On This Day in Math - Aug 8

This result is too beautiful to be false;
it is more important to have beauty in one's equations
than to have them fit experiment.

Paul A M Dirac

The 220th day of the year; 220 is the smallest amicable number, paired with 284. Amicable numbers are two different numbers so related that the sum of the proper divisors of each is equal to the other. Amicable numbers were known to the Pythagoreans, who credited them with many mystical properties. (what is the next pair?)

EVENTS

1576 Laying of the cornerstone of Tycho Brahe’s observatory on the island of Hveen. *VFR

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1786 Standards for the decimal system of money established (in the USA). *VFR The first really popular English language arithmetic by an American born author was in 1788 when Nicholas Pike published A New and Complete System of Arithmetic, which he said was "Composed for the use of the citizens of the United States". Well, patriotism probably won't hurt sells in a new country. Pikes book carried endorsements from several noted persons, including the governor of Massachusetts, James Bowdoin, and Yale President Ezra Stiles. The book even included a copy of the Act of Congress of 1786 which created the U. S. Federal Money System with denominations of mills (1/1000 of a dollar), cents, dimes, dollars, and Eagles (ten dollars). With all this emphasis on the new USA, it seems strange that none of the problems in the book involved the new American money, but instead were based on the English system. [The 2nd edition, in 1797, includes in the (very long) title; "adapted to the Federal Currency by Nathaniel Lord, A.M.;Boston]"

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In 1854, metal bullet cartridges were patented by Smith & Wesson.*TIS Prior to this, cartridges were formed from paper. In 1776 a schoolmaster in Vienna named Felkel completed a factor table to 408,000 that was intended to be part of a larger work to reach several million. The tables were published at the expense of the Austrian government in the hope that subscriptions would pay for the cost. When the subscriptions failed to meet expectations, the printed volumes were supposedly used for cartridge paper. *Oystein Ore.. Number Theorey and Its History, pg 54

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1876 Thomas Alva Edison, of Menlo Park, New Jersey, obtained patent #180,857 for a “method of preparing autographic stencils for printing,” the first mimeograph machine. *VFR Only those of us who have been in the classroom a loooong time will remember these handy machines (and their intoxicating aroma).  (addendum; Charles Wells has advised me "The solvent in mimeo ink was castor oil.")

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1900 Hilbert delivers his address to the International Congress of Mathematicians. Hilbert's problems form a list of twenty-three problems in mathematics published by German mathematician David Hilbert in 1900. The problems were all unsolved at the time, and several of them were very influential for 20th century mathematics. Hilbert presented only ten of the problems (1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 13, 16, 19, 21 and 22) at the Paris conference of the Second International Congress of Mathematicians, speaking on 8 August in the Sorbonne.
"Who of us would not be glad to lift the veil behind which the future is hidden..."
He had provided an extract of the speech (most unusual at that time) in French before hand for those who were not fluent in French.

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1931 George Birkhoff publishes “A Set of Postulates for Plane Geometry Based on Scale and Protractor in Annals of Mathematics. The system has undefined elements of point and line, and undefined relations of distance and angle. (pb)
in 1932, G. D. Birkhoff created a set of four postulates of Euclidean geometry sometimes referred to as Birkhoff's axioms. These postulates are all based on basic geometry that can be confirmed experimentally with a scale and protractor. Since the postulates build upon the real numbers, the approach is similar to a model-based introduction to Euclidean geometry. Other often-used axiomizations of plane geometry are Hilbert's axioms and Tarski's axioms. Birkhoff's axiom system was utilized in the secondary-school text Basic Geometry (first edition, 1940) *Wik

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1977 Derek T. Whiteside received the Sarton Medal, the highest honor that the History of Science Society can bestow, for his editorship of The Mathematical Papers of Isaac Newton. In delivering the award Richard S. Westfall said “Before Tom began, Newton’s mathematics was largely a land of myth and fable.” In his 25 years work on the papers, Whiteside has changed all that. *VFR

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BIRTHS
1901 Ernest Orlando Lawrence American physicist who was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize for Physics for his invention of the cyclotron, the first device for the production of high energy particles. His first device, built in 1930 used a 10-cm magnet. He accelerated particles within a cyclinder at high vacuum between the poles of an electromagnetic to confine the beam to a spiral path while a high A.C. voltage increased the particle energy. Larger models built later created 8 x 104 eV beams. By colliding particles with atomic nuclei, he produced new elements and artificial radioactivity. By 1940, he had created plutonium and neptunium. He extended the use of atomic radiation into the fields of biology and medicine. Element 103 was named Lawrencium as a tribute to him.*TIS

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1902 Paul A. M. Dirac English theoretical physicist known for his work in quantum mechanics and for his theory of the spinning electron. In 1933 he shared the Nobel Prize for Physics with the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger. *TIS One of my favorite Dirac anecdotes (of which there are many)

Dirac was watching Anya Kapitza knitting while he was talking physics with Peter Kapitza. A couple of hours after he left, Dirac rushed back, very excited. "You know, Anya," he said, "watching the way you were making this sweater I got interested in the topological aspect of the problem. I found that there is another way of doing it and that there are only two possible ways. One is the one you were using; another is like that. . . . " And he demonstrated the other way, using his long fingers. His newly discovered "other way," Anya informed him, is well known to women and is none other than "purling."

