Mathematicians have tried in vain to this day to discover some order in the sequence of prime numbers, and we have reason to believe that it is a mystery into which the human mind will never penetrate.
~Leonhard EulerThe 257th day of the year; 257 is a prime number of the form 223+1 and therefore a Fermat prime. It is currently the second largest known Fermat prime.
EVENTS
1752 The first day of the Gregorian calendar in Britain and its colonies. The dates 3 to 13 September did not exist in England in 1752 due to the conversion to the Gregorian calendar. Poor Richard’s Almanac for 1752 carried the catchy heading, “September hath XIX days.” Much of Europe made the change in 1582, and since 1600 was a leap year under the Gregorian but not the Julian calendar, England had to omit eleven days, not ten. *VFR England and the American Colonies dropped the Roman era Julian Calendar, which had become 10 days out of synchrony with the solar cycle, and adopted the Gregorian Calendar. People rioted in the streets thinking the government stole 11 days of their lives. Instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the calendar has 365 days with an extra day every four years (the leap year) except in years divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400. Thus, the calendar year has an average length of 365.2422 days. It moved the day's date up from September 3rd to September 14th. Some other countries, including Russia, did not change until the twentieth century.*TIS
1792 In a letter from Bernardino Ferrari to Sebastiano Canterzani describes the interest created by Galvani's "Frog" experiment. Writing from Milan he said "Now here the experiments are also repeated in ladies’ salons, and they furnish a good spectacle to all. " *Walter Bernardi, The Controversy on Animal Electricity (web post)
1814 Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Actually he wrote a poem called "Defence of Fort McHenry" . The Poem was written by the 35-year-old lawyer and amateur poet after witnessing the bombardment of Fort McHenry by the British Royal Navy ships in Chesapeake Bay during the Battle of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. The tune was actually a popular British tune written for a mens social club in London which had become popular in the US too. It became the official National Anthem on March 3, 1931 when President Hoover signed a Congressional resolution to that effect. Mathematics??? umm, OK, the song has a range of 1 1/2 octaves, so the highest note has a frequency that is the square root of eight times the lowest note. *wik (by the way all you patriotic types, sing the second verse)
1959 Bank of America accepts the ERMA (Electronic Recording Method of Accounting) system. This revolutionary system digitized checking for the Bank of America by creating a computer-readable font. A special scanner read account numbers preprinted on checks in magnetic ink. The system was developed at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, California.*CHM
1959 Life Magazine cover story is picture of the first seven Nasa Astronauts.
BIRTHS
1769 (Baron) Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (14 Sep 1769; 6 May 1859) was a German natural scientist, archeologist, explorer and geographer, who made two major expeditions to Latin America (1799-1804) and to Asia (1829). During the first, equipped with the best scientific instruments, he surveyed and collected geological, zoological, botanical, and ethnographic specimens, including over 60,000 rare or new tropical plants. He charted and made observations on a cold ocean current along the Peruvian coast, now named, the Humboldt Current. In geology, he made pioneering observations of stratigraphy, structure and geomorphology; he understood the connections between volcanism and earthquakes. Humboldt named the Jurassic System. *TIS
1837 Nicolai Vasilievich Bugaev (14 Sept 1837 , 11 June 1903) His research was mainly on analysis and number theory. Bugaev gave proofs of theorems stated without proof by Liouville. He wrote on algebraic integrals of certain differential equations. His work in Moscow was to lead to the creation of the Moscow school of the theory of functions of a real variable in 1911, eight years after his death by Egorov, one of his students. Sonin was another of Bugaev's pupils who went on to make a major contribution to mathematics.
