 1961, an associate professor in 1965, and a professor in 1973 at the University of Toronto. He retired in 1995. He died of a heart attack at his winter residence in Florida.
Together with his colleagues in Toronto, Stephen Halperin and Werner H. Greub, he wrote a three-volume textbook on differential geometry.
He was a visiting professor and visiting scholar at Flinders University in Australia, the University of Western Australia in Perth , ETH Zurich , the University of Arizona , and the University of Mannheim . From 1969 to 1972 and from 1981 to 1983, he served on the governing board of the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS). He was editor of the CMS Bulletin from 1965 to 1967 and of the CMS Journal from 1983 to 1988.
He was married and had two daughters and two sons.*Wik
2019 Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp (September 6, 1940; Dover, Ohio - April 9, 2019) was an American mathematician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp is known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory. While an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he was a Putnam Fellow in 1961. With John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, he co-authored Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, leading to his recognition as one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He also published a book on the simple (but complex) game of dots and boxes. Outside of mathematics and computer science, Berlekamp has also been active in money management. In 1986, he began information-theoretic studies of commodity and financial futures. In 1989, Berlekamp purchased the largest interest in a trading company named Axcom Trading Advisors. After the firm's futures trading algorithms were rewritten, Axcom's Medallion Fund had a return (in 1990) of 55%, net of all management fees and transaction costs. The fund has subsequently continued to realize annualized returns exceeding 30% under management by James Harris Simons and his Renaissance Technologies Corporation. Berlekamp and his wife Jennifer had two daughters and a son and lived in Piedmont, California. *Wik
Credits : *CHM=Computer History Museum *FFF=Kane, Famous First Facts *NSEC= NASA Solar Eclipse Calendar *RMAT= The Renaissance Mathematicus, Thony Christie *SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History *TIA = Today in Astronomy *TIS= Today in Science History *VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA *Wik = Wikipedia *WM = Women of Mathematics, Grinstein & Campbell
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