On This Day in March - July 10

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees. 

~ Marcus Aurelius

July 10th is the The 191st day of the year.

191 is the smallest palindromic prime whose sum of digits is a multidigit palindromic prime

By adding up the values of the common US coins, one obtains 191 ¢ (silver dollar + half dollar + quarter + dime + nickel + penny)
*From Number Gossip  

EVENTS

1637 First meeting of the Acad´emie Fran¸caise. *VFR

1676 Flamsteed began living at the Observatory with his two servants, on 19 July,  his long series of Greenwich observations began?

1794 Star in a crescent moon? Astronomer Royal Investigates. The results are read to the Royal Society..."An Account of an Appearance of Light, like a Star, Seen Lately in the Dark Part of the Moon, by Thomas Stretton, in St. John's Square, Clerkenwell, London; with Remarks upon This Observation, and Mr. Wilkins's. Drawn up, and Communicated by the Rev. Nevil Maskelyne, D. D. F. R. S. and Astronomer Royal" *Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. January 1, 1794 84:435-440;

1796 Date of the entry EγPHKA! num=Δ+Δ+Δ in Gauss’s scientific diary, recording his discovery that every positive integer is the sum of three triangular numbers. [Thanks to Howard Eves] *VFR

1826 Cauchy presented a proof to the Acad´emie dealing with existence theorems for first-order dif-ferential equations. [Ivor Grattan-Guiness, Convolutions in French Mathematics, 1800–1840, pp. 758 and 1401] *VFR

1843 Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, age 57, elected to the Acad´emie des Sciences to succeed Lacroix. He is an example of a mathematician who published much late in life. He worked in mechanics, elasticity, perturbation theory, determinants, and the calculus. [Ivor Grattan-Guiness, Convo¬lutions in French Mathematics, 1800–1840, pp. 191 and 1410] *VFR

1925 The “Monkey Trial” of John T. Scopes began in Dayton, Tennessee. Clarence Darrow defended him. The prosecution, conducted by William Jennings Bryan, presented a strong case, and he was convicted of violating a state law prohibiting the teaching of evolution. Although the law was later overturned, this case provided a strong blow to science education. Scopes was not a biologist and never taught evolution. Rather he was a mathematics and physics teacher who volunteered to stand trial to furnish a test case. *VFR
The trial ran for 12 days. A local school teacher, John Scopes, was prosecuted under the state's Butler Act, but was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union. This law, passed a few months earlier (21 Mar 1925) prohibited the teaching of evolution in public schools. The trial was a platform to challenge the legality of the statute. Local town leaders,(wishing for the town to benefit from the publicity of the trial) had recruited Scope to stand trial. He was convicted (25 Jul) and fined $100. On appeal, the state supreme court upheld the constitutionality of the law but acquitted Scopes on the technicality that he had been fined excessively. The law was repealed on 17 May 1967. *TIS


1950 France honors Lazar Carnot (1753–1823) with a postage stamp. [Scott #B251]. *VFR

1950 The German Democratic Republic, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the founding of the Academy of Sciences, Berlin, issued postage stamps picturing Leonhard Euler and Gottfried von Leibniz. [Scott #58, 66]. *VFR 

Leibniz was also honored with stamp issues in 1980 and 1996 it seems.

1993 MASH fans will remember that there was always a sign telling how many miles to Toledo and frequently they talked of the hotdogs at Tony Pacos (they are good). On this date the Cake Walk and Jazz Band (I believe the band is called "The Cakewalken Jass Band") celebrated their twenty-fifth anniversary with a live broadcast at Tony Pacos that was broadcast on public radio in Toledo. So what does this have to do with mathematics? Well, Ray Heitger, their clarinetist, leader, and one of the founding members happens to be a math teacher. If you can’t get to Toledo to hear them play, perhaps you can find one of their six LPs.*VFR
Tony Packo's Cafe is restaurant that started in the Hungarian neighborhood of Birmingham, on the east side of Toledo, Ohio at 1902 Front Street. The restaurant gained notoriety by its mention in several M*A*S*H episodes and is famous for its signature sandwich and large collection of hot dog buns signed by celebrities.     In 2011 it listed five restaurants in the Toledo area. *Wik



BIRTHS
1682 Roger Cotes born. In January 1706 he was named the first Plumian professor of astronomy and natural philosophy at Cambridge. It was Cotes who first showed that e was the natural base to choose for the logarithm. *VFR He did not realize his full potential because he died at age 33, leaving anunfinished series of imposing researches on optics and a large number of other unpublished manuscripts. Newton, who seldom spoke well of anyone else, said of Cotes, "If Cotes had lived, we might have known something."