Bugaev's most important work in number theory was based on an analogy between some operations in number theory and the operations such as differentiation and integration in analysis. Bugaev built a systematic theory of discontinuous functions which he called arithmology. *SAU
1858 Henry Burchard Fine born in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. After earning his Ph.D. in Germany he joined the Princeton faculty. He is responsible for building that department into a world class mathematics department. The mathematics building at Princeton is named in his honor.*VFR (Fine Hall is the tallest building on the campus)
1887 Karl Taylor Compton (14 Sep 1887; 22 Jun 1954) American educator and physicist who directed development of radar during WW II. His research included the passage of photoelectrons through metals, ionization and the motion of electrons in gases, fluorescence, the theory of the electric arc, and collisions of electrons and atoms. In 1933, President Roosevelt asked him to chair the new Scientific Advisory Board. When the National Defense Research Committee was formed in 1940, he was chief of Division D (detection: radar, fire control, etc.) In 1941, he was in charge of those divisions concerned with radar within the new Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). Afterwards he was cited for personally shortening the duration of the war. (Brother of Arthur H. Compton, American Physicist and Nobel Laureate.)*TIS
1891 Ivan Matveevich Vinogradov (14 Sept 1891 , 20 March 1983) Vinogradov used trigonometric series to attack deep problems in analytic number theory.*SAU
1906 Franz Rellich (September 14, 1906–September 25, 1955) was an Austrian-Italian mathematician. He made important contributions in mathematical physics, in particular for the foundations of quantum mechanics and for the theory of partial differential equations.*Wik
1914 Robert Sinclair Dietz (14 Sep 1914; 19 May 1995) was an American geophysicist and oceanographer who set forth a theory (1961) of seafloor spreading (a term he coined), in which new crustal material continually upwells from the Earth's depths along the mid-ocean ridges and spreads outward at a rate of several inches per year. While a student Dietz identified the Kentland structure in Indiana as a meteoric impact site. His professors steered him toward marine geology. He became the founder and director of the Sea Floor Studies Section at the Naval Electronics Laboratory (1946-1963). He also achieved prominence by studying meteorite craters, both on Earth and on the moon and arguing that these impact craters were common. He died of a heart attack.*TIS
1926 Hans-Joachim Bremermann (1926–1996) was a German-American mathematician and biophysicist. He worked on computer science and evolution, introducing new ideas of how mating generates new gene combinations. Bremermann's limit, named after him, is the maximum computational speed of a self-contained system in the material universe.*Wik
DEATHS
1638 Pierre Vernier (19 Aug 1584, 14 Sep 1638) French mathematician who invented the vernier scale, which enabled instruments to make more accurate linear or angular measurements. He first described it in a work entitled La construction, l'usage et les propriétés du cadran nouveau (1631)*. It consists of a small graduated scale or arc made to slide along a larger fixed scale or arc to enable determining the increment between two graduations of the larger scale. The ten divisions of the smaller, vernier scale are equal to nine of the fixed scale. For example, calipers with a larger scale graduated in tenths of inches can be read by use of the vernier scale to within one-hundredths of an inch. Vernier scales are also used on sextants and mercury column barometers.*TIS
1712 Giovanni Domenico Cassini (8 Jun 1625, 14 Sep 1712) Italian-French astronomer who discovered (1675) the dark gap subdividing Saturn's rings into two parts, now known as Cassini's Division. He stated that Saturn's ring, believed by Huygens to be a single body, was actually composed of small particles. Cassini also discovered four of Saturn's moons: Iapetus (Sep 1671), Rhea (1672) and on 21 Mar 1684,* Tethys and Dione. He compiled new tables (1662) on the annual motion of the Sun. He observed shadows of four Galilean satellites on Jupiter (1664), and measured its rotation period by studying the bands and spots on its surface. He determined the period of rotation of Mars (1666), and attempted the same for Venus. His son Jacques was also an astronomer.*TIS (There were four consecutive Cassini generations to hold the post at the French Observatory. After Giovanni came Giovanni's son Jacques, then his grandson César-François Cassini de Thury, and finally his great grandson Jean-Dominique Cassini, Conte de Cassini.)
1882 Georges Leclanché ( 1839, 14 Sep 1882) French engineer who invented the wet cell Leclanché battery (1866), ancestor of the familiar carbon-zinc dry cell batteries used to power portable electric lights and electronic devices. His wet cell, provided an e.m.f. of about 1.5 volts. A porous pot containing manganese dioxide and a carbon rod as current collector was immersed in an electrolyte of ammonium chloride solution with a negative terminal of zinc metal. From 1867, Leclanché gave full-time attention to his invention, which was adopted the following year by the Belgian telegraph service. He opened a factory to manufacture the battery. In 1881, J.A. Thiebaut had the idea of packing the chemicals in a zinc cup. Carl Gassner made the first commercially successful "dry" cell.*TIS
1912 Georg Landsberg (30 Jan 1865 , 14 Sept 1912) studied the theory of functions of two variables and also the theory of higher dimensional curves. In particular he studied the role of these curves in the calculus of variations and in mechanics.
He worked with ideas related to those of Weierstrass, Riemann and Heinrich Weber on theta functions and Gaussian sums. His most important work, however was his contribution to the development of the theory of algebraic functions of a single variable. Here he studied the Riemann-Roch theorem.
He was able to combine Riemann's function theoretic approach with the Italian geometric approach and with the Weierstrass arithmetical approach. His arithmetic setting of this result led eventually to the modern abstract theory of algebraic functions.
One of his most important works was Theorie der algebraischen Funktionen einer Varaiblen (Leipzig, 1902) which he wrote jointly with Kurt Hensel. This work remained the standard text on the subject for many years. *SAU
1916 Pierre-Maurice-Marie Duhem (10 Jun 1861, 14 Sep 1916) was a French physicist, philosopher of science and mathematician who emphasized a history of modern science based on evolutionary metaphysical concepts. He had a wide variety of mathematical interests from mechanics and physics to philosophy and the history of mathematics. Duhem studied magnetism following the work of Gibbs and Helmholtz and also worked on thermodynamics and hydrodynamics producing over 400 papers. He maintained that the role of theory in science is to systematize relationships rather than to interpret new phenomena.*TIS
1925 Charles Tweedie (27 June 1868 , 14 Sept 1925) studied at Edinburgh, Göttingen and Berlin. He returned to Edinburgh as assistant to Chrystal. He served as a Schools Inspector and published works on the History of Mathematics. He became President of the EMS in 1903 and an honorary member in 1915. *SAU
1926 Johan Ludvig Emil Dreyer (13 Feb 1852, 14 Sep 1926) Danish astronomer who compiled the New General Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, (NGC) in 1888. When he became Director of the Armagh Observatory in 1882, financially it was destitute, with no prospect of replacing its aging instruments. Though Dreyer obtained a new 10-inch refractor by Grubb, the lack of funding for an assistant, precluded him from a continuation of traditional positional astronomy. Instead he concentrated on the compilation of observations made earlier. The NGC he listed 7840 objects and in its supplements (1895, 1908) he added a further 5386 objects. It still remains one of the standard reference catalogs.*TIS
1932 Ernest Julius Wilczynski (13 Nov 1876 , 14 Sept 1932) began his research career as a mathematical astronomer. This interest lasted until he was appointed to Berkeley. By that time he had published over a dozen papers in astronomy, but his interests moved towards differential equations which arose in his study of the dynamics of astronomical objects. From there his interests became pure mathematical interests in differential equations. However, Wilczynski's main work was in projective differential geometry and ruler surfaces. He extended Halphen's work, devised new methods and extended the theory of curves to surfaces.*SAU
1973 Eleanor Pairman (8 June 1896, 14 Sept 1973) graduated from Edinburgh. She went to London where she worked with Karl Pearson and then went to the USA where she gained a doctorate from Radcliffe College. *SAU
Credits:
*VFR = V Frederick Rickey, USMA
*TIS= Today in Science History
*Wik = Wikipedia
*SAU=St Andrews Univ. Math History
*CHM=Computer History Museum
No comments:
Post a Comment