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1931 Sir Roger Penrose, British mathematician and theoretical physicist who in the 1960s calculated many of the basic features of black holes.*TIS A Penrose tiling is a non-periodic tiling generated by an aperiodic set of prototiles named after Sir Roger Penrose, who investigated these sets in the 1970s. Because all tilings obtained with the Penrose tiles are non-periodic, Penrose tiles are considered aperiodic tiles. A Penrose tiling may be constructed so as to exhibit both reflection symmetry and fivefold rotational symmetry, as in the diagram at the right.*Wik

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1952 Roman Juszkiewicz (born 8 August 1952, died 28 January 2012) is a Polish astrophysicist whose work is concerned with fundamental issues of cosmology.
Juszkiewicz's scientific interests include the theory of gravitational instability, origins of the large-scale structure, microwave background radiation and Big Bang nucleosynthesis. He wrote nearly one hundred research papers, mostly in the area of cosmology. Calculated results based on observed motions of pairs of galaxies, obtained in 2000 by Roman Juszkiewicz and the group led by him, aimed at estimating the amount of dark matter in the Universe, were confirmed by the recently published data from the South Pole's ACBAR detector. *Wik

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DEATHS
1555 Oronce Fine was a French mathematician who published a major work on mathematics and astronomy.*SAU Although primarily a populariser, Fine was one of the most prolific authors of mathematical books of his age. He worked in a wide range of mathematical fields, including practical geometry, arithmetic, optics, gnomonics, astronomy, and instrumentalism.
He gave the value of pi to be (22 2/9)/7 in 1544. Later, he gave 47/15 and, in De rebus mathematicis (1556), he gave 3 11/78. *Wik

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1853 Josef-Maria Hoëné de Wronski wrote on the philosophy of mathematics. *SAU He wrote exclusively in French, desirous that his ideas, of whose immortality he was convinced, should be accessible to all; he worked, he said, "through France for Poland." He published over a hundred works, and left many more in manuscript. When dying in the seventy-fifth year of his life, he exclaimed: "God Almighty, there's still so much more I wanted to say!"
In science, Hoene-Wroński set himself maximal tasks: the complete reform of philosophy and of mathematics, astronomy, technology. He not only elaborated a system of philosophy, but applications to politics, history, economics, law, psychology, music, pedagogy. It was his aspiration to reform human knowledge in an "absolute, that is, ultimate" manner.
Though during his lifetime nearly all his work was dismissed as nonsense, some of it has come in later years to be seen in a more favorable light. Although nearly all his grandiose claims were in fact unfounded, his mathematical work contains flashes of deep insight and many important intermediary results. Most significant was his work on series. He had strongly criticized Lagrange's use of infinite series, introducing instead a novel series expansion for a function. His criticisms of Lagrange were for the most part unfounded, but the coefficients in Wroński's new series were found to be important after his death, forming the determinants now known as the Wronskians (the name was given them by Thomas Muir in 1882).
The level of Wroński's scientific and scholarly accomplishments, and the amplitude of his objectives, placed Wroński in the first rank of European metaphysicians in the early 19th century. But the abstractness, formalism and obscurity of his thought, the difficulty of his language, his boundless self-assurance, his uncompromising judgments of others—alienated. He was perhaps the most original of the Polish metaphysicians, but others were more representative of the Polish outlook. *Wik

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1989 Taro Morishima ...His passion was algebraic number theory and he had a particular love of Fermat's Last Theorem. His first paper on Fermat's Last Theorem was published in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Japan in 1928. It was the first of 12 papers written in German with the title Über die Fermatsche Vermutung, with 10 of these papers being in the Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Japan between the years 1928 and 1935. By 1935 he had published a total of 16 papers, the other 6 being: Über den Fermatschen Quotienten (1931); On recent results about Fermat's last Theorem (Japanese) (1932); Über die Einheiten und Idealklassen des Galoisschen Zahlkörpers und die Theorie der Kreiskörper der l-ten Einheitswurzein (1933); and Über die Theorie der Kreiskörper der l-ten Einheitswurzein (1935). He also published a monograph Fermat's Problem (1934) in Japanese. All his papers are full of good ideas but they are extremely difficult to read since Morishima did not present enough detail.
Morishima's high research activity seems to have greatly lessened after 1935. Although difficulties relating to World War II​ and the difficult years in Japan following the war were partly responsible, nevertheless it does appear that he had already reduced his research activities. He did publish the book Higher Algebra in 1940 (in Japanese) but this and one further paper on Fermat's Last Theorem (in 1952) was all in published in the 30 years between 1935 and 1965.*SAU

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1996 Sir Nevill F(rancis) Mott English physicist who shared (with P.W. Anderson and J.H. Van Vleck of the U.S.) the 1977 Nobel Prize for Physics for his independent researches on the magnetic and electrical properties of amorphous semiconductors. Whereas the electric properties of crystals are described by the Band Theory - which compares the conductivity of metals, semiconductors, and insulators - a famous exception is provided by nickel oxide. According to band theory, nickel oxide ought to be a metallic conductor but in reality is an insulator. Mott refined the theory to include electron-electron interaction and explained so-called Mott transitions, by which some metals become insulators as the electron density decreases by separating the atoms from each other in some convenient way.*TIS

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