1832  Alvan Graham Clark  U.S. astronomer, one of an American family of telescope makers and astronomers who supplied unexcelled lenses to many observatories in the U.S. and Europe during the heyday of the refracting telescope. He began a deep interest in astronomy while still at school, then joined the family firm of Alvan Clark & Sons, makers of astronomical lenses. In 1861, testing a new lens, he looked through it at Sirius and observed faintly beside it, Sirius B, the twin star predicted by Friedrich Bessel in 1844. Carrying on the family business, after the deaths of his father and brother, Clark made the 40" lenses of the Yerkes telescope (still the largest refractor in the world). Their safe delivery was a source of anxiety. He died shortly after their first use. *TIS


1856 Nikola Tesla Serbian-American inventor and researcher who designed and built the first alternating current induction motor in 1883. He emigrated to the United States in 1884. Having discovered the benefits of a rotating magnetic field, the basis of most alternating-current machinery, he expanded its use in dynamos, transformers, and motors. Because alternating current could be transmitted over much greater distances than direct current, George Westinghouse bought patents from Tesla the system when he built the power station at Niagara Falls to provide electricity power the city of Buffalo, NY. [Born in Croatia of Serbian parents. Some sources give birthdate as 9 Jul; he is said to have been born on the stroke of midnight.]


1878  Oliver Dimon Kellogg was appointed to the University of Missouri in 1905 where, despite a heavy teaching and administrative load he was able to publish impressive papers on potential theory. In 1908 he published three papers, namely Potential functions on the boundary of their regions of definition and Double distributions and the Dirichlet problem, both in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, and A necessary condition that all the roots of an algebraic equation be real in the Annals of Mathematics. In 1912 he published the important work Harmonic functions and Green's integral in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society. This paper includes what today is called 'Kellogg's theorem' on harmonic and Green's functions. *SAU

DEATHS

1851 Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre  French painter and physicist who invented the daguerreotype, the first practical process of photography. Though the first permanent photograph from nature was made in 1826/27 by Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce of France, it was of poor quality and required about eight hours' exposure time. The process that Daguerre developed required only 20 to 30 minutes. The two became partners in the development of Niepce's heliographic process from 1829 until the death of Niepce in 1833. Daguerre continued his experiments, and he discovered that exposing an iodized silver plate in a camera would result in a lasting image after a chemical fixing process.*TIS


1910  Johann Gottfried Galle German astronomer who on 23 Sep 1846, was the first to observe the planet Neptune, whose existence had been predicted in the calculations of Leverrier. Leverrier had written to Galle asking him to search for the new planet at a predicted location. Galle was then a member of the staff of the Berlin Observatory and had discovered three comets. In 1838, while assistant to Johann Franz Encke, Galle discovered the dark, inner C ring of Saturn at the time of the maxium ring opening. In 1851, he became professor of astronomy at Breslau and director of the observatory there. In 1872, he proposed the use of asteroids rather than regular planets for determinations of the solar parallax, a suggestion which was successful in an international campaign (1888-89). *TIS

1916 John Emory McClintock was for many years the leading actuary in America. He published 30 papers between 1868 and 1877 on actuarial questions. His publications were not confined to questions relating tolife insurance policies however. He published about 22 papers on mathematical topics. One paper treats difference equations as differential equations of infinite order and others look at quintic equations which are soluble algebraically. He published A simplified solution of the cubic in 1900 in the Annals of Mathematics. Another work, On the nature and use of the functions employed in the recognition of quadratic residues (1902), published in the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, is on quadratic residues.*SAU

1936 Salvatore Pincherle worked on functional equations and functional analysis. Together with Volterra, he can claim to be one of the founders of functional analysis.*SAU

Credits:
